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.
