7-Day Glacier Discovery Cruise

The perfect combination of urban meets nature, Vancouver is a hub for lovers of the great outdoors. Enjoy picturesque views of the mountains while exploring the city’s local hot spots like Stanley Park, Granville Island, Gastown and more. Don’t forget to sample the best of the local culinary and cocktail scene for something truly unique. Here’s how to enjoy a stop at Hollywood of the North.

Alaska’s Inside Passage is a renowned cruising route through a protected network of waterways, featuring glacier-cut fjords, lush rainforests, and diverse wildlife. Stops along the route showcase Alaska’s rich history, including Native Alaskan culture in Ketchikan and Skagway’s Gold Rush era legacy. Here’s how to experience the best of the Inside Passage.

Endicott Arm is a 30-mile fjord that snakes through the Tracy Arm-Fords Wilderness Area. At the head is the majestic Dawes Glacier. Find a good spot on our spacious decks or get cozy on your verandah and take in the views. Glide past waterfalls that spool like silver ribbons from soaring mountain peaks. As you go deeper into the narrow fjord, the water changes color from gray to jade, the temperatures dip and the bergy bits (ice chunks) become larger and more plentiful.

The 600-foot-tall, mile-wide Dawes Glacier takes center stage just around a bend. The ship will sidle up to this brilliant blue giant for a chance to witness calving, when ice breaks off and plunges into the sea. Dawes Glacier regularly rumbles with white thunder, so keep your camera ready!

Wildlife sightings are common, so bring your binoculars. Endicott Arm and Dawes Glacier are the breeding grounds of harbor seals, one of Alaska’s cutest critters. In spring, you can see chubby pups chilling with mom on floating ice. You might also spot mountain goats balancing on cliffs or humpback whales swimming with their pods. Scan the valleys for brown and black bears. An Alaska cruise to Endicott Arm and Dawes Glacier is unforgettable. Soak in every minute.

At the height of the Klondike Gold Rush, the port town of Skagway served as the primary gateway to the legendary gold fields, and quickly grew into Alaska’s largest settlement. It was then a raucous frontier hub packed with trading posts, saloons and guesthouses. As the gold rush faded into the 1900s, so did Skagway—but today it has been reinvigorated as a gateway for a new kind of visitor: those looking to explore Alaska’s colorful history, pristine wildlife and unrivaled natural beauty.

Set sail on an Alaska Cruise and take an adventure in Skagway. At every turn, you’ll find yourself immersed in gold rush lore, from the infamous Red Onion Saloon that still keeps a pistol that Wyatt Earp left behind en route to the Klondike, to the White Pass & Yukon Route Railroad, a classic narrow-gauge railway that traverses rugged mountains and passes cascading waterfalls and towering glaciers as it connects Skagway to Whitehorse deep in the Yukon. Known as the “Garden City of Alaska,” Skagway is filled with beauty and nature. Explore the town on a Skagway excursion. Much of the town has been preserved as part of the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, where rangers offer free walking tours around the historic district. Take an Alaska Cruise to Skagway and you’ll also find a vibrant local community, home to a rich collection of local galleries, curio shops and restaurants serving seafood plucked fresh from nearby waters.

Icy Strait Point is a popular cruise destination on Alaska cruises and is only open when a cruise ship is in port. This historical town is filled with history and culture. Back in the old days when a freezer was a piece of ice, fishermen in Alaska had two problems. The first one was finding the fish, although that wasn’t too complicated, the ocean was chock-full of fins; but the second problem was a little harder. The government regulated how long you could keep your catch on the boat, and it wasn’t very long.

Canneries were the answer. Owning a cannery was having a license to print money. Really. As operations spread up and down Southeast Alaska, each cannery had its own currency. True company towns, canneries had their own workforce, their own laws. A big cannery needed a couple hundred workers, for everything from keeping books to making the millions of cans needed to ship all that fish, as well as the actual cleaning and prepping of fish on the line, called “slime row.”

Canneries were usually somewhere beautiful, someplace you could see from far off and aim your boat towards. But canneries didn’t survive the advent of refrigeration. Most were taken back by the forest or simply left to rot. With one exception: Icy Strait Point, beautifully restored. Just opposite Glacier Bay, Icy Strait Point stretches for a few hundred meters along the beach; the old wooden buildings, bright red in the endless green of the Tongass, now offer a museum and a cannery demo. But more interesting is simply the madness of scale. Icy Strait Point gives a chance to look into history to see where Alaska’s money came from, all in a ghost town of millions of fish.

Take an adventure and cruise to Ketchikan, Alaska. Alaska’s “First City” of Ketchikan is so named because it’s the first major landfall for most cruisers as they enter the picturesque fjords of the Inside Passage, where the town clings to the banks of the Tongass Narrows, flanked by green forests nurtured by abundant rain.

Ketchikan has long been an important hub of the salmon-fishing and -packing industries. Visitors can try their luck on a sportfishing or simply savor the fresh seafood at one of the local restaurants on a cruise to Ketchikan excursion. Ketchikanis also one of the best spots along the Inside Passage to explore the rich cultural sights of Native Alaskan nations like the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian. You can see intricately carved totem poles at the Totem Heritage Center and Totem Bight State Park, while the attractions of Saxman Village just outside of Ketchikan offers the chance to see Tlingit culture in action, with working carvers and a dance show in the clan house. On an Alaska cruise to Ketchikan don’t forget to leave time to explore the sights in the town itself, including historic Creek Street, a boardwalk built over the Ketchikan Creek, where you can shop for souvenirs, smoked salmon and local art, while exploring gold rush­–era tourist attractions like Dolly’s House Museum.

Days At Sea