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Tue, 19 Sep 2006

Berch on Cruises, part 3: helicopters and glaciers

Wednesday, August 9, dawned cool and grey like much of the week preceding. I was up early, out on the balcony, trying to divine whether the cloud deck and visibility were going to be sufficient for helicopter flying: we'd booked the 1:45 PM Pilot's Choice Ice Age Odyssey, which is the tour company's name for a 2-hour tour involving two landings, a chance to troop around a glacier in ice boots, and some nearby sightseeing from the air. Maggie and I had been looking forward to it for weeks.

The weather did not look that promising, and I was glad we hadn't booked our flight for the previous day in Juneau, since most of those tours were canceled. I paced nervously, tried to get a weather report on the room TV. Around 10 AM, I looked out and saw helicopters heading out in pairs from the nearby airport. "They're flying!", I cried, and we headed to brunch, then joined the rest of the party on a walk downtown.

Skagway was a little more interesting than Ketchikan or Juneau, I thought, mostly due to history: it was the port of entry for gold-rush miners heading to the Klondike gold fields in the Yukon, over the perilous White Pass. Later, a railroad was built, the White Pass & Yukon Route, and it remains as a narrow gauge tourist attraction, with its yard and tracks taking up much of the Skagway waterfront.

The town itself is a somewhat more fully realized tourist village, laid out in about 5 by 10 blocks of the usual shops and restaurants, with an 1890s motif. It was fun to see a village of wooden Victorian houses, with our ultramodern ship looming in the background, as if it were a UFO mother ship hovering over a contemporary city. We wandered a bit, and headed back to the ship in order to pace nervously some more, waiting for the tour.

We were shuttled over to Temsco Helicopters' base adjacent to the airport, watched a safety briefing, and put on bright orange safety vests and ice overboots. The flights were running on time, which meant a quick walk over to our craft, which was a Euroocopter AS350 Ecureuil ("Squirrel") piloted by a lanky Californian named Jesse. My first helicopter ride!

Weight dynamics put me in the left rear window seat (Maggie & I switched for the ride home). The AS350 carries a pilot and 6 passengers – 2 in the front and 4 in the back. A quick takeoff and low fly-by of the Diamond Princess, and we were on our way south down the Taiya Inlet, then turned left on one of the smaller arms. The view was amazing -- water, then mud flats, then, in the distance, the face of the terminus of the Meade Glacier. We flew lower, and slower, and could see the deep blue, crenellated face of the glacier, and its dirty top. Lower, and slower still -- it reminded me of the TV pictures from the landing of Apollo 11 -- and finally we came to rest on a flat spot on the surface of the glacier.

We were cautioned about crevasses, but were otherwise free to roam around. Our sister ship -- the helicopters always travel in pairs for safety -- landed nearby, and we all just got out and explored. The similarity to the moon landing seemed very apt. Maggie and I shot a zillion photos, and I made some short videos. The minutes flew by like seconds. If the whole trip had been nothing but this tour, it would have been worth it. We saw moulins (meltwater streams), deep crevasses (which our pilot demonstrated by dropping a rock in one -- it took more than 10 seconds before there was a splash), tiny lifeforms, and the deep blue crystalline color of the ice.

And then it was time to go. Since this was the "premium" helicopter tour, we were treated to a second landing, this one on a nearby mountaintop, a few thousand feet above the glacier. The glacier looked like a huge frozen slot-racing track, with multiple medial moraine lines making parallel S-curves as the glacier made its way down the mountain valley. And the mountaintop itself was an intricate ecosystem in miniature: tiny blueberry plants crept among the mossy ground between flat rocks that hosted hundred-year-old lichens. I ate a blueberry no bigger than a BB, and it gave a tiny burst of sweetness. Maggie climbed up the mountain and admired the glacier from above. I just marveled at being on a mountaintop in the wilderness, with no human settlement or activity visible -- not even a tiny plume of smoke -- in any direction, yet we had ascended seemingly effortlessly, as if plucked from the ground by a giant and set down on a peak. (That was meant metaphorically; I was quite appreciative of the skill and calm professionalism of our pilot, and the quality of our helicopter and its instruments, believe me.)

Too soon, we needed to head back, down from the mountain, retracing our flight path, back up the Taiya Inlet, and back to Skagway which, from a distance, appears to be a collection of cruise ships with a few tiny buildings nearby. Back at the heliport, we exchanged stories while we put away our vests and boots and got back on the bus to the dock.

Dinner that night was back at the Vivaldi, and it was Alaskan seafood night, which was just the right note. I had crab cakes, salmon lox with toast points and capers, and Alaskan rockfish chowder, followed by local, fresh king crab legs, the best I've ever had -- and for the only time on the cruise, I called for seconds on the main course. We had a crisp Kenwood sauvignon blanc, and I skipped dessert, but had the cheese course.

My stress level went down considerably after the helicopter tour. I confess I'd been worrying about it since we reserved space well before the cruise -- not about the flight itself, of course, but just hoping everything would come off OK, especially the weather. I don't presume to know what other people like to do, or what sort of things pique their curiosity and enthusiasm, but I'm pretty confident in saying that if you make it to that part of the world, which for most people means a cruise ship, do the helicopter glacier landing. You'll like it. It's more expensive than the land tours, but it's worth it. Really. It was the highlight of the whole trip.

