had seen numerous grey whales , seals , and orcas . Some people chose to go dogsledding , but the most popular excursion was a short bus trip to the Mendenhall Glacier , a rapidly retreating ice flow twenty minutes from town .
The following morning , we awoke to sunshine in Skagway , one of Alaska ’ s gold rush boomtowns . Skagway offers dogsledding , whale-watching , and zip lining , but we opted to take the twenty-mile White Pass & Yukon Route train to the summit of White Pass at an elevation of 2888 feet . Built during the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898 , the railway follows the same route taken nearly 125 years ago by countless adventurers bound for Dawson City , Yukon .
After our tour , we had a pint of an awardwinning spruce tip blonde ale at a local brewery before reboarding our ship . The shopping was great ; we found that the further from port we wandered , the more authentic the wares were . Local artisans were well represented with jewellery , art , handmade pottery , and traditional Inuit knives — “ ulus .”
The following morning , we found ourselves in Glacier Bay enroute to view the Lamplugh , Johns
Hopkins , and Margerie glaciers . Our ship spent at least an hour hovering adjacent to Margerie Glacier , by far the most impressive of the three . Glacier Bay National Park and Reserve is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site protected from human encroachment . Visitors each year are welcome to kayak , canoe , and boat in the frigid water , but the shore is strictly off limits . Protecting these rapidly retreating natural wonders is an international endeavour .
Our final stop on the return voyage was Ketchikan , a small town originally built as a fishing and canning port long before becoming a popular cruise port . Ketchikan derived its name from Kitschkhin , the Tlingit word for the creek that runs through town .
The Tlingit people have lived on these shores for thousands of years and are well represented among the local people . Local guides will take tourists about town to show them the sites from an Indigenous perspective . Ketchikan has the largest collection of
Ketchikan . Photo PH
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