Alaska Travel

Things to with Kids in Ketchikan Every Saturday, the Disney Wonder’s “Wish upon a Star” horn heralds a day of family fun in Ketchikan but it is not just Disney bringing families to Alaska, many other Alaska Cruise lines now offer great kids programming and families are also traveling to Alaska on the Marine Highway ferries, and flying in with Alaska Airlines. Whichever way you travel to Alaska, don’t be afraid to bring the kids. Alaska is a great destination for families and a truly unique place to share with your children. We travel with a tornado of twins who are now almost eight years old: they are active, outdoors loving boys with no patience for being still or shopping, unless it’s in a toy store. When we visited Seattle last year, the only activity that they really did not…

Paddling into Punchbowl Cove, Misty Fjords, Alaska 2005. The blog post is tardy this week because I opened a can of worms; a big can of juicy misty worms. Once I started reviewing our fifteen years of kayaking in Misty Fjords I discovered that they couldn’t be contained within paragraphs, at least not without annoying overuse of superlatives. There is simply no way to capture the magic of a cup of coffee on a misty morning in Punchbowl Cove, or the exhilaration of paddling beneath the towering granite cliffs hearing nothing but the dip of your paddle and the cry of the loon. My blog post started to look like something by Marcel Proust. Instead of a thousand words, I give you this photographic celebration with many thanks to our guests and guides for all of the miles paddled, trails…

Some great reading for your Alaska Vacation. Alaska Vacation Reading List I have been a bookworm since the 1st grade. Maybe that’s why I like it here so much; we get plenty of time to read during Southeast Alaska’s long, dark, rainy winters. It was images that drew me to Alaska: pictures of snow-capped mountains, rainforest islands and colorful fishing villages on the edge of nowhere. After I moved to Ketchikan I discovered that Alaska was also rich in story and storytellers. Any evening with friends here includes tall tales of bush pilots, big bears and adventures on the high seas. There are hundreds of books written about Alaska, and reading is important for guides, but to be perfectly honest I don’t have a great tolerance for non-fiction. It’s a bit like salad: I know that it’s good for me…

Best Summer since 2004 or 1994… Almost everyone in Ketchikan agrees that 2013 was an amazing summer: beautiful weather, tons of visitors and record salmon catches, but not everyone can agree on when the last good weather summer actually occurred. 2004 was definitely a fair weather summer but some old timers say we haven’t had a really beautiful summer since 1994. Whichever one you go with, it’s been quite a while! At Southeast Sea Kayaks, we certainly got spoiled with kayaking in all the sunshine this year. Here is a celebration of our sunny summer in images. We had Orcas early this summer: this photo was taken in early May. Our photo contest winner, Bonnie captured this amazing photo of an acrobatic humpback whale putting on a show at Orcas Cove. Bearnardo, made frequent appearances at the salmon stream in Orcas Cove. We spent an amazing afternoon…