We started out on the Chena river. There are many nice homes along the banks of the Chena, many of which have airplanes parked in the back yard. The Chena is frozen for much of the year and serves as an air strip. A couple of the homes along the Chena were pointed out to us as the homes of famous Bush pilots.

At one stop, a young woman who was the dog-sledding rookie of the year talked to us about sled dogs, and we got to meet and pet some of the dogs. I had thought that, as working dogs, sled dogs would be subject to strict training and discipline, but in fact they spend a great deal of time petting and playing with and bonding with these dogs, and the dogs are very friendly and affectionate and enjoyed all the attention they got from us.

These dogs are Alaskan huskies, and they are almost exclusively what are used in the Iditerod and other races. They are lean and short-haired. The larger dogs that we often think of as sled dogs, like Siberian huskies and malamutes, are not used much for long distances because their long hair picks up snow and ice that weights them down. 

As part of the demo, the dogs were harnessed to a sled that is designed for dirt and gravel, and they were so excited that she could hardly hold them back. They seem to live to run.

The Chena river is spring-fed and is clear with well-defined banks. From the Chena river, we entered the Tanana. The Tanana is fed by glacial melt. It is thick with silt, a powder-fine gravel that is ground and picked up by the glaciers and is released when they melt. The water is kind of a milky gray-tan color. The river forms many thin intertwined channels with islands of deposited silt. The call these braided rivers, and we saw many examples of this in Alaska.

I was surprised that salmon come this far inland, but they do,  and the come up these turbid, silty rivers like the Tanana almost blind. Salmon traditionally is the primary food for the sled dogs. There are several kinds of salmon, the lowest and most plentiful of which is chum, or dog salmon, which is used primarily to feed the dogs. Sock-eye, chinook, silver, and pink salmon are common here. The pink salmon are canned.

We got to pan for gold. We each had a few little flakes that were assayed at a total of $6.75, but they wouldn't buy it back.

Much of the gold in Alaska is in flakes, not in veins. In the early twentieth century, they started mining with big machines that float in a pool of water. At the front, scoops on a conveyer scoop up gravel from the surface down to bedrock. The gravel gets spun and sifted and somehow the gold gets separated, and the tailings get spit out the back. This machine eats its way through the valley, extracting the gold from the gravely soil. The one we saw operated until sometime in the 50's.

Denali.  Thursday started with a four-hour train ride from Fairbanks to Denali National Park. Holland America owns the cars we rode in (and the Princess line has its own cars, too). Seating was in an observation deck upstairs, with a dining area below. The first three hours were pleasant but not exciting, fairly flat land thinly forested with spruce. Almost all of the forests are spruce forests, and the trees are tall and very thin. Areas that have burned go through a deciduous cycle, with aspens, birch, and poplar.

On the last hour of the trip we went through some spectacular country, with steep mountainsides and deep river gorges.

At Denali, we left at 3 pm for our "wildlife tour." We didn't get back until nearly eleven pm, and it was still daylight. Our tour guide and bus driver, Joshua, came to Alaska for a summer job years ago and never left. He is married to an Indian woman and has learned a great deal about the native Alaskan culture, and he talked and sang and lectured and entertained us for the entire seven hour trip. At one point he had us all doing an Indian dance at a rest stop.

We saw several caribou. Caribou and reindeer are essentially the same animal, but the caribou are indigenous and wild, and the reindeer are domestic and were brought from Europe.

We stopped for a while to watch a mother grizzly and cub. They were digging for roots at the side of the road and were completely oblivious of us, in a school bus 15 feet away. I was fascinated by the golden color of these bears.

We also saw a wolf, which our guide said is very unusual. This one was wearing a collar with a transmitter. He looked gaunt. The hare population  falls off every ten years because of a ten-year cycle in one of the plants it eats. This is the year for the hare population to drop, and it is very hard on the wolves, who depend on the hares as a primary food source.

Life is tough at Denali. Winter mortality is high even for the strong adult animals, and the majority of animals born in the summer do not make it to the next.

Talkeetna.  On Friday, we rode the bus from Denali to Talkeetna. Talkeetna is a little tiny town within view of Mt. McKinley, although McKinley is shrouded in clouds much of the time. We never saw it. Many people took flights around the mountain, but we opted not to. Talkeetna is near the staging point for climbers.

The town of Talkeetna was, they claim, the inspiration for Cicely, Alaska, the town in the TV show Northern Exposure. 

The most remarkable thing about Talkeetna is the hotel. It is brand new, and is much larger than the entire town. The rooms are big and plush. Our room had a big picture window with a spectacular view. There are balconies and sitting areas with fireplaces and overstuffed couches. It is the kind of place I'd expect to see in ski areas in Colorado.

McKinley never visited Alaska. The traditional name of the mountain is Denali. It was renamed McKinley as a political move during the drive for statehood. State maps show it as Denali, but Federal maps show it as Mt. McKinley.

Anchorage.  Anchorage is a bustling, modern city. It's about the size of Huntsville but it has a large busy downtown. A substantial portion of the population of Alaska lives in Anchorage. 

The harbor in Anchorage is too shallow for cruise ships -- in fact, it fills with glacial silt and they have a hard time keeping it open. The cruise ships dock at Seward, and we had a scenic bus ride to Seward from Anchorage. About half the ride was along the side of a bay or fjord that was lined by scenic mountains. There were areas where all the trees are dead. These are areas that were flooded with seawater in the 1964 earthquake and the tsunami that followed. The trees were both killed and preserved by the saltwater.

Hubbard Glacier. We boarded the Veendam on Sunday evening. On Monday, we traveled up College fjord and saw some some scenic mountains and some moderate-sized glaciers. On Tuesday we saw Hubbard glacier. Our original itinerary included Glacier Bay, but there is a court action restricting the number of cruise ships allowed into Glacier Bay, so we went to the Hubbard glacier instead. 

Hubbard glacier stretches over 90 miles back into Canada. The weight of fresh snow at the top forces the glacier to slowly flow down to the sea. The intense pressure packs the snow into a ice with a unique blue color.

We spent much of the day traveling into the fjord and back out. There were several smaller glaciers along the way, and then we came to Hubbard. We parked in front of it for a half hour or so, and it put on a show for us.

I didn't expect the noise. There are loud sharp thunder-like cracks, sometimes nearby, sometimes farther up the glacier. The sounds near the face of the glacier crack and then reverberate, and the sounds farther back on the glacier rumble, so it is very much like being in a thunderstorm. Occasionally, ice fractures off of the face of the glacier. It looks like a small amount of ice, because the face of the glacier is so large, but it makes a thunderous noise when it hits the water, and sometimes sets up a pretty substantial wave.

A young stellar sea lion swam along the side of the ship for a while. That was the only wild life we saw here except for two other cruise ships.

Sitka.   On Wednesday we visited Sitka, a town with a long history and many t-shirts. Cruise ships don't dock in Sitka, and we had to ride a "tender," a small boat, kind of like the landing craft in Star Trek. Sitka harbor is spotted with little islands that are very lush and green. It looks kind of tropical, except that the trees are spruce.

Sitka was established by the Russians, twice (the local Indians, who took exception to enslavement and to being denied their traditional fishing grounds, drove the Russians out for a while, but they came back). It was the capital of Alaska after the US purchased it.

We went through the Russian Orthodox church, actually a reproduction of the original, which burned in the 60's. I also went through the bishop's residence, which has been restored and is maintained by the park service. It's an interesting combination of tradition and local construction, with some walls of plank and others with elegant wallpaper, delicate spode china on a simple wooden table. The chapel has plank floors and some 300-year-old icons.

I saw an eagle circling over the harbor above the cruse ship, but I couldn't get a picture of him. We saw whales spouting as we left the Sitka area.

Juneau  nestles into the mountains. In the area near the docks, there is only a couple of blocks of city, and then there are steep cliffs and mountainsides.

We took a trip out to the Taku Mountain Resort. We flew in a seaplane that took off from the harbor and flew for about 20 minutes over mountains and glaciers to the lodge. The lodge is on the Taku river and is accessible only by water or air. The face of a good-sized glacier is across the river. They say it is two miles away, but it looks much closer.

They served us a meal of fresh grilled salmon. It was the best meal of our trip.

Ketchikan was the nicest of the SE Alaska stops we made. There are more restaurants, a wider variety of shops, and wide clean streets. The art work in the shops and galleries seems to be better here.

Ketchikan's Creek Street area was the old red-light district. Little houses on pilings extend out over the creek. Many of the original houses have been restored, and now house galleries and restaurants.

Tklinget totem poles are still carved here. For the most part, they are commissioned for museums and private collections in the lower 48.

Our cruise ended in Vancouver. We traveled by bus to Seattle for our flight home.

People often ask what it is like to be on a cruise, or which cruise line is best. This was our second cruise, our first being a Panama Canal cruise on the Princess line. 

On both cruises, we had several days at sea, and in some ways those were my favorite days. With my usual hectic schedule, I really enjoy the opportunity to put my feet up and take it easy and let other people take care of me. 

We usually ate dinner in the dining room. It is a fairly formal atmosphere, like a nice restaurant. On the formal evenings, some men wear tuxedos, but many wear suits or sport jackets. On casual nights, shorts and jeans and t-shirts are discouraged but pretty much anything else is acceptable. 

The food is often pretty good but seldom spectacular. We learned early to avoid the fancy dishes and select steaks or simple fish dishes. 

The Lido is a cafeteria-style restaurant with pretty much the same selections as the dining room, with additional choices, and is much more casual and often offers longer hours and a better view.

There is a big show every night. We went to a couple of them. The ones we saw were musical shows that featured a young and talented dance crew. The band was very good, but, in a very strange stage arrangement, they played behind a curtain at the back of the stage. They were miked and the music came through the PA system, which gave it kind of an artificial sound.

I had heard a lot about the quality of the music on cruise ships, but outside of the stage band behind the curtain, the musicians were not spectacular. A Filipino band seemed to be playing a bad rendition of Chattanooga Choo Choo every time we walked past. Another band made up of young English musicians was a little better. They were just getting started playing together, and they'll get better, but they weren't the high-caliber professional musicians I expected to hear.

They have music piped into the staterooms, and there are several channels to choose from. I turned on the jazz channel, and I did hear a kind of sappy Sinatra tune, but other songs I heard were the famous jazz standards Knock Three Times on the Ceiling If You Want Me, and Indian Lake (is a scene you should make with your little one).

All food is provided, as well as tea and coffee, but you have to pay for your drinks. No cash is used, you just run a tab. At a buck seventy-five for a coke, that tab adds up in a hurry. At the bars, we did find a dusty bottle of Glenlevit, but you can forget about sipping a Macallan while you watch the sea go by.

In a word, it's very nice, but it's not as elegant as they want you to think. Service is always very good. Your stateroom is constantly being cleaned, bed made, bed turned down, and somehow they do this without you ever seeing them. 

There is an exercise room, and a walking deck that is about a quarter mile around. On our days at sea, I made a point of doing a mile or two on the walking deck, to compensate for the fact that I was eating way too much, but also because it just feels good to be out exercising in that clean sea air.