Cruising Alaska

Before my family left last summer for a cruise through Alaska's Inside Passage, my wife, Joan, and I asked our then five-year-old son, Thomas, what he expected to see when we got there. A naturalist in the making, Thomas replied, "It will be completely white and covered with snow, and there will be polar bears, moose, whales, raptors and huskies everywhere." (Our daughter, Mia, then two, was too preoccupied with packing her favorite purple dresses to share her thoughts about the forty-ninth state.)

Thomas's concept of Alaska was not far from my own, which was formed through schoolboy studies of frostbitten prospectors and of what we used to call Eskimos, with their harpoons, igloos and diets of whale blubber and fish eyes. Readings of Jack London had only confirmed my belief that a cold, harsh exoticism blanketed the vast state like a dark and still night's snowfall.

As it turned out, the Alaska of our imaginations was not exactly the one we encountered; what we did see, however, fired our imaginations in wonderful new ways. To begin with, we journeyed in July, and summer touches Alaska as surely—albeit not as emphatically—as it does the rest of the United States, with daytime temperatures often reaching well into the sixties. More to the point, we traveled on the Crystal Harmony, a sleek 940-passenger luxury ocean liner—not the normal mode of transport for intrepid outdoorsmen.

We certainly were not heeding any call of the wild when we boarded—in Vancouver, a few days into the Harmony's twelve-day round-trip out of San Francisco—and were shown to our quarters. Joan and I had one penthouse stateroom; Thomas and Mia shared another with Dina Rivera, our babysitter from New York.

I'm no cruise neophyte. My mother won't fly and loves to sail, so when I was growing up, we'd often travel by ship. Back then my sister and I were usually among a handful of children on board, but as we toured the Harmony, I was struck by how many kids we passed on every deck. (The ten-and-under set tended to congregate in Fantasia, the ship's children's-activity center, with its perennially cheerful staff.) Yes, most of our fellow passengers were older than sixty. But the many young faces we encountered bore out what I'd frequently heard: that Alaska is the leading cruise destination for families. I also soon noticed that many of these families were multigenerational—grandparents, parents, teenagers and toddlers all finding common ground, as it were, through a shared interest in the vivid history and unspoiled beauty of the United States' last frontier.

The ship soon pulled out of Vancouver's sunny harbor, and we headed up the coast. A day later we began to crisscross the waters of the southeasternmost spur of Alaska, hugging the green, rain-forested shores of the Inside Passage, a photogenic 500-mile-long collection of unpopulated islands, whale-filled straits and narrow fjords that would sometimes dead-end at massive glaciers calving house-sized chunks of ice into the sea.

Unless you have the time, inclination and daring to charter small planes and hop from lodge to camp to rustic lodge—and how many people traveling with young children do?—most of the fabled attractions of the massive state (more than twice the size of Texas) are out of reach. This time around we didn't take in the endless caribou-and-moose-covered tundra of the state's interior; or the sharp, frigid crests of Mount McKinley, North America's tallest peak; or the lonely Arctic Circle whaling town of Barrow, without a single road leading in or out of it; or even the rugged, wind-whipped Aleutian Islands, poking bravely into the Bering Sea. In other words, what we saw and experienced in our few days at sea was just—and I can write this now that I am back on terra firma—the tip of the Alaskan iceberg.

But what a tip-top tip it was. The Inside Passage coastline affords some of the most gorgeous scenery you'll ever have the good fortune to sail by at twenty-two knots. Clouds hover over steep, evergreen-covered mountains marked here by a gray, jigsaw-puzzle outcrop of granite and there by a thin vertical slash of white: a waterfall, whose great height is impossible to calculate. The landscape is not all that inspires; the water, too, is striking, changing constantly—from aquamarine to blue black to a gray so steely it's as if cold were made visible. Earth and sea together comprise a palette different from anything I'd seen before—resembling not so much a Turner oil as an oversized Rothko color-field painting.

Truth be told, traveling on a large cruise ship like the Harmony may not provide you with the most intense experience of Alaska, what with the relatively short time you spend on land (docking briefly in four Alaskan ports—Sitka, Juneau, Skagway and Ketchikan—over twelve days). And if you don't enjoy cruise-ship culture—tango lessons in the Palm Court, ventriloquists in the Galaxy Lounge, photographers endlessly snapping your picture on Formal Night, cherries Jubilee as a much ballyhooed highlight of the menu (but, ironically, no baked Alaska, at least while we were on board)—I'm not certain that the Harmony, elegant as she otherwise is, will convert you. But if you love the slow, steady progress of a ship across mostly calm seas, dislike having to pack and unpack repeatedly during your vacation and want a safe, extremely comfortable, extraordinarily well staffed floating hotel that's big enough to offer something for every member of your party, you'll find that the fourteen-year-old Harmony is your dream boat.

