Your Travel Guide to Alaska

Everyone comes back from Alaska talking with their hands. The whale that surfaced off the bow, the glacier that cracked like a rifle shot, the eagle on a piling close enough to count its feathers. If you have sat through a friend's slideshow and quietly opened a flights tab under the table, this guide is for you. Here is how to see the best of it, starting with the water most of it happens on.

The Inside Passage

The Inside Passage is a coastal route running more than 1,000 miles from Seattle up to Skagway, threaded through a maze of over 1,000 islands. On any given day you might share it with cruise ships, fishing trawlers, tankers, towboats, and the state ferries that stitch the roadless towns together. Count in every island, and the passage is bordered by roughly 15,000 miles of shoreline.

Boats favor this inland route because it shelters them from the open Pacific, but the calm water asks for respect. Tides here are dramatic. The level can swing as much as thirty feet between high and low, enough to strand a skiff or float it free depending on the hour. Those coves, fjords, and channels were cut by glaciers during the last ice age, which is exactly the kind of terrain a wood chart was made to show. Each layer of birch is a real depth contour, so the seabed you cruised over gets rebuilt in relief on your wall.

When to go

Summer is the answer for most travelers. June, July, and August bring the best mix of mild weather, long daylight, and active wildlife, which is why the cruise calendar and the fishing derbies cluster there. Shoulder seasons have their own quiet rewards, and locals will tell you every month has something worth seeing, but if this is your first trip, aim for high summer and give yourself room to linger.

The wildlife earns the stories

Half of any returning traveler's slideshow is animals, and the Inside Passage delivers. Scan the shoreline and the water and you have a real shot at the region's headliners.

• Brown and black bears
• Gray wolves
• Humpback and orca whales
• Bald eagles
• Sea lions

The one animal everybody wants and few see from the water is the moose. Alaskan moose keep to the inland bogs and wetlands, not the coast, so a moose sighting usually means a trip into the state parks at dawn or dusk, when they drift out to feed. Build a day inland and your odds go up.

Fishing in Alaska

The hardest fishing question in Alaska is not where to go, it is whether you feel like freshwater or salt that morning. Bays, inlets, lