My travel bucket list has mostly included places that are foreign, exotic, distant, unfamiliar. Places that have names I cannot pronounce or languages I do not speak. But, curiously, in our cruising experiences, we have met fellow passengers from all over the globe, some from those very places I find so alluring, and many of their “bucket lists” include my home country’s state of Alaska. I realized that I have taken it for granted, our largest and 49th state. I guess I’m sort of too used to it and have overlooked it as a destination. I know that the capital is Juneau, it borders Canada, and some Alaskans have even been thought to claim that they are so close to Russia they can see it from their house. But its sheer wild vastness and magnificent nature, I now realize, are among the things that really make it so interesting as one of the last great frontiers.
An acquaintance of mine, an accomplished chef and writer who founded a cooking school, was born in northwestern Alaska, of all places. She is now a food writer and critic and writes extensively about the native Alaskan Inupiat cuisine in an effort to preserve their traditional cooking techniques. To read her descriptions of the foods and cooking of the arctic north is to learn about a very resourceful native culture, one that is wild and remote, adaptable to hardships, respectful and reliant on nature, a description that still applies to much of Alaska today, and hard to grasp in today’s modern, technological world.
To see what all the fuss was about, we cruised to Alaska from Vancouver to Seattle in June, 2014, through the inside and outside coastal passages, Glacier Bay, and Icy Strait, arguably one of the best ways to see the grandeur of the state. What we saw was an abundance of magnificent unspoiled natural beauty, thankfully much protected government land and national parks, and laid-back friendly people. Alaska is the largest state as far as land mass, but still remains wild and sparsely populated. It is the least-connected state in terms of road transportation. Most cities and villages have no road access and can only be reached by sea and air, including Juneau, the third largest city with a population of only about 30,000. It was a revelation to visit these cities I had read about in school and heard in the news, made larger-than-life in my mind, only to discover they were small, frontier, sometimes even one-street towns, where commuter sea planes are a common sight at the coastal harbors.
And wildlife is everywhere. Great bald eagles are common and roost like crows on the piers, whales thrive, and sea otters are plentiful, floating among the ice floes on their backsides, cradling their young on their bellies.
Alaska is huge, and while we did not see it all by any means, I saw enough to have newfound respect for it’s vastness, swelling national pride for this US state, and a better understanding of it’s irresistible allure.