Alaska Travels: Finding my Route by Car, Ferry, Train & Small Ships

Alaska Travels

By Ted Scull.

Alaska: the Last Frontier, Seward’s Folly and the 49th state was once upon a time such an alluring prospect to conquer for anyone who loved geography and off-the-charts travel. Airplanes do their best to eliminate geography and deathly dull drives on Interstate Highways are a close second.

So when there are more interesting ways to get some place far far away, I like to nab the opportunities.

Alaska: Routes of the Alaska Marine Highway – Southeast (Inside Passage & Panhandle), Southcentral (based at Whittier) & Southwest (Kodiak Id. to Aleutian chain).

My best friend in high school loved geography too so we put our minds together to determine where best to go with our graduation money and a car at our disposal. We started with the furthest possible place to drive to from Philadelphia and came up with Alaska.

Ted putting his toe into water from the melting Portage Glacier. * Photo: T. Wistar Brown

With the car packed with food and camping gear, including jungle hammocks, courtesy of my friend’s father who had been in the New Guinea jungle during WWII. We headed north to Canada, across the country to Alberta, then arrived at Mile Zero of the Alaska Highway at Dawson Creek. While hundreds of miles thus far were over gravel roads, leading to one smashed windscreen, only the first 49 miles of the famed 1,523-mile route ahead were paved.

The highway was hurriedly constructed during the Second World War to provide road access to Alaska for military equipment to protect the territory from a possible Japanese invasion. It officially begins in northern British Columbia near the border with the adjoining province of Alberta, almost 800 miles from the U.S. Montana border.

The Alaska highway passes through the Yukon Territory and its capital, Whitehorse, the largest town (just over 23,000 people) en route and crosses into Alaska, where at a town called Tok Junction, motorists have the option to drive northwest to Fairbanks or southwest to Anchorage. Today, the road is entirely paved and its condition widely varies.

Alaska Highway Mile Zero, Dawson Creek, British Columbia. * Photo: Ted Scull

We traveled as far north as Fairbanks and as far west as Mt. McKinley (now Denali). To reach the Alaska Panhandle, we had one choice only as the Alaska Marine Highway ferry fleet did not yet exist. A small ferry (for people and cars) called the Chilkat operated from Haines near the top of the Inside Passage to Juneau, the only state capital without road access to the outside world — still the case to this day.

And we returned triumphant to the Lower 48 much the same way, arriving home after driving 15,219.5 miles!

1956 Ford station wagon takes to the high road. * Photo: Ted Scull

The second trip to Alaska 10 years later involved a combination of trains across Canada, a ferry to Vancouver Island, a train north to an overnight ferry connection to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, and then the Alaska Marine Highway to Skagway.

Traveling on the cheap without advance reservations, I spent the nights sleeping on a deck chair in the ferry’s heated solarium, and the days standing at the railing and watching the passing scene of majestic mountains, thick forests, and deep fjords. On the ferry, I met a couple of people to join for continuing travel.

Alaska Marine Highway, camping in the heated solarium. * Photo: Ted Scull

At Skagway, we took the Yukon and White Pass train (not a cruise ship excursion then) all the way to Whitehorse in the Yukon for a stopover, then returned south by bus along the Alaska Highway and finally to Prince George, before hopping trains to Vancouver, Seattle and back across the US of A.

I was so intrigued by the snappy-looking blue and white Alaska Marine Highway ships that I vowed to take the full route the next time. By now I was a travel writer and always looking for something different to interest an editor. I bet no one had written about taking the ferry in winter, and, why would they?

After spending Christmas with my brother and his family, I boarded a train for Seattle and booked a week’s round-trip voyage up the Inside Passage to all the usual Panhandle ports with a turnaround at Skagway. This time I had a cabin and all to myself. The sheer luxury of it all!

I am pretty sure I was the only tourist aboard the Matanuska (less than 300 cabin passengers) as everyone I met were either Alaskans returning home after the holidays in the Lower 48, truck drivers making deliveries or young folks looking for a job up the Inside Passage. Once we reached Ketchikan, Alaskans over 65 rode for free, so a number piled on and they were great resources for stories about Alaska as a territory back in the old days.

