It's 11:30 p.m., and the sun has yet to set in Denali National Park near the 62nd latitude. The five of us are wowed by the late hour and the clear view -- all too rare in July -- of North America's highest peak, Mount McKinley.
Not one of the boys -- ages 20, 18 and 14 -- has asked for the radio.
That, in itself, would have justified our 10-day trip to Alaska. This wasn't a cheap venture; even with favorable cruise prices and a few frequent-flier air tickets, the tab nudged $8,000. But with two kids in college and another hurtling through teendom, this might be the last opportunity for real family togetherness. If there was a time to go for broke, this was it.
The frontier idea of Alaska -- wild spaces and a husky in every pickup truck -- met with general approval.
And so it was that we cruised through this Brigadoon place to find a brief moment of summery glory before the dual deep freezes of Alaska winter and impending adulthood set in again.
Glory there was: the flash of humpback whales breaching, elk sporting full racks of antlers, all of us standing triumphantly atop a glacier.
Secluded in places where even cell phones don't work, we spent hours talking to each other. We clutched at rafts rocketing through the rapids of the Nenana River and sped down the better part of a mile-high mountain on bikes.
To get a taste of Alaska, you need to travel by land and sea. Our original plan was to go on our own, traveling on state ferries through the Inside Passage and then by rail or car to the north. But after we figured the costs of a ferry-rail pass, hotel rooms in Alaska's pricey summer season plus feeding five hungry mouths, we decided a cruise ship was a better value.
Ultimately, we opted for a one-way cruise from Vancouver to Seward, with a land trip to Anchorage and Denali National Park via rental car -- less glamorous, perhaps, than taking the train, but more practical for letting us stop along the way.
To get the most for our dollar -- and to try to satisfy the whole crowd -- we worked out a careful plan.
Alaska's land-based activities can be expensive. Many places are inaccessible by road, meaning all gear has to be brought in by ship or rail. Also, the tourist season is short, so companies have only a few months in which to make a profit.
The result: $90 for a float trip, $69 for a bicycling trip, $124 for horseback riding, $189 for a helicopter ride. Such dollars do buy security: pre-vetted companies, knowledgeable and safety-conscious guides, and communication with the ship if something goes wrong. But when you multiply any of these prices by five, you're looking at a gross family debt equal to that of a small country.
So with guidebooks and the cruise line's shore excursions booklet in hand, we found out which ports offered in-town attractions and in which we'd want a rental car. The kids voted on the ship-arranged excursions that interested them most. I located alternative companies for kayak rentals.
Because we'd be driving north after the cruise, we decided to hold off on "flight-seeing" -- by helicopter or plane -- until we got to Talkeetna, where prices were lower than in the popular cruise-ship ports.
Generally, it was a sound strategy. But like any trip, this one had its less-than-fab moments. The main source of discontent was the cruise: seven days aboard a ship geared toward young families and a pre-boomer generation of grandparents, with few sports facilities, music that had my 50-something husband snoring and teen programs that bored my 14-year-old.
While passengers such as Jane Silva and Rudy Kittl, professionals from San Jose, Calif., found the cruise's service, spa and shore trips just the tonic they needed, others fell into our camp.
"It's boring," said Joan Herfurth of Excelsior, Minn., traveling with her five teen-age grandsons. And like many other families we met, she found the shore excursions beyond her budget.
To be sure, plenty was delightful aboard Royal Caribbean's Rhapsody of the Seas. Our comfortable balcony cabin was big enough for all to enjoy, with kids in a surprisingly large inside cabin just across the hall. The food -- lobster, salmon fillet with lemongrass sauce, mushrooms in pastry -- was far better than we'd expected. The friendly staff was superb.
But next time, we decided, we'd rely less on positive past experiences with a particular cruise line and look more closely at the programming aboard the specific ship. On an Alaska cruise, you spend a lot of time at sea.
Still, the views were spectacular, from sheer walls of snow-crusted rock to vast sheets of ice suspended in mountain crevices hundreds of feet in the air. We stood on deck for hours, staring through binoculars for a glimpse of a breaching whale and marveling at the vastness of a place that represents one-sixth of the entire U.S. land mass.
"It's the best vista I've ever seen. It changes all the time," said Drew, 20. "I've never seen so many mountains," said Cary, 18. "I'm awed by so much uninhabited land," my husband said.
One night, while sitting on our balcony, we caught sight of a quick flash of black and white. Then another, and another. It was a pod of baby killer whales, playing alongside the ship.
Coastal towns
Like the ship, the towns we visited were a mixed blessing. At first glance, they seemed too-cute duplicates of one another, with sweet wooden facades trimmed in greens and reds, and curio shops. Each day, we shared the small burgs with 10,000 or more cruise passengers.
But as we looked beyond the obvious, we found that each place had its own character and attractions.
Ketchikan, for instance, was quickly dubbed catch-'em-if-you-can by 14-year-old Devin, who spent a couple of hours with Cary trying to pull in a salmon from the harbor on rods rented dockside for $10 per hour.
