Alaska sat on the list for years. In September 2026 we finally went — eight nights from Seattle up the Inside Passage to Vancouver aboard Virgin Voyages’ Brilliant Lady, with five friends and family along for the ride. Late season turned out to be a gift: thinner crowds, cool but workable weather, and a shoulder-season quiet that suited the scenery.
Leaving Seattle
We had a couple of pre-cruise days in Seattle before boarding, and pulled off the pier in the afternoon with the skyline doing what a skyline is supposed to do as you leave it.
Sitka
Sitka was a short port day and we didn’t have the hours to do it justice, but two things stuck. The first was Fortress of the Bear — a nonprofit rescue on the old pulp-mill site outside town, eight resident brown and black bears in three enclosures, watched from covered platforms above. These are orphaned cubs that Alaska law won’t allow anyone to rehab and release; without the Fortress they’d be euthanized, and some go on to accredited zoos. It runs on admissions and donations, no state or federal money. Worth the short bus ride, and the bears are close enough that you don’t need a lens.
The second was the salmon. Leigh hiked out to Indian River to watch them jump; my knee had opinions, so I waited — and got my salmon fix a few days later anyway. Downtown mixes the usual tourist shops with some genuinely good artsy ones, and the free shuttle from the cruise dock to town runs about fifteen minutes each way. Lunch was at Crab & Chowder, which bills itself as dangerously delicious and did not oversell it: chowder fritters, then fish and chips.
Icy Strait Point
The headline at Icy Strait Point is the whale watching, and it was the single best thing we did in any port — amazing, with spectacular scenery thrown in for free. Humpbacks, repeatedly, close in, for long enough that people stopped shouting and just watched.
The transit gondola between the two docks is free and worth riding just to see the other end; the ride up the hill is $55 a head and we passed. The village and its “museum” are pleasant but mostly shops. Getting into Hoonah itself is a bit of a shambles: $10 round trip on a 35-passenger bus that only runs every half hour, or a mile and a half each way on foot. Lunch was halibut and chips with an Alaskan Amber — tasty, and expensive.
Skagway
Skagway is both completely unique and completely cliché, and somehow that works. Yes, it’s wall-to-wall jewelry and souvenir shops — but the presentation is its own thing. If you asked an AI to draw a classic Alaskan gold-boom town, this is what it would hand you.
Breakfast was at the Red Onion Saloon — the old bar and brothel, which has not exactly buried the history. The souvenir shelves are also a genre unto themselves.
Then the White Pass route up into Canada and back, about three hours round trip. The steam engine had been swapped for a diesel with mechanical trouble, which stung a little, but the views and the crew were both terrific — shelf-cut track, gorges, the old cantilever trestle rusting away next to the modern steel bridge, and flags at the summit where you cross into British Columbia.
The post-train snack came from the Skagway Weenie Wagon, where we also paid our respects to Spike the Wiener Dog.
Endicott Arm & Dawes Glacier
This was the day it started to feel like Alaska. Ice floes appeared in the water as we pushed up the arm and the ship went quiet in the way people do when the scenery starts winning.
Wildlife took the day off. Someone in our party spotted a single seal riding a floe, there were a few birds, and that was the whole list. We got within a couple of miles of Dawes Glacier. From that distance it looks small — the scale only lands when you see the little expedition ships sitting much closer in. One of them, a Ritz-Carlton yacht, arrived first, never moved, and is now in a great many of our photos.
We did catch the tail end of a calving — the splash, the mist hanging above it, and the wave rolling out — though at that range there’s no anticipating the next one. Still: impressive, and a real sense of where glaciers sit in the world. We also got lucky on the naturalist front. Dr. Glo spent the summer aboard doing education and live spotting calls — “Orcas ahead on the left!” — and she made the scenic days considerably better than they’d otherwise have been.
Ketchikan
Ketchikan gets something like thirteen feet of rain a year, so getting only lightly damp — and then actually seeing blue sky — counts as a win. The fish ladder and the salmon running up Ketchikan Creek were the highlight, and closed the loop on what I’d missed in Sitka. Creek Street, the old red-light boardwalk built on pilings over that same creek, is right above them and has never once been shy about its past.
Lunch was a local burger and a draft at 108 Taphouse & Burger Bar, which has limited seating and, at lunchtime, a line out the door. Thirty minutes standing in it, and the patience was rewarded. There was hand-labelled peach moonshine on the shelf. I was intrigued. I had a Forty Ninth State hefeweizen instead.
Through the Narrows to Vancouver
The last sea day was the best wildlife day of the trip: more orcas, dolphins, seals, and birds everywhere. We were also flat-out hauling — apparently we needed to beat high tide to fit under a bridge on the way into port — which put us alongside in Vancouver around midnight, roughly seven hours earlier than advertised.
What We’d Tell You
Go late season if you can stand a jacket. Book the whale watching at Icy Strait Point and don’t overthink the rest of the excursion list. Assume the wildlife shows up when it feels like it and not when the itinerary says. And if you’re heading up an arm to a glacier, temper the expectation of scale — you’ll be further away than the photos suggest, and it will still be worth standing out in the cold for.
Ship notes are in the Brilliant Lady review.