Matanuska at Ketchikan in winter. * Photo: Ted Scull

Colorful dawns came about 10am and dusk followed some five hours later. There was snow but not a lot of it at water level, that is, until an announcement came for the motorists leaving at Haines, the highway that I had used two decades before, was closed with drifting snow. Until it reopened there was no way to drive to Anchorage and Fairbanks. The passengers disembarked in their vehicles and stayed in motels or their camper vans until the highway and the border with Canada reopened.

Wintery dawn at 9:30am approaching Juneau. * Photo: Ted Scull

At the turnaround port of Skagway, the snow-covered main street was almost empty and the shops, hotels and attractions all closed. What a contrast to a summer day during the height of the cruise season. On the trip south, the boat was lightly loaded, and it snowed hard enough that when returning to Seattle the streets were impassable, and I had to hoof it, happily not that far, to the railway station.

That adventure made the Sunday travel sections of 13 newspapers. The good ‘ole days.

RELATED: Ted’s Account of his 1980 Weeklong Adventure on the Alaska Marine Highway. by Ted Scull.

Princess Cruises

The fourth Alaskan trip was aboard a large Princess cruise ship as by now the cruise industry was well developed. I liked the ship and the passing scenery, but found the ports of call so crowded with roaming tourists, and on this big ship, we were so high above the water that everything nearby still seemed far away.

I hated the land extension as the hotels were isolated with no suitable safe walks and land travel involved a bus amidst lots of others doing the same thing, converging on the same sights and lunch stops.

Cruise West

Finally, on the fifth venture, I came to my senses and took the opportunity to try a small ship! And a quirky one at that, the Spirit of ’98, a ship that resembled a handsome old-fashioned steamer operating for Cruise West, a firm that had been in the Alaska tour business well before the modern tourist onslaught. I asked my brother to join me for a one-week voyage from Seattle north to the Alaskan Panhandle ending in Juneau.

Spirit of ’98 at Skagway. * Photo: Ted Scull

Being with less than 100 others, rather than 20 times that, not only were we not sharing the outer decks with a milling mass of humanity, but one felt like a tiny speck amongst the majestic scenery. We sailed close enough to a waterfall to have those standing at the bow get wet and near enough to lounging sea lions to not even need a telephoto lens. On the night of a full moon, the little ship stopped among a raft of ducks and with the engines off, it was utterly silent except for sounds of nature. Magic!

Adrift on a full moon night in Icy Strait, Alaska. * Photo: Ted Scull

My brother, who had gone on a canoeing trip in these waters a few years earlier, remarked that he saw more wildlife on this small ship trip than he had roughing it camping and paddling. The captain and naturalist staff knew where to go.

Two brothers, Glacier Bay, Alasaka. * Photo: fellow passenger

SS Legacy

Then a decade later we went again on the same ship, now the S.S. Legacy of Un-Cruise Adventures, and had much the same wonderful experience, feeling a part of the scene, especially when we sat off the Margerie Glacier in Glacier Bay watching the ice break off with nary another ship in sight.

Then moving to Johns Hopkins Inlet, we nosed up to a glacier of the same name, and this one was still growing! Again, there was no one else about; we were alone in this wonderful world of nature, bergy bits, sea lions, and clear blue skies.

S.S. Legacy, Un-Cruise Adventures at Glacier Bay Lodge. * Photo: Ted Scull

In the lounge, the National Parks Service guide spoke to us as one small group, and at the bow, she did the same with the passengers gathered around or listening from one and two levels up.

Let off at the Sitka National Historical Park we walked amongst the tall totems set in a peaceful forest and strolled along the fishing piers of Petersburg where fisher folk shared their life’s work going after the catch, in one of the best places to make a living from the sea.

Would I go a seventh time? Yes, perhaps on a small ship to South-central Alaska, the Kenai Peninsula and maybe the Aleutian Islands. Small cruise ships and the Alaska Marine Highway (newly added to our ship lines) head that way too.

For information about the small ship cruise lines specializing in Alaska, go to American Cruise Lines, Lindblad Expeditions, Alaska Dream Cruises, UnCruise Adventures and the Alaska Marine Highway.

White Pass & Yukon Route, historic railway based in Skagway, Alaska. * Photo: Ted Scull

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