Since Skagway was the last port of call, it was time to relax and enjoy the scenery for the remaining 2.5 days of the cruise. The next morning we entered Glacier Bay National Park, and we'd signed up for a champagne breakfast on our balcony. Not just champagne -- it's a lovely breakfast with lox, bagels, cream cheese, crab quiche, berries in a stuffed canteloupe, and assorted breads and pastries. We couldn't finish it. Luckily Maggie's nieces came by later to look at the view, and helped out with the fruit and pastries.

Then it was time to see the sights. We had Glacier Bay almost to ourselves; the National Park Service limits access to two cruise ships and a few smaller vessels per day. We were able to come up close to the face of the Margerie Glacier, and watched for hours -- the captain rotated the ship in place so that both sides got a good view -- as bits of the glacier cracked and fell into the water. There were no large "calving" events but there were some good deep cracking sounds. Naturally, we managed to get some lunch in as well -- a nice buffet of mostly local produce, with cold baked salmon, caribou sausage, venison stew, halibut terrine, and roast crackling pork. I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to catch up on my exercise, and did laps of the ship (which you can do via decks 7 and 8) along with a little group of fellow walkers.

Dinner was the second of the two formal nights. If you ask me, a cruise doesn't really need more than one, but we made the effort in any case. Maggie's dad had booked a table at Sabatini's, one of the ship's two specialty restaurants. Perhaps by that point we were a little sated by cruise ship food, or they were having an off night, but Sabatini's was really not that great. They serve sort of an Italian seafood tasting menu, although it's not really presented like that, and the waiters more or less told us what to order and whisked the menus away. The food was tasty, particularly the first courses, but it was served in a somewhat overbearing and speedy manner, without much attention to diners' preferences, to the degree that it seemed more like a buffet than what was nominally the ship's most elegant dining room. The first courses were prosciutto with melon, beef bresaola, assorted grilled vegetables, a tiny portion of sevruga caviar with a potato pancake, salmon roe with a crab cake, marinated shrimp with artichoke, marinated green-lip mussels, and white anchovies. This was followed by a cioppino, gnocchi alfredo, spaghetti with oil, garlic, and assorted seafood, canneloni with beef, and finally lobster tails. (The lobster was one of the only things that wasn't good at all; the tails were tiny ones, the type often seen at Asian buffets, and were badly overcooked.)

Now, all that sounds like a lot of food, and it was, but there was no way to easily have more of the things you liked and less of the things you didn't like. Some things were very well executed (like the seafood spaghetti and the marinated shrimp with artichoke), while others were simply pedestrian (like the canneloni and the prosciutto with melon) or downright poor (like the aforementioned lobster). So, I wouldn't necessarily write it off, but at $20 extra per head, it really didn't meet my expectations. And also, oddly, they made a big fuss about the need for reservations and how hard it is to get a table, especially on formal night, but Sabatini's was half-empty all the time we were there. Go figure. Maybe it works better for a party of two.

Our last day aboard was a Friday, and it was spent touring College Fjord, which is an arm of Prince William Sound, and the routine and the scenery was much like Glacier Bay. The featured vista was of Harvard Glacier, and we were able to get as close as we were to the Margerie Glacier. The view was slightly different, as Harvard Glacier takes a steeper and more twisted path down its mountain.

No one really felt like braving the main dining rooms, so we settled for the buffet for lunch, which provided some nice filling food for the chilly weather, including veal scallopini, corned beef brisket (the only corned beef I really enjoy), and some beef short ribs in a tangy sauce. Outside the buffet, on the Lido deck's seating area, there was a display of some very cleverly carved melons and some rich baked desserts. I didn't try either, but it was a good photo op.

My final meal aboard was dinner. I realized that buffet lunch and dinner would break my self-imposed one buffet per day maximum that I adopted a few years ago in Las Vegas (not even counting breakfast!), but everyone else bailed on dinner and I found myself a bit peckish late in the dinner hour. So I made my way down to the buffet for the last time, and had a (relatively) light dinner of salad, spinach and cheese frittata, chicken curry, and scallops with eggplant and zucchini.

The logistics of our tour transfer meant that luggage had to be put out again in the evening, and we had a very early morning ahead of us -- 7:35 AM disembarcation -- and we went to bed just as we were pulling into Whittier with four sharp blasts of the ship's horn (one of the only times I'd heard it since we left Vancouver) on a foggy, foggy night on Prince William Sound. The next morning we assembled according to our disembarcation color (brown) and group (3), and were led off the ship by an efficient parade of crew members. The disembarcation instructions ran to three pages, with a couple of dozen different groups sorted by their further plans, whether a transfer to Anchorage airport, a bus ride to a hotel, or, as in our case, a trip to Denali on the Midnight Sun Express.

We were quickly escorted onto the Princess chartered train (with its own sleek branded cars) on the Alaska Railroad. We found our seats upstairs (two tables of four people) and took a last look back at the Diamond Princess before we left the station at Whittier.

And then it was time for breakfast.

Posted at 18:01 | permanent link

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