13 nights, Vancouver to Vancouver

The itinerary, port by port

12 calls over 13 nights, round-trip from Vancouver. Open any port for my full day-ashore guide, what to see, when to go, and how the day actually runs.

Getting there: Flights to Vancouver (YVR) open around August 2027, about 11 months before you sail. I track that window for booked clients and flag it the moment it is worth booking. When to book your flights →

1. Embark
   Vancouver

   Vancouver is the embarkation city for most Alaska sailings, a coastal Canadian metropolis pinned between the harbor and the Coast Mountains, with a forested 1,000-acre park at its tip. Port guide →

2. 2
   Ward Cove (Ketchikan)

   Ward Cove is a cruise berth built on a former pulp mill site about 20 minutes north of downtown Ketchikan, used to spread ships out beyond the crowded downtown docks. Port guide →

3. 3
   Icy Strait Point (Hoonah)

   Icy Strait Point is a converted 1912 salmon cannery on Chichagof Island, the only Alaska Native-owned cruise port in the state, built and run by the Huna Tlingit of neighboring Hoonah. Port guide →

4. 4
   Sailing the Hubbard Glacier

   Hubbard is the largest tidewater glacier in North America, a 76-mile river of ice that meets the sea at the head of Disenchantment Bay near Yakutat.

5. 5
   Valdez

   Valdez is a small fishing and oil-terminal town ringed by the Chugach Mountains at the head of a deep fjord in Prince William Sound. Port guide →

6. 6
   Kodiak Island

   Kodiak is Alaska's largest island and one of the country's biggest commercial fishing ports, with a layered past as the first Russian capital of Alaska and home to the Alutiiq people for thousands of years. Port guide →

7. 7
   Seward

   Seward sits at the head of Resurrection Bay on the Kenai Peninsula and is the gateway port to Kenai Fjords National Park, where tidewater glaciers calve into the sea and humpbacks, orcas, sea otters and… Port guide →

8. 8
   Sitka (Baranof Island)

   Sitka sits on the outer coast of Baranof Island, the only Southeast Alaska town that faces the open Pacific rather than the Inside Passage, and it was the capital of Russian America before the 1867 Alaska… Port guide →

9. 9
   Skagway

   Skagway is a four-block gold-rush boomtown at the head of the Lynn Canal, frozen at its 1898 peak as the gateway to the Klondike. Port guide →

10. 10
    Sailing the Endicott Arm (Dawes Glacier)

    Endicott Arm is a fjord more than 30 miles long that branches south off Holkham Bay, about 45 miles south of Juneau within the Tongass National Forest.

11. 11
    Sailing the Tracy Arm Fjord

    Tracy Arm is a classic glacier-carved fjord about 30 miles long, roughly 45 to 60 miles south of Juneau, that narrows to barely 300 yards between granite walls rising as much as 4,000 feet from milky…

12. Disembark
    Wrangell

    Wrangell is a working Southeast Alaska town of about 2,500 people, with no chain jewelry rows or built-for-tourists waterfront. Port guide →