The views she offers are fairly dreamy too. None of us ever grew blasé about the sights. Whether we were eating breakfast on our stateroom's private veranda, a lunch of burgers and sprinkle-covered ice-cream cones at the Trident Grill (the children's favorite venue) or a fabulously fresh sushi dinner in the Lido deck's Kyoto restaurant (the grown-ups' pick), we'd arrange ourselves so we all faced out, ready to take note of a breaching whale, a particularly craggy mountain or a patch of blue sky peeking out from behind July's ubiquitous rain clouds.

When we did drop anchor, the Harmony's shore excursions—you register and pay for the outings in each port before your arrival there—ensured that our time off the ship was incredibly well spent. (Depending on the excursion, you might share the experience with several of your fellow passengers or have the few hours of guided exploration all to yourselves.)

Our stopover in Sitka, which was a thriving trading post when the Alaska Territory belonged to Russia, started with a tour of the Alaska Raptor Center, where Thomas befriended (from afar) Spud, a peregrine falcon with very poor vision. The state-of-the-art center provides medical treatment for hundreds of injured birds of prey, including red-tailed hawks, great horned owls and golden eagles.

Next a large group of us embarked on a kayak expedition on protected Camp Coogan Bay, where thousand-foot peaks rise steeply out of the water, their sheer faces heavily forested with cedar, western hemlock and Sitka spruce, the state tree. Eagles circled overhead, soaring on ther-mal currents, while salmon jumped and splashed around our kayaks. In vain we scanned the shore for brown bears, but we did sight, much to Thomas's delight, countless green starfish in the shallows, as well as a dead crab floating on the sur-face. With the crab proudly displayed on his upheld paddle, Thomas, understandably, was incapable of assisting me as I maneuvered the kayak back to the floating base camp against a strong headwind. (Because the outfitter deemed Mia too young to go kayaking, she and Dina enjoyed a catamaran ride among sea otters and a pod of humpback whales.)

The following day, in and around Ju-neau, was even more memorable. Sand-wiched between Gastineau Channel and Mount Juneau, the downtown area of Alaska's capital is, by Inside Passage standards, positively bustling. But we weren't interested in cities: as soon as we disembarked from the Harmony, we dashed with a few dozen of our fellow passengers across the dock to waiting floatplanes—ours was a 1958 Canadian Beaver—and headed for lunch at Taku Glacier Lodge, a charming 1923 timber-framed log building a half hour away. (Yes, this not-so-intrepid flier packed his family into a forty-plus-year-old aircraft, albeit a legendarily reliable one, all for the sake of this story—and a delicious meal of just-caught salmon.)

Within minutes we were up off the water and over rounded mountains buffed smooth by glaciers tens of thousands of years ago. In true Alaskan fashion, not a house or road or human could be seen from the windows, although off to the left, a lone white mountain goat was momentarily caught in the shadow of our plane. (A lunchtime recap of the flight gave rise to this heated debate: "It was a baby," Thomas insisted, "since it didn't have horns." "No, it was a mommy goat," Mia confidently countered.)

Then we were over the Juneau Ice Field—1,500 frozen miles of fantastic folds, ripples and striations formed during this remarkable glacier chain's eternal slow dance of advances and retreats. (The lodge sits beside a lake in the midst of this glorious landscape.) Here at last was the cold white Alaska of lore. Then again, it wasn't truly white; it was, in fact, a strangely luminous and unforgettably beautiful blue, an effect created by the sun's rays passing through the glacier's ice crystals.

After the meal, taken at communal tables, we flew back to Juneau and were whisked to a waiting helicopter. Even though our vacation had unofficially been billed as the best of Alaska by sea, we were finding the real thrills in the air. A helicopter must be the one way to fly that's cooler than a floatplane, I concluded as ours swooped and hovered and hugged the valley walls of the Juneau Ice Field. This flyover was much more cinematic: it was IMAX-worthy. "I felt like I was starring in the opening sequence of a James Bond movie," Joan said later.