While the boys fished, Drew, my husband and I walked the easy mile to the Totem Heritage Center, an intriguing little museum created to preserve 19th-century totems and fragments of Tlingit Indian culture from surrounding areas.
Here we learned about the rich legacy of the people of this region through a variety of storytelling obelisks.
Juneau, Alaska's capital, offered some of the best shopping of the trip, with quality crafts, furs and gemstones.
We bypassed the town's big attraction, the Mount Roberts Tram, and headed out in a minivan from Rent-A-Wreck (cost: $50, including pickup in town) and headed for the 12-mile-long Mendenhall Glacier. Many of our co-cruisers would see it from above, on flight-seeing tours and helicopter visits that landed them atop the ice.
The boys went dashing along the trails to the blue glacial face. The ice was so massive -- from 200 feet above the lake it feeds to 100 feet below the surface -- that the two-man kayak a half-mile from its face seemed to be paddled by Lilliputians.
What is most amazing is to stand at the visitor center, roughly a mile from the face, and know that 70 years ago, the glacier had reached this point. Since 1700, the Mendenhall has been receding, and though it pushes forward from the Alaska Ice Field at about 1 1/2 feet a day, it has still lost nearly 300 feet in the last two years.
On we sailed, beneath icy cliffs and past postcard lighthouses, to the gold-rush town of Skagway.
Most visitors ride the White Pass & Yukon Route narrow-gauge railway, a century-old engineering marvel through treacherous mountains between the gold fields and the sea.
Instead, the boys had chosen a two-hour bike tour ($80 each) from the top of the Klondike Pass, at nearly 3,300 feet, down through the mountains. It was an afternoon tour that allowed them the requisite teen-age all-morning sleep-in and included a van ride to the starting point, so we didn't have to slog uphill.
My husband and I spent the morning on a free walking tour led by a National Park Service ranger. More than a century ago, money lust and adventure fever brought 100,000 people -- miners, con artists, the young writer Jack London, even Edith Van Buren, the president's niece -- to this northern outpost, gateway to the gold fields near Dawson.
Thanks to the railway, Skagway became a transportation hub, a noisy town of 15,000 with more than 70 bars so raucous that soldiers were brought in to keep the peace. In those days, we were told, the town looked like a Hollywood back lot with huge false storefronts to draw patrons into the tent-businesses out back. When the gold rush ebbed, the nearby town of Dyea died, but Skagway's deep harbor kept it alive until tourists provided a cash injection.
A mighty glacier
By the time we reached the once-Russian town of Sitka the next morning, the weather had turned, and the onion domes on St. Michael's Cathedral were draped in fog. We had opted for kayaking, forgoing the ship-sponsored trip ($94 each) in favor of renting our own for a $90 total from Sitka Sound Ocean Adventures, arranged in advance by e-mail.
We should have forked out for a guide. Within minutes, our Boy Scout-trained family -- two Eagles and a troop leader -- was vaguely disoriented. The weather was getting snottier by the minute, and we decided to stick closer to home base than we might otherwise have done. This wasn't all bad; a sea lion had the same idea, and for a half-hour he ducked and bobbed among us, as curious about these human fools as we were about him. An hour after we'd first set out, we were drenched and cold, happy we were on our own and not committed to a three-hour group tour.
The gloomy weather lasted another day, through the ship's visit to the eight-mile-wide Hubbard Glacier. This massive river of ice came roaring down from the mountains in 1986, blocking the outlet of Russell Fiord and creating a lake. Five months later, the dam gave way in a flood that reconnected the lake with the sea.
A Native American guide came aboard to talk about the event, and the captain did an admirable job of pivoting the ship so that everyone could have a view. But the ship stayed miles from the glacial face, and we could only imagine how it might look on a clear day.
By the time we reached Seward, we were ready for a few days on our own. The rental SUV -- barely big enough to hold all the luggage -- provided us with the freedom to stop off at Exit Glacier, where the kids could actually touch the ancient ice; at Portage Glacier, with a first-rate visitor center and lake cruises; and Aleyska Resort, an upscale hotel and ski lift where we rode the cable car to the mountaintop.
We stopped briefly in Anchorage, then headed north to the funky little town of Talkeetna. The town isn't much -- just a few stores and restaurants, a train depot, tackle-and-guide shops and Grandma's Video Rental. We saw several climbing parties who had come here to get permits for Denali treks.
Expedition permits are one reason to come here. Roughly 700 climbers try to summit Mount McKinley each year, and, in a good season, about half make it. Another reason to visit is the July Moose Dropping Festival, a wacky event that gives rise to moose nugget swizzle sticks, earrings and the like.
Our excuse to come here was the abundance of flight-seeing operations, positioned to sweep over the Alaska Range from the south and, on lucky days, offer views of Mount McKinley, also called Denali. Though flights are available for about $100 each, we wanted a plane that would land on a glacier. We got a family rate -- under $800 -- from Doug Geetings Aviation on a six-seat single-engine Cessna fitted with skis.
