After Seventy Five Years, Holland America Still Sails to Alaska with the Same Intrepid Spirit

“Actually,” I hear my pilot, Logan, say by the headset, “the primary time I got here to this glacier, it was like a child’s first time at Disney World.”

We’re simply touchdown the helicopter on the huge bluish-white Mendenhall Glacier, streaked with darkish rock particles and silt. I sit stupefied by the sight of this marvel wedged among the many jagged peaks of Southeast Alaska. I used to be raised in Florida; earlier than this journey to Alaska on Holland America Line’s Noordam, I had by no means even seen a glacier. Standing on this immense, silent, slow-moving pressure, I really feel the unmistakable thrill of journey: For just a few seconds, I am Jason Bourne or James Bond.

Certainly one of our guides takes the requisite {photograph} of me leaping into the air atop the glacier. I hop down into push-up place and decrease my physique sufficient so my lips contact the rivulet of water working right into a crevasse. I’ve traveled to 5 continents and greater than 60 nations—why have I by no means come right here earlier than?

Juneau—like different ports of name alongside this sail from Whittier, Alaska, to Vancouver, British Columbia, together with the Gold Rush settlement of Skagway and rustic boomtown of Ketchikan—hugs the Pacific Ocean, deep inside the Inside Passage of slender waterways and forest-covered islands alongside the rugged western shoreline of North America. Whereas it’s attainable to fly on to Juneau and drive by this area, there’s just one correct approach to absorb the misty fjords and craggy headlands, the turquoise waters filled with aquatic life, the ferns and firs of the temperate rain forests, the icy glaciers and snowcapped mountains: by sea.

Alaskan cruising is now almost absolutely again on observe after the interruption of the pandemic. Holland America Line, the primary passenger line into Alaska, has been creating journey experiences right here repeatedly since 1947, earlier than statehood. Over the previous couple of a long time, Alaska has turn into one of the fashionable locations in cruising. However Holland America Line has sure ad-vantages over its competitors due to proprietary entry to the land, which has allowed it to create a few of the first-ever cruise-tour experiences to Denali Nationwide Park and into Canada’s Yukon Territory.

Nonetheless, unmatched entry to nature isn’t Holland America’s solely enchantment. There may be additionally the glamour within the glossy strains of Noordam, the 936-foot-long Vista-class cruise ship. Each morning, simply after daybreak, I stroll by the ship, Americano in hand, the darkish blue of the hull and the wooden paneling of the decks evoking Holland America Line’s Nineteenth-century origins as a transatlantic passenger line, ferrying immigrants and rich vacationers throughout the Atlantic from Rotterdam—typically heading as far south as South America.

My fellow passengers, whose eyes gleam with lifetimes of tales, benefit from the swimming pools and eating places and retailers and exhibits on board. A number of have cruised in Alaska earlier than. Simply after our departure from Whittier, I enterprise to the dinner for single and solo vacationers within the ship’s principal eating room. I sit subsequent to Miss Barbara, a retired insurance coverage adjuster from japanese Tennessee, whose husband handed away just a few years in the past. She regales me with household tales with a folksy aptitude that might make Dolly Parton proud. I dine on hen and waffles, Miss Barbara on lobster, whereas Noordam slips out of Prince William Sound. It does not take lengthy earlier than she reveals to me her secret to cruising: “You possibly can keep on the boat if you wish to. You may get off the boat if you wish to. You are able to do what you wish to.”

On a kind of stay-on-the-ship days, we sail quietly up the center of Glacier Bay. The water is turquoise and easy like a glass tabletop, besides close to the shoreline, the place it laps rhythmically towards towering partitions of grey rock and dust-specked ice. Tiny chips of ice float between the ship and the shore, glowing white just like the snow-covered peaks on the horizon. The sound of seagulls pierces the quietude. Each single passenger of Noordam appears verklempt, surprised into silence by the surprising grandeur and fragility of the confluence of ice and stone and sea and sky. Within the subsequent second, a big chunk of the glacier breaks off and falls into the bay. I spy it drop into the chilly, clear water. And a second later, the thunderous crack reaches my ears.

A seven-day Glacier Discovery cruise on board Holland America Line begins at $589 per particular person; hollandamerica.com

This text appeared within the December 2022 challenge of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the journal right here.