As we soared over the last precipice of the Norris Glacier, an enormous otherworldly valley of ice popped into view. Slowly a tiny geometric grid of dots came into focus. Below us, looking like a for-gotten outpost on a distant planet, was a dogsledding camp set up for the summer training of Iditarod hopefuls—and for the occasional joyride by lucky tourists like us. Rows of tents for the human in-habitants of this strange cutoff colony ran alongside rows of dog igloos.

The Iditarod is the famously grueling 1,500-mile dogsled race from Anchorage to Nome that is held every March. Our "race" was less challenging—a smooth two-mile loop around the camp—but no less awesome. With the family divided between two sleds, both Thomas and Mia felt like chief mushers as they urged on to the finish their teams of twelve barking, panting huskies. Our guides assured us that the animals enjoy their rarefied line of work; Thomas was certain that his favorite lead dog, Amazon, was having as much fun up at the head of the pack as he and his sister were on their sleds.

The dogs were an inspiration to Joan and me the next day, in Skagway, when we joined a small guide-led group and hoofed it up the first few forested miles of the Chilkoot Trail. (The children and Dina took a streetcar tour of historic Gold Rush–era Skagway.) The steep thirty-three-mile footpath was the first leg of a brutal 500-mile journey to the goldfields of the Canadian Klondike. In the late 1890s, more than 100,000 "stampeders" trudged the trail, a former Tlingit Indian trade route. By law they had to carry on their backs enough supplies to last them six months. Hauling such terrible loads, they probably couldn't appreciate, as Joan and I did, the absolute beauty of the natural surroundings. Red squirrels scampered under a thick canopy of ever-greens; blazing purple fireweed and huge, flat-leaved devil's club (an oddly lovely plant that looks like a thorny, overgrown maple leaf) framed partial views of the Taiya River, down which we eventually rafted back to the Harmony.

There she always was, at anchor in the harbor, set off against green mountains and ready to welcome my family and me back, feed us heartily, entertain us, rock us gently to sleep—often well before the summer sun had set—and carry us slowly along to our next new and thrilling view of a pristine world.

CRYSTAL HARMONY's first twelve-day cruise to Alaska and Canada sets sail May 30; the last departs September 15. Price (per person, based on double occupancy) from $5,090, for an Inside stateroom, to $21,800, for one of four 948-square-foot Crystal penthouses. Shore excursions from $22 to $387. 800-804-1500; crystalcruises.com.

Alaska à la Carte

The Crystal Harmony is by no means the only ship making a splash in the waters along Alaska's southeastern coast. Among other high-end vessels with similar itineraries are Celebrity Cruises' three-year-old Summit ( celebrity.com) and Radisson's all-suite Seven Seas Mariner (www.rssc.com) . Good news for people who prefer smaller ships: Silversea's elegant 194-suite Silver Shadow (silversea.com) makes its inaugural Inside Passage run this summer.

Don't want to share your experience with hundreds of strangers? Consider chartering a boat, as did Jim and Joly Stewart, of Ambler, Pennsylvania, last June. They hosted sixteen relatives, aged eight to eighty, for a week aboard the M/V Liseron, a comfortable converted 1952 minesweeper. The Liseron is owned by the Seattle not-for-profit Boat Company (theboatcompany.com) , which was founded to promote awareness of Alaska's remarkable—and fragile—environment.

Maybe you want to travel beyond a boat's limited range. Lisa Lindblad runs a New York–based custom-travel company (212-876-2554; lisalindblad.com) that has sent families to Anchorage and the Arctic Circle—and to countless unspoiled attractions in between. "Alaska is a fantastic destination for families," she says. "Nature is a great leveler: all ages are humbled by the immensity of the state's natural wonders."

Off the Beaten Path, of Bozeman, Montana (www.offthebeatenpath.com) , another custom outfitter that specializes in upscale outdoor travel experiences, helped New Jersey's Marc Goldstein and Arlene Lauf-Goldstein plan a twelve-day trip across Alaska with their two teenaged sons last summer. "We stayed at wonderful wilderness lodges—I particularly liked Denali West Lodge—and went canoeing and fishing and clamming and mushing in the most remote areas, places that cruiseship passengers would never see," Lauf-Goldstein explains. "With no malls, no supermarkets, no television, the boys quickly learned how dark a dark night can be, and how quiet quiet can be."