If you're queasy about small planes, stick to the ground. But you'll be missing something magnificent.
Alaska from the air
For nearly two hours, we soared over rivers and lakes and fields where we spotted the occasional moose, and then over the ice-crusted peaks piercing the clouded sky. Below stretched mile-deep packs of ancient ice, swirled with chocolaty patches of rocky debris and dotted with boysenberry puddles that from the air looked like Bigfoot tracks. Cracklike crevasses, we learned, were often 100 feet deep. Just beyond the wing rose craggy pinnacles of mountains more than 10,000 feet high.
The clouds were too thick for our pilot to get up over the peaks for views of the big mountain, but we didn't care. The thrill for us was landing on a glacier.
The pilot landed uphill in a bowl atop Ruth Glacier. Seconds later, we were crunching through the snow, flinging icy missiles.
"This," said Cary, "is definitely one of the coolest things I've ever done."
Later, he'd claim that it beat even the three-hour whitewater rafting trip along the Nenana River -- though he and Drew had a blast in a raft where they got to help steer. Whether it beat our visit to Denali National Park was another matter.
During a few days in the park we joined ranger walks, visited sled dogs and caught sight of a cow moose and her calf feeding at a wooded lake. But the centerpiece was the daylong trip into the heart of the park aboard one of the park's school buses-turned-visitor transport. Traffic within the six million-acre park is tightly restricted, and for most visitors, the only way in is via the park shuttles or an authorized bus tour.
We boarded at the dawn of a crystalline day -- a July rarity -- in the care of Peter, one of the shuttle service's engaging, hawk-eyed drivers, who filled us in on park wildlife (300 grizzlies, 1,800 moose, 2,500 caribou), the road system (dug by hand during the Depression) and foliage (45 types of willow, more than 20 kinds of berries).
This land was called taiga, he said, meaning "land of little sticks," and we could see why. It is an unseemly place, an endless and scraggly meadow punctuated by stands of leaning trees called drunken forests whose roots slide as the permafrost thaws.
As we bounced along the road, we saw only a few official vehicles or an occasional other bus. For more than an hour, we saw no wildlife. But then someone spotted a rare falcon on a ledge. A few miles later, we saw a hoary marmot. And then came the big show: caribou sitting just feet from the bus, in a curve in the road, and later, a grizzly with her two cubs grazing just yards from us.
By day's end, we'd spotted the bear family twice, seen a herd of Dall sheep on a mountainside and counted more than half-dozen caribou. We'd strolled through the spongy taiga, been attacked by mosquitoes at Wonder Lake, enjoyed our picnic lunch in the warmth of a surprisingly sunny day. For the second time, we'd been blessed by Denali, getting a lengthy view before the clouds closed up again.
When you go
Getting there: Cruises that come and go from a single port may offer savings on airfare, but you'll see more savings on cruises that take a full week to go one way. It's often cheaper to fly to Seattle and drive a rental car to Vancouver than to fly to Vancouver directly. Check airfares before deciding whether to book on your own or through the cruise line; prices can vary significantly, depending on when you book your flight.
Choosing a cruise: Think carefully about your children's ages and the preferences of those in your party, then ask specific questions about sports facilities, activities and entertainment on the ship. Many Alaska cruises seem to be holdovers from the days when most passengers were seniors; the music and entertainment can be disappointing to boomers and their kids.
Making arrangements: Whether you're renting a car, booking hotel rooms, buying tickets for the Denali park bus or arranging a tour, do it early.
Shore excursions: If you bypass them all, you'll feel cheated. Budget for at least one sightseeing trip by air, either in Juneau or, if you're driving north, in Talkeetna or Denali. If you're not spending extra days on land before or after your cruise, consider a wildlife-viewing trip along the way.
* If you're making your own plans, get a good guidebook (we used Lonely Planet's Alaska guide) and compare prices for excursions offered aboard vs. the cost of doing them on your own. Sometimes, it's worth a few extra dollars for the security of having the ship make arrangements.
Resources:
Royal Caribbean Cruise Line
888-313-8883 www.royalcarib.com / rcldeck
Alyeska Resort
800-880-3880
www.alyeskaresort.com
Sitka Sound Ocean Adventures
907-747-6375
www.ptialaska.net / ~delongb /
Talkeetna Cabins
888-733-9933
www.talkeetnacabins.org
Talkeetna Alaskan Lodge
888-959-9590
www.alaskatour.com / TalkeetnaLodge
Talkeetna Chamber of Commerce
907-733-2330
Alaska Railroad
800-544-0552
www.alaskarailroad.com
Alaskapass (for travel on Alaska's ferries and railways)
800-248-7598
www.alaskapass.com
Denali National Park and Preserve
907-683-1266
www.nps.gov / dena
Alaska Travel Industry Association
907-929-2200
www.travelalaska.com
When you go