The magic of Alaska

Alaska itself is vast beyond imagination. You could fit Britain, Germany and Italy into this northernmost American state and still have room left over. I discovered Alaska while setting my Rake Ozenna thriller series there, with a hero who comes from that tense and isolated frozen frontier. Few places better reveal Alaska’s essence, a land balanced between wilderness, commerce and the shifting borders of history. Here are the highlights of what to expect when you get there:

The Inside Passage is a labyrinth of islands, fjords and forested slopes that shelters ships from the open Pacific. For many, it’s the most memorable part of an Alaskan journey. The sea is often calm here, the light ever-changing, mist curling off the water in the early morning, then lifting to reveal snow-capped peaks and spruce-clad shores. Bald eagles circle above, dolphins dart alongside the bow and, now and again, a whale’s tail breaks the surface in a flash of silver spray.

Inside Passage

Each bend in the coastline brings another picture-postcard view: tiny fishing villages, waterfalls cascading from the cliffs and, occasionally, a solitary cabin clinging to the rocks. Life along this route is dictated by tide and weather, by salmon runs and ferry timetables. As the ship glides south, passengers gather on deck wrapped in blankets, cameras ready, breathing in the crisp, salt-laced air. By the end of the journey, you feel you’ve travelled not just through distance, but through time, from the high drama of gold-rush history toward the gentler rhythms of coastal life, where Alaska begins to meet the sea.

Alaska’s state capital is unlike any other in America. Hemmed between snow-tipped mountains and the silvery waters of the Gastineau Channel, Juneau is a city that feels both remote and welcoming, a place where the wilderness begins at the end of every street. No roads connect it to the outside world. You arrive by air or sea, just as gold-rush prospectors did more than a century ago and are instantly struck by the clarity of the air, the shifting light on the glaciers and the sense of life close to nature’s edge.

Humpback whales, Juneau

For travellers seeking adventure with comfort, Juneau offers both. One moment you can be sipping coffee on the harbour watching floatplanes skim the water; the next, you’re gliding past blue ice on the Mendenhall Glacier or spotting humpback whales breaching in Auke Bay. Downtown, galleries and seafood restaurants mix with frontier-style wooden buildings, and locals are proud to share stories of fishing, mining and survival through long winters.

A day’s sail north from Juneau along the Lynn Canal, Skagway appears like a film set from the gold rush: wooden boardwalks, false-fronted saloons and stories of fortune-seekers who once flooded its narrow valley. In 1898, this small port became the gateway to the Klondike, when thousands of prospectors arrived hoping to strike it rich. Most didn’t. Many never made it past the treacherous White Pass, where snow, avalanches and exhaustion defeated all but the toughest. Yet the legend of that brief, feverish time lingers in every street.

Today, Skagway has just over a thousand residents and welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors each summer. Cruise ships anchor in the deep harbour and from there passengers fan out to stroll along Broadway, where century-old buildings house cafés, outfitters and museums celebrating the town’s raucous past. The White Pass and Yukon Route railway, an engineering marvel clinging to the mountainside, offers one of the world’s most scenic rides, tracing the same route that fortune hunters took on foot.

Skagway is framed by wilderness. Glacial valleys, rushing rivers and pine forests stretch in every direction, reminding travellers that Alaska’s beauty and hardship have always gone hand in hand.

Ketchikan is known as Alaska’s First City, the first port of call for ships sailing north. The settlement sprawls along a narrow strip of waterfront hemmed between mountain and ocean. Bright wooden houses, perched on stilts above the tide, reflect in the water like a painter’s palette. Founded as a fishing and trading post in the 1880s, Ketchikan quickly grew into the salmon capital of the world and traces of that heritage are everywhere: canneries, smokehouses and boats still heading out at dawn.

Ketchikan is also a heartland of Native Alaskan culture. Totem poles stand proudly in parks and museums, their carved figures telling centuries-old stories of clans, spirits and survival.

At the Totem Heritage Centre, visitors can see some of the finest examples of 19th-century Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian totem poles in the Pacific Northwest, many rescued from long-abandoned coastal villages and carefully preserved indoors.

Creek Street was once a notorious red-light district until outlawed in the 1950s and is now a boardwalk lined with boutiques and galleries, revealing Ketchikan’s blend of grit and charm. Salmon leap in the creek below and locals chat easily with travellers. Backed by temperate rainforest and wrapped in mist for much of the year, Ketchikan feels both vibrant and otherworldly, a fitting farewell to Alaska’s wild, waterbound soul.

As the ship turns south from Ketchikan and the Alaskan coastline begins to fade, there’s often a quiet sense of awe among those on deck. Mountains soften into mist, eagles become gulls and the sharp northern light gives way to gentler Pacific skies. Ahead lies Vancouver, cosmopolitan, green and warm with the promise of city life, yet nothing can shed the captivating memories of glaciers, silence and vast horizons.

Alaska leaves its mark not through comfort but through contrast: raw beauty beside modern industry, solitude beside friendship, danger beside tranquillity. From Anchorage’s bustle to the ghostly calm of Little Diomede (see Fascinating Facts, below), it reminds every traveller how close the edges of the world can feel and how alive one becomes standing there.

By the time the Inside Passage narrows and the first lights of British Columbia appear, conversation drifts to favourite moments, a breaching whale, a glint of sun on ice, a stranger’s kindness in a harbour café. Alaska has a way of sharpening memory, of urging you to look harder, breathe deeper and take less for granted. The voyage south feels like leaving a dream, one stitched together from sea, sky and mountains, a vast, beautiful, untamed landscape at the top of the world.

Until 1867 Alaska was part of Russia and Orthodox Churches still dot the landscape of many cities. The small, white, octagonal wooden St Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church in Juneau, built in 1894, remains active today.

Tsar Alexander 11 sold Alaska to the United States for just US$7.2 million which worked out as two cents are acre. Russia needed the money because of the Crimean War and was afraid that Britain was about to invade and colonise Alaska.

At the time, many Americans mocked the deal, believing the land to be a frozen wasteland of little value. They called it “Seward’s Folly” after Secretary of State William Seward who negotiated the purchase. Time proved him right: Alaska’s vast reserves of gold, oil, gas, timber and fisheries have become a cornerstone of American wealth.

Alaska remains America’s last great frontier where Indigenous cultures, a pioneering spirit and raw nature coexist. Mountains rise higher than anywhere else in North America; rivers carve through tundra and forest; and wildlife outnumbers people many times over. From the Arctic Circle to the rainforests of the southeast, Alaska’s landscapes shift dramatically, but everywhere there’s a feeling of space, resilience and awe.

Far to the northwest lies Nome, famous for the 1898 gold rush, where the landscape flattens into tundra and sea ice. Across the Bering Sea, barely fifty miles away, Russia looms. Within the Bering Strait lie America’s remote Little Diomede Island, a native Alaskan settlement of less than a hundred people and Russia’s Big Diomede Island, which is a military base. They are less than three miles apart and between them runs the American-Russian border and the International Date Line.

Humphrey Hawksley is a travel writer, journalist and author whose Rake Ozenna thriller series is based in Alaska.