Thoughts about cruising to Alaska. It is no wonder that all of the major cruise lines run multiple ships on this route in the summertime. The waters are protected. Your exposure to the swells of the open Pacific Ocean is limited to a half day in each direction, the stretch north of Vancouver Island.
The ports of call are mostly in panhandle Alaska: Juneau, Skagway, Ketchikan, Haines. If the cruise starts in Seattle, it will make one stop in Canada as required by the Jones Act: Victoria, Vancouver, or perhaps Prince Rupert. If the cruise starts in Vancouver, it will automatically satisfy the requirements of the Jones Act (here is a description of the Jones Act).
For my money, the high point of the cruise is sailing the fjords of Glacier Bay National Park - spectacular scenery not unlike that in Antarctica. We had great weather, rain would have spoiled it. We were all out on the deck with cameras and binoculars, lovin' it.
The famous White Pass & Yukon RR scenic trip is a good 'un. The route was blasted out of the granite cliffs in less than 2 years, it is narrow gauge and the cars are old and charming. They don't run the steamer most of the time but that is only critical to true RR buffs, which the DrsC are not. We just took the trip to the summit and back; it is also possible to ride all the way to Whitehorse, capital of the Yukon Territory of Canada. It looks like that might take all day, or even longer which would be hard to do from a cruise ship as they tend to stay in port something like 8 to 5 or 9 to 7.
Some passengers expected the cruise to be through narrow channels most of the way where you could look at wildlife on the banks on either side. They were disappointed. The Inside Passage is wide and you won't be checking out a bear on the bank from a large cruise ship. One of the small ships, say 100 passengers or less, might take you much closer.
In some of the ports, the Norwegian Pearl was one of five ships there at the same time. Figure roughly 2000 passengers per ship, that means we dumped as many as 10,000 people into a town of less than 1000 year-round inhabitants. For some strange reason these tiny towns are saturated with jewelry stores - are cruise ship passengers well-known for jewelry purchases? We understand these stores are only open during the summer cruising season, then the personnel move to the Caribbean where they operate stores for the winter cruising season there. Strange business this.... If they had to rely on the DrsC for support, they'd be in another line of merchandise.
