Jewels of Alaska

You'll arrive in Anchorage, where the Chugach Mountains rise beyond the rooftops, their highest folds sometimes holding traces of snow, while Cook Inlet stretches west in broad channels divided by silver-grey tidal flats. White-barked birch and dark spruce soften the city streets. Overhead, you might catch the distant drone of a floatplane rises and fades into a northern sky that seems to have no end. Later, share dinner and wine with your fellow travellers at a local restaurant.

In downtown Anchorage, painted whales and birds stretch across brick walls as you move through its low-rise streets. At the Alaska Native Heritage Center, you'll follow the path around Lake Tiulana, moving between six life-sized Native dwellings among the trees. During your MAKE TRAVEL MATTER® Experience, you'll taste agutak, also known as Inuit ice cream, feeling its cool, whipped texture on your tongue as you learn how Alaska’s Indigenous people prepare this traditional food. Talkeetna lies at the confluence of three glacier-fed rivers, with two historic blocks of independent shops, galleries and restaurants. At the end of Main Street, you may hear the Susitna River running beyond the trees and, on a clear evening, see the peak of Denali pale against the distance.

Your choice experience offers two distinct ways to explore Alaska’s waterways. Choose the jet boat and feel it surge beneath you as it threads through the Chulitna’s braided channels, the water winding around shifting islands of gravel and silt before the banks narrow towards the gorge. As part of the same experience, a short nature walk leads to an authentic trapper’s cabin, where you examine rough timber walls and rustic furnishings while your guide explains how trappers lived in the Bush at the turn of the 20th century. Alternatively, choose a scenic float along the Talkeetna River. The raft drifts with the current, each measured stroke of the oars cutting through the water as you scan the banks for eagle nests, beaver dams and animal tracks. Later, explore Talkeetna independently or choose one of two Optional Experiences. Take a flightseeing tour over the Alaska Range, looking down across ridgelines, snowfields and glaciers. Alternatively, join a naturalist for a three-mile hike, listening for songbirds among old-growth trees and pausing over wildflowers, berries and mushrooms identified beside the trail.

From your glass-domed railcar, you gaze out at swift streams breaking white over stone as the Alaska Railroad curves north towards Denali National Park and Preserve. The glass dome arches above you as the train crosses Hurricane Gulch, the ravine falling sharply beneath the bridge and mountain country stretching far beyond it. At the lodge, a local climber speaks of Denali not as a distant summit but as a 17- to 18-day test of breath, muscle and concentration. You hear how climbers build snow walls around camp, work through thin air and stay alert as conditions change around them. For your Dine-Around evening, choose dinner at a local brewery or the lodge’s rustic restaurant.

Across Denali’s open tundra, you follow the park road between braided riverbeds, low willow and broad slopes brushed with muted green, gold and russet. A moose may lift its head above the scrub and Dall sheep can appear as pale specks high against the rock. You scan the willow thickets, open slopes and ridgelines, watching for a grizzly moving across the hillside or caribou threading over the tundra. Near the East Fork River, the Murie Cabin stands alone beside wide gravel bars and pale channels of water. Its rough timber walls mark the place where naturalist Adolph Murie lived. The afternoon is yours. Join an Optional Experience fly fishing in clear moving water, listening to the line whisper through the air before it settles on the surface. Alternatively, take an Optional Experience helicopter flightseeing tour, rising above river valleys, ridgelines and folds of distant ice. Back at the lodge, watch the final daylight fade across the surrounding slopes as evening deepens.

Southbound through the Matanuska–Susitna Valley, you'll pass broad farmland spread across fine glacial silt. At Moonstone Farm, you'll meet David Church, whose family arrived with the 1935 Matanuska Colony Project. He shares how three generations have used Alaska’s long summer days and mineral-rich soil to grow vegetables celebrated for their remarkable size and sweetness, while helping supply food to communities far beyond the farm. The Seward Highway traces Turnagain Arm, with steep mountains on one side and vast tidal flats on the other. At low tide, narrow ribbons of water wind through gleaming silt. When conditions align, a bore tide can race along the Arm in a single advancing line, its deep rumble travelling across the inlet before the water reaches you. As you arrive in Girdwood, you'll move beneath rain-dark trunks, past moss-covered fallen timber and ferns spread across the forest floor around Alyeska, Alaska’s only year-round resort. This evening, join your Travel Director for dinner with wine.

A relaxed morning at Alyeska leaves you time to enjoy the resort before travelling to Whittier. Here, you'll board the 26 Glacier Cruise for a 100-mile (160-kilometre) journey through Prince William Sound, moving between forested headlands and narrow fjords. In College Fjord, towering glaciers rise from the water in blue-white walls, with deep crevasses cutting through the ice. From the open deck, you feel the temperature fall as the catamaran approaches the glacier fronts. You may hear a sudden crack echo across the fjord before ice breaks from a glacier and crashes into the water. Inside the wheelhouse, you stand beside the Captain and watch the channels ahead through broad windows as he explains how he reads the water, weather and ice. Over lunch, you look out across blue ice, floating fragments and sheer rock. Following the cruise, travel back to Anchorage, where your journey comes to an end.