From Ketchikan to Kenai, Alaskan adventure travel takes a surprising new form
When I paddle my kayak with the current, I am Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur, I am a 110-horsepower Evinrude mounted on the back of a dinghy, I am - in the memorable words of Jules in Pulp Fiction - superfly TNT. I discovered this while casually zipping around the harbor in Ketchikan, Alaska, cutting to a nearly empty island for a nature talk, splashing underneath the pilings supporting Creek Street, the city's historic waterside bordello district. But when it was time to outfight the wind and rising shore chop to return to the luxury cruise ship that brought me there, I became Charlie Chaplin flailing on a conveyor belt, sprinting to stay in place.
The frantic paddling reduced my deltoids to Play-Doh as I measured my progress against the parked cruise ship looming above me. I inched toward safety rivet by agonizing rivet. Arms aching, the irony of my skeptical reaction to the boast of Kirby Day, the on-shore tour operator for Princess Cruises in southeast Alaska, suddenly struck me. "With cruise ships getting larger, and with more competition in the industry, we've felt the need to appeal to younger, more energetic and more athletic passengers," he said. Yeah, right, I had thought at the time. They call it a "cruise" for a reason.
But a week of enjoying heart-pumping hiking and biking on the Alaskan mainland and ship-based activities like my brutal kayaking battle had gone a long way toward convincing me that Day was right. Luxury cruise lines have recently been one of the fastest-growing segments of the Alaskan tourism industry - the nation's biggest state is too expensive and remote for many to visit without a structured tour. And within the entire travel industry, adventure-travel firms like Sobek and Backroads have enjoyed rapid growth by catering to venturesome individuals whose idea of relaxation involves an elevated heart rate. Given that background - and Alaska's play-friendly geography - it was inevitable that someone would add adventure to Alaskan cruising.
One of the first and most aggressive competitors to enter into the Alaskan luxury-adventure market is Princess Cruises, the line made famous through TV's The Love Boat. So when the company invited me on a two-week sea-land cruise through Alaska s rugged Inland Passage, I tried to banish my preconceptions about Gopher, Captain Stubing and the gang. I accepted their offer but braced myself for a heaping serving of vanilla ice. Would I spend my trip on deck, drifting past beautiful but untouchable scenery and surrounded by septuagenarian Carol Channing-clones playing shuffleboard? Or, worse, would Princess take me ashore, tantalizing me with the prospect of seeing the real Alaska, only to shunt me into the tourist hell of little Eskimo Eddie's Aleut Gift Shop instead of the Denali backcountry?
Fortunately, the answer was no on both counts. You won't find ample opportunities for gonzo backwoods adrenaline-pumped adventure on any cruise, but you won't be forcibly escorted into tacky souvenir shops, either. The Princess formula for active travelers is to combine a deluxe on-ship stay (with outdoor sports opportunities during stops at ports of call) with three- to seven-day stops at lodges owned by Princess Tours, the company's on-land division. The idea is to balance land and sea, exertion and relaxation, thereby providing a truer sense of a vast, wild state than a sea voyage alone could.
The sea and lodge phases of a Princess Alaskan Cruise Tour are distinct - you complete the on-land portion of the trip either before or after your time at sea. It would be nice to intermingle the two; to, say, sail for two days, then spend two days on land, but Princess officials say that would probably be too difficult logistically. And anyway, the main selling point of a packaged land-sea trip is having the details taken care of. The lodges serve as base camps for daytime trips; shuttles transport guests to various on- (or above-, in the case of helicopter and floatplane "flight-seeing") land activities. These trips cost between $30 to $300 extra, depending on the price of transportation. Gear, guides and food are all provided.
I worried about being stifled by this structure going in - what if I wanted to hit a mountain-bike trail on a nimble hardtail instead of a lumbering hybrid? - but the hassle-free arrangements more than compensated. This is no small thing. A surge of visitors to Denali National Park, the No. 1 outdoor destination in the Alaskan interior, has forced the park service to implement a strict system of quotas, buses and reservations for visitors. Those who know say that successfully negotiating the process requires months of foresight. But thanks to Princess, I took a wonderful (if abbreviated) hike though Denali's plunging, pine-scented valleys without filling out a form or making a reservation.
The price of this high convenience is, well, high - about $3,500 for my 15-day trip, plus the optional excursions. But given the inherently expensive nature of Alaskan travel - until recently, says Jim DuFresne in hi, s excellent guidebook Alaska, Alaska s prices were higher than New York's - tour prices aren't ridiculously out of line with what you'd pay as a free agent. "Before our trip, we were told, 'Alaska is simply expensive. Accept that fact and don't waste time looking for bargains,'" says Charles Duncan, veteran of a minimalist three-week trip in 1997 that cost him and a companion about $4,000 each plus airfare. "It was excellent advice."
Smooth sailing
I worried that the convenience of packaged travel would damage more than my American Express card, though. I look at travel as a tool for experience, for learning to see the world through new eyes and terms. Knowing that Alaskans call their uniquely voracious mosquitoes the "state bird," or that some areas have a five-to-one ratio of single men to single women (a fact that prompted one rickety female shopkeeper to confide in me what I later found out was the classic Alaskan woman's lament about dating: "The odds are good, but the goods are odd") are more than curiosities to drop into conversations back home - they're a reminder that despite the McDonalds and swarms of tourists, Alaska is different.
I got a sense of Alaska's distinctive mix of good and bad - its intense natural beauty and the boundless stupidity of many of its tourists - during the on-land portion of my trip, when I used Princess's deluxe lodge on the Kenai Peninsula between Anchorage and Seward as a jumping-off point for a rafting trip on the Kenai River. The day was warm and brilliant, and the Kenai's water glowed an unearthly, shocking aqua blue. It's the blue of carefully photographed travel brochures and Discovery Channel specials, and it was right in front of me.
The guide flicked his oar to send us in a long zigzag that took us close to the jutting rocks and thick evergreen forest along the river's edge. He reeled off a witty-but-well-practiced spiel and pointed out bald eagles - which hardly seemed necessary, given that they're as common in this chiseled canyon as pigeons are in New York City. I wasn't paying attention to anything except for that water, though. I needed to touch it.
When I finally dipped my fingers in, they jerked back involuntarily, as if I had jammed them into an electric socket. The guide, a 28-year-old local named Michael Seward, caught me and laughed. "That's 38 degrees." My curiosity about the water satisfied, I turned back to the scenery until we drifted around a bend and came upon one of the most bizarre displays of human avarice and stupidity I've ever seen: "combat fishing."
I took my trip in mid-June, at the onset of summer salmon spawning runs, right when hundreds of fishermen crowd the rocks at the fork of the Kenai and Russian rivers, jostling each other for space to cast. Just out of range of the lines of on-shore fishermen, a dozen or so boats join the melee, searching for salmon that run from around 20 pounds to as large as 80. Seward swung the raft well away from them, out of range of the wildly flinging lines, but the curses and laughter from land remained clearly audible.
Combat fishing gets its nickname because it's more rugby than A River Runs Through It. Anglers are crammed together hip boot to hip boot, and as beer flows, lines tangle and tempers rise, and the "combat" soon becomes man-to-man, not man-to-fish. The finesse of fly fishing is most definitely required here, because the salmon fighting their way upstream aren't coming for food, just sex. "The salmon are here to spawn and die," Seward told me. "Fishermen are looking to snag one of them in the head with their lures, or just annoy it into biting."
Bounty without mutiny
