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Panhandling in Alaska

Our cruise ship, the Coral Princess, sailed eastward from the port of Whittier in Prince William Sound on the south coast of mainland Alaska. Our route followed glacier-draped mountains that back onto Wrangell-St.
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Our cruise ship, the Coral Princess, sailed eastward from the port of Whittier in Prince William Sound on the south coast of mainland Alaska. Our route followed glacier-draped mountains that back onto Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, the largest park in the U.S. system. The next day we entered Yakutat Bay, with its massive Hubbard Glacier.

Great late-summer weather delivered spectacular views along this rough-hewn Alaskan Panhandle and allowed for shore excursions into sometimes hard-to-access and remote locations. And our little group took full advantage.

The next day we sailed into Glacier Bay National Park - sidling up to the miles-long Margerie and Lamplugh glaciers (sea access to Johns Hopkins Glacier was limited to protect seasonally calving seals). And we were out in the stern-deck Sanctuary area (lemon water, no kids in the pool) with cameras, binoculars, maps and guidebooks.

We watched massive chunks of glacial ice crash into the water and blue-ish icebergs glint in the sun. We learned from a park ranger why glaciers are both retreating and advancing and how the indigenous Tlingit people base themselves in the village of Hoonah on nearby Chichagof Island (shades of 18 th -century Russian exploration) while remaining active participants in this sprawling United Nations biosphere reserve.

From the port of Skagway, I joined a group tour that followed the Klondike gold-seekers over the Chilkoot Pass and into the Yukon. Our driver and guide was Bethany McCurry, a young native of Utah with an informed interest in Klondike history and an affinity for the outdoors. (She and her friends, calling themselves The Klondike Cold-water Club, "jump in every lake and river we can find.")

As her coach climbed the slopes of the "Tormented Valley," McCurry spoke of the 100,000 hopefuls who walked their way from Skagway into the gold fields in 1898, and the "hundreds of pack-horses that fell to their deaths" along these narrow-ledge trails.

Arriving in sub-alpine terrain of deep-blue lakes and stunted Sitka spruce, we watched a bear amble along a low-lying rock face. Then we passed through a Canada Customs post at Fraser, B.C. (where a George-Clooney look-a-like McCurry and her fellow drivers call "the Silver Fox" glanced at our passport photos) and into the Yukon.

While McCurry talked of gold-seekers who carried 2,000 pounds of supplies over the White Pass and Chilkoot trails ("1,500 steps straight up") and then built their own boats to sail down Bennett Lake, then over rapids and rivers to Dawson City, we followed the shore of 36-kilometre Tutshi Lake.

We stopped to take photos of picture-perfect Bove Island (framed with fireweed).

A lunch of northern comfort food - roast chicken, baked potato with coleslaw - at the caravansary-like resort called Caribou Crossing, was followed by a visit to the Tagish First Nation village of Carcross, at the southern tip of Bennett Lake.

In this home to about 500 Tagish, where the common abode is a wood-frame cabin with antlers over the doorway, you feel as though you're at the top of the world. One can only imagine the winters. And yet a beautiful native teenager selling locally made jewelry in the street seemed worldly and sophisticated in her way.

Finally, back at Fraser, B.C., we boarded the historic White Pass & Yukon Route railway to rattle and roll our way down precipitous slopes, over canyons and around hanging turns, to return to Skagway.

At the port of Ketchikan, I joined an excursion on a powerful catamaran. The aluminum-hulled, diesel-powered boat headed southeast along the Revillagigedo Channel, then around Point Alava and north into a realm where the only signs of human life are the occasional purse seiner and small aircraft, and maybe some kayakers.

Negotiating Shoal Pass, where we spotted a pod of whales, we continued up Behm Canal into fjord-like territory charted by Captain George Vancouver, when he sailed here on the Discovery in 1793. Among the many geographical features named by Vancouver was New Eddystone Rock (after an English lighthouse engineer) - a dramatic mid-channel protuberance said to resemble a ship under sail.

From here, we slipped into Rudyerd Bay, an other-worldly matrix of narrow, wending inlets and steep, deeply striated granite faces draped with waterfalls and rock-clinging trees. Richly coloured lichens and other marine life provide drama at sea level.

This is the Misty Fjords National Monument - 3,594 square miles of wilderness set aside by the U.S. government in 1978 for all its values: geographical, ecological, cultural, historic and scientific.

John Muir, the great American naturalist and preservationist (Muir founded the Sierra Club), wrote in the 1880s of a "little steamer, seemingly hardly larger than a duck (in)... a sound filled with islands sprinkled and clustered in forms and compositions such as nature alone can invent, some of them so small the trees growing on them seem like little handfuls culled from neighboring woods, and set into water to keep them fresh."

Muir might have been talking about this tiny pocket of the Tongass National Forest - in all, 17 million acres of mountains, glaciers, fjords in Southeast Alaska - and all experienced from the water and on land, during a seven-day cruise with Princess between Whittier, Alaska and Vancouver.