Travelmodia - Alaska Cruises

Welcome to Alaska! Did you know that approxiamately one million travelers head to Alaska each year having numerous opportunities to appreciate the vast natural beauty of the 49th State, the largest in the U.S.? Click here to search for a cruise to Alaska.

The Inside Passage offers cruisers to enjoy the immense ice formations of Glacier Bay and Icy Strait with popular ports of Ketchican, Skagway and Juneau. Juneau is the only state capital within the entire U.S. that is not accessible by car.

Travelling further north to the Kenai Peninsula and the city of Ankorage, you can disembark for a shore trip to the famed Denali National Park which encompasses over 6 million acres of Alaska's interior wilderness and home to its centerpiece attraction, Mt. McKinley. At 20,310 feet high, it is North America's tallest peak.

Having terrain of tundra, spruce forest and glaciers, the park is home to wildlife including grizzly bears, wolves, moose, caribou and Dall sheep and offers the adventurer popular activities such as camping, biking, backpacking, dog-sledding, hiking, mountaineering and even "flightseeing" along one of Denali's many glaciers.

Another popular stop is the city of Skagway, Alaska rich in history with the gold rush of 1898 that put the city on the map. Today you can visit the Gold Rush Cemetary, sip some spruce tip ale, a unique beer of southeast Alaska at the Skagway Brewing Company, take the Red Onion brothel tour, the last remaining brothel in Skagway as one of its madams leads the tour of this historic bordello entertaining you with stories of days gone by or just enjoy the ambiance of this Klondike town of old.

Glacier Bay National Park presents some of the deepest glacial fjords encompassing some of the continent's most amazing scenery and wilderness as a designated wilderness bioshere reserve. As your cruise ship pulls up to the Margerie Glacier, watch for icebergs and calving walls break free
and plumet into the bay. Many wildlife can be viewed such as brown bears, mountain goats,
sea otters, sea lions, harbor seals, orcas, humpback whales and even the majestic bald eagle!

The majority of itineraries are round trip, with most departing from Seattle or Vancouver, B.C. Some are one-way, also known as open-jaw, like Vancouver to Anchorage and generally are 7 night in length however can be longer if you embark from California ports.

The cruising seasn to Alaska is from mid-May through mid-September where you can expect cool to mildly warm temperatures and some rain is possible depending on the region as well. Also, something else which is quite exciting to experience are the Northern Lights or aurora borealis, which offer an entrancing, dramatic, magical display that fascinates all who see it. This dramatic display of one of the universe's spetacular shows is caused by the solar winds eminating from escaping particles of plasma hurtling 40 hours to reach Earth where they collide with Earth's gravitational field. The colors most often associated with the aurora borealis are pink, green, yellow, blue, violet, and occasionally orange and white and are determined by which type of atom they collide with in our atmosphere. For example, typically, when the plasma particles collide with oxygen, yellow and green are produced and interactions of the plasma particles with nitrogen produce red, violet, and occasionally blue colors.

So, whether you are cruising the various fjords and bays or taking add-on land tours to Denali, Skagway, Juneau or other areas, Alaska has unlimited beauty, wildlife, interesting sites and history for any traveler to enjoy.