North to Alaska . . . But which way do I go?

Long before I retired, Le Anna and I had agreed that our first big trip would be to see the Inside Passage to Alaska.  We had talked about taking a normal cruise, which would be the easy way to do it, but we wanted to spend more than a few hours in each of the small towns along the Inside Passage.  So we had decided that the best way for us to go would be on the Alaska Ferry,  which stops at all the towns on a regular schedule.  Here is the link to the Alaska Marine Highway website http://www.dot.state.ak.us/amhs/ .  Thus began our study of various options for the trip.

Alaska Ferry

I worked in Alaska earlier in my career, and we had both seen the Anchorage area and Kenai Peninsula.  Our goal for the next trip was to see Fairbanks, Denali, and more of the interior in addition to exploring the beautiful Inside Passage.  We also wanted to visit Whitehorse, Yukon, and possibly the gold rush town of Dawson.  The more we talked about it, the more options came up.

Our first preference was to load up our car and hit the road, driving up Vancouver Island, putting the car on the BC Ferry at Port Hardy, and going up the Canadian coastline, switching to the Alaska Ferry at Prince Rupert, BC.  Here is the link to the BC Ferry system -  http://www.bcferries.com/.  We’d take our time and enjoy getting off/on at the small towns along the Alaskan Inside Passage from Ketchikan up to Skagway where we could drive on the mainland again.  We could tour the interior as we liked, and return to the US via the Alcan Highway through the interior of BC.  What we discovered when we dug into details, was that advance reservations would be required for each leg of the ferry, and there was really no place to go with a car at most stops.  Then there was the cost, which would be over $900 for the vehicle cost on the ferry.  We concluded that this option would be too restrictive and expensive.

The Inside Passage

We thought about some variations, like leaving our car in Juneau and taking the fast foot ferry to Sitka, but that was only a slight improvement.  We also looked at driving through BC up to AK first, and coming South down the Passage on the ferry, but this was essentially the same trip with the same inflexibility and comparable costs.

after this, we started thinking that the better approach would be to just walk-on the ferry and rent a car in Skagway or Whitehorse to tour the interior, then fly home from Anchorage or Fairbanks.   Ideally we would prefer to return the car to where it was rented to avoid the one-way drop-off fee, but in this case it was very difficult and costly to fly home from Whitehorse.  We looked at every option we could think of – including taking the ferry straight from Bellingham, WA to Ketchikan, AK before starting our stop-offs at the small towns up the Passage.  

Whitehorse, Yukon Territory

Skagway, Alaska

At this point the engineer in me decided we needed to put the scenarios in a spreadsheet to do a proper assessment of the options.  I ended up with 5 different options, listing each day of the itinerary, with columns for all the different costs for the day.  Surprisingly, the total costs for each option did not vary as much as I had thought they would (although it was still going to be a pricey trip – over $6K).

It was time to consider making some trade-offs and setting priorities.  We gave up on going to Dawson but kept Whitehorse and Skagway on the tour, and put a priority on having a couple days in each of the Inside Passage villages that interested us.  We could skip Anchorage since both of us had seen it on more than one occasion.  In the end we decided on a fly, drive, and ferry combination, starting in Fairbanks and coming south.  It made a lot of sense, kept our travel time under four weeks, and was in the mid-price range of all the options.   

We will fly to Fairbanks from Seattle (cheap tickets), then rent a car to tour Denali and the interior, drive eastward through the Matanuska Valley to the St. Elias/Wrangell parks, over to Whitehorse and then drop the car in Skagway, hop on the ferry as foot passengers and come down the Inside Passage at a slower pace. There is a large drop-off fee for the rental car, but less than taking a personal car the entire distance on the ferry.  We decided to stop our tour in Ketchikan and fly back to Seattle in order to save a few days of ferry travel.  We plan to do the BC Canada coastline on another trip.

Denali National Park

Once we got the itinerary roughed out, we started looking at accommodations along the way.   This was another challenge since we were going in peak season for Alaska, and motels are limited in many of the places we wanted to see.  We ended up having to pre-book everything about 6 months in advance, including the ferry and the rental car.  This was contrary to our initial thought that once we were retired, we could take off at a moment’s notice and hit the road.  This trip required very detailed day-to-day planning long in advance of leaving.

We will start the Alaska trip next week, so stay tuned to our blog.  Thanks for traveling along with us!