My first Alaska cruise, and what I would tell you

Facts checked against official sources on 24 September 2026

I had done the Caribbean. I had done the Caribbean a lot. And every time somebody came back from Alaska they would get a look on their face and say "it's just different," which is the least helpful sentence in travel.

They were right, though. It is just different. Let me try to do better than that.

1. It is not a beach holiday and you must stop packing like it is

I know you know that. I knew it too. I still under-packed the warm things and over-packed everything else.

What I actually wore, every day: layers, and a rain jacket with a hood. Ketchikan's official NOAA normal is 149.54 inches of rain a year. That is not a joke the town tells. An umbrella is useless up there because your hands are full and the wind takes it.

What I wished I had more of: warm socks, and a proper hat for standing on a cold open deck at seven in the morning. Which brings me to the next one.

2. Set the alarm for the fjord. This is the whole trip.

Tracy Arm is scenic cruising — nobody gets off, there is no port, there is no excursion to book. The ship goes up a thirty-mile fjord in a federal wilderness and comes back out, and if you sleep through it you have missed the best part of your holiday and there is no way to get it back.

We were well up the fjord by ten to seven in the morning. Jade green water. Walls of granite on both sides. Waterfalls everywhere you look. Ice in the water and one piece of it a blue you will not believe until you see it. And at the end, the glacier itself.

Take the coat up with you. You will not go back down for it, and you will regret not having it.

Read the full Tracy Arm guide, including the 2025 landslide the USGS says still makes that fjord hazardous. That is current and it is worth knowing before you book.

3. The railway is the excursion to spend money on

If you only book one thing on your whole Alaska cruise, book the White Pass & Yukon Route train out of Skagway.

It is a narrow-gauge railway built in 1898, with grades of almost 3.9%, and it climbs from sea level to 2,865 feet at Milepost 20.4, which the railway states is the official border between the United States and Canada. You board on the pier next to your ship. You sit in an old wooden car. You go over a bridge with a very long drop underneath it. And you end up at flags in the rain at the top of a mountain pass that people died trying to cross in 1898.

And here is why I recommend it above everything else: you do it sitting down. The Summit Excursion is published by the railway as wheelchair accessible, with limited space in lift-equipped cars, and they ask you to tell them when you reserve. There are very few headline excursions anywhere in the world that a person with limited walking can do properly, and this is one.

4. Check which dock you get in Skagway

This is the one nobody warned me about and it has got harder since I sailed.

The Railroad Dock sits under an active slide zone that moved in autumn 2022. The Municipality of Skagway's own current project page says "Pier access remains restricted; alternative disembarkation includes tendering at Railroad Forward position and bussing from Railroad Aft position."

Tendering. In Skagway. Nobody expects that, and if steps and a moving boat are a problem for you, it changes your whole day. Ask your cruise line which berth your ship has. It is a fair question and they can answer it.

5. In Juneau you have to choose, so choose on purpose

Glacier, or whales. On a normal port call you are not doing both well, and as I write this the Mount Roberts tramway is temporarily closed with no reopening date published, so that third option may not even be on the table.

We did whales. You sit on a boat looking at flat grey water for a long time wondering if you have been had, and then it happens, and it is thirty seconds you keep.

If knees are the issue, take the glacier instead: the Forest Service states in writing that the Mendenhall Visitor Center is reachable from the parking lots "by stairs, elevators, and an easy ramp." That is rarer than it should be. Note there is a $5 per person fee from 1 May to 30 September, and children 15 and under are free.

6. Victoria is a legal requirement, not a bonus

Your Alaska cruise from Seattle stops in Canada because the Passenger Vessel Services Act says a foreign-flagged ship cannot carry you between two US ports. Seattle, Ketchikan, Juneau and Skagway are all US ports. So the ship has to touch a foreign one, and Victoria is the nearest.

Which is why Victoria calls are so often late in the evening and short. It is not a slight against Victoria, which is lovely. It is scheduling around a statute.

Go out anyway, even just onto the deck. And read the Victoria guide for what CBSA and CBP each require, because the two lists are different and you need to satisfy both.

7. Take the passport even when you do not need it

On a closed-loop cruise from Seattle, CBP will let a US citizen back in with a birth certificate and a government-issued photo ID. That is genuinely true and it is published.

Take the passport anyway. It weighs nothing. It lives in the safe. And the State Department's own guidance contains the sentence that settles it: if you cannot return on the ship and have to fly home, you will need a passport book. That is the day you do not want to be arguing about paperwork.

8. What actually surprised me

• How quiet it is. In the fjord the ship goes almost silent and so does everybody on deck. I have never experienced that on a cruise ship.
• How little I sat by a pool. On a Caribbean cruise I am a pool person. In Alaska I was on an outside deck in a coat every single day, looking at land.
• The light. In July it does not really get dark. Dinner ends and it is still light and it stays light and your sense of time goes sideways.
• The bear. On the road out of Ketchikan, on the rocks, going about his morning. Everyone went silent. Nobody did anything stupid. I think about that bear more than I think about any beach.