Alaska Rail to Denali
This is the reason to cruise with Princess. They offer a five day land tour you can add to your cruise. From what I gather they have only been doing it for about 10 years, so in the past your trip would stop here and you would fly back to Seattle to end your trip. Thankfully we had another five days to go.
They have a very nice system setup in the town and port of Whittier. Small doesn’t quite convey the size. What you see is about the entire town. From the ship you have a covered walkway all the way to the train. Very nice. The trains are definitely not Amtrak. Double decker, glass domed for viewing, assigned seats, and a full bar and waiter in every car. This is the way to travel.
A feature they are testing that I hope they expand in the future is the real time GPS and travel guide. This is EXACTLY what they needed. I still can not believe they only had a couple of these, and almost no one knew about them. The one I saw was on the back of the train car in the open air section. It was perfect. It showed you a GPS map of where you were, and had automatic triggers by location to show slide and information about the region you were traveling thorough at various times.
The Ghost Forest. In 1964 Alaska had one of the largest earthquakes on record at 9.2. Only the fact that few people lived here and the remoteness kept the death toll to 131. Amazing this was not that long ago, but very few people even know of it. The Ghost Forest area is a section of land that dropped almost ten feet in elevation during the quake, causing the sea water to rush in and kill all of the trees. Given the slow rate of decay and the salt preservation, there are still the truck of dead trees everywhere 50 years later
Tiga. Many of the large areas without trees or with only very short and stunted trees are actually due to permafrost. In areas where the ground is frozen year long, trees cannot establish deep roots and either do not grow at all or cannot grow very tall.
Items of note
1-2 Whittier
3-4 Double Decker, Clear domes for viewing, great seats with a table, and a bar in every car, nice!
5 GPS Map
8 The Ghost forest
11 Alaska gets the most interesting clouds
12 Tiga
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