At home and abroad

When you hear the word “seaplane,” what comes to mind? Like me, do you think of a small aircraft that takes off and lands on the water? That’s what I envisioned when I booked our flights between Juneau and Skagway on Alaska Seaplanes. I’ve never flown in one and I expected it to be one of the highlights of this trip. But Steve, looking at the Alaska Seaplanes website the other day, noted that the company uses both actual hydroplanes and other small aircraft, and that the ones going to Skagway were the land-launched ones. I felt crushed.

I need not have. Our single-engine 8-passenger Cessna may have lacked flotation pontoons, but other aspects of the trip made up for it.

I loved the anarchic check-in at Juneau’s airport Tuesday morning. When I gave my name to the cheery lady behind the counter, she asked for no identification, nor did she hand us any boarding passes. We could have been Boris Badenov and Natasha masquerading as Jeannette De Wyze and Steve Wolfe; no one would have been the wiser.  She wanted to weigh our minimal baggage (just our backpacks; we’d left our carry-ons in our home-exchange partner’s garage), but she said we could keep the backpacks with us until boarding. Then we’d have to hand them over to be stowed in the plane’s belly. I eavesdropped as the passenger at the next counter was telling his clerk about the 9mm handgun in the suitcase he was checking. She had no problem with the weapon, but when he told her about the loose bullets, she said he’d have to somehow pack them in their original cartons.

That constituted the security screening. No metal detectors. No interrogation about the size of our toiletries, or attention to our drinking bottles, empty or full. I could have carried on a fifth of Jim Beam, undetected. 

We thus had plenty of time to read and write on our iPads. Finally a plump young guy appeared and read off 8 names (our two among them) He checked us off a paper roster, then told us to follow him out onto the rainy airfield.

He turned out to be our pilot. Actually, he was the entire crew. He mentioned where the life vests were but I instantly forgot, transfixed by the thought of how quickly I would die if my body were plunged into the water anywhere in the region. He continued, pointing out how to operate the fire extinguisher and where the GPS button and the emergency locator transmitter were, instructing us that if we had to land unexpectedly and he was unconscious, one of us should activate them and help would be on the way. Aye-aye captain.

He turned on the engine, drove us to the end of the runway, and we started to move forward. Seconds later, we lifted up into the gray clouds and driving rain.

The skies never cleared completely during the 35 minutes we were in the air, but the rain stopped and I drank in the staggering views from the Cessna’s big windows.

About 30 minutes in, I spotted a little town with several gigantic cruise ships parked at its waterfront. It had to be Skagway, I figured. I could see a runway, but our pilot flew over it and up the valley and for a moment, it looked like he might be planning to slam into the mountainside. Then he banked, turned us around, and descended steeply. Our wheels jounced as they touched the ground, and we rolled toward the terminal.

Seventy-five minutes later, Steve and I were chugging up to the Canadian border on the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad, usually cited as Skagway’s top touristic experience.

Cruise-ship passengers and other package tour-goers filled the seats (along with us) for Wednesday afternoon’s summit excursion. Inaugurated in 1900 in the wake of the hellacious Klondike Gold Rush, the train takes a little over an hour and a half to ascend almost 3000 feet in about 10 miles, passing brutally vertiginous mountains and scary drop-offs (and the obvious evidence of an avalanche that had occurred just three days before).

I enjoyed it, though frankly, the scenery couldn’t compare with the views we’d just enjoyed from 2500 feet aloft. More than anything, the ride made me appreciate what the gold-seekers who slogged up this route before the line was built had endured: inadequately dressed, making the climb over and over as they hauled up load after load to cache the food and other supplies required by the Mounties at the top of the pass. (The Canadian government supposedly worried that without 2000 pounds per person of such provisions the wannabe miners would die of starvation as they made their way to the gold fields near Dawson, another 550 miles further into Canada.)

Before this trip, I knew almost nothing about the Klondike gold rush. Our short time in Skagway fixed that. The whole town is a National Historical Park and the visitor center and several museums do a wonderful job of bringing to life that brief (less than 2-year) period in which a wild, violent, frenzied society sprang into life. We learned that of the 100,000 gold-seekers who came from all over the world, only 400 actually collected a significant amount of the shiny yellow stuff.

At first glance, the town’s Main Street made both Steve and me think of Disneyland — those throngs of tourists shuffling along, clutching bags filled with their gift shop purchases, those colorful olde time buildings. But in Skagway, almost 100 of the buildings are authentic antiques.

The cruise-ship passengers were the main fauna (some 10,000 of them on the day of our visit.) But I forgot to mention three other cool creatures we saw during our time in Juneau — and one welcome no-show.

— Bald eagles! I failed to get a good photo of them, but it was startling to see them frolicking in the skies all over town. Kind of like the parrots in my neighborhood back home.

— Ravens! As common as the eagles.  I had fun tossing bits of my sandwich to this cheeky guy on our beach hike the other day.

— A live King Crab! The one below was in a little tank at the dazzling salmon hatchery we visited after our beach hike. We were blown away by the hatchery’s mission (for the last 50 years): raising millions of embryonic salmon every year till they’re big enough for release into the ocean. That TLC gives them a vastly better chance for survival than salmon who aren’t thus protected. After release, the fish swim the seas for several years and then return to the hatchery to spawn and die.  

What we did NOT see were the hordes of mosquitoes and “white feet” bugs and flies and no see ‘ums and other annoying summer pests for which Alaska is famous.  Apparently they’ll appear in Juneau a bit later this summer. We may meet them yet. We’ve just arrived in Fairbanks for a whirlwind (two-night) stay here. Then we’re on to Denali National Park and Anchorage, the next stops on our grand tour of Seward’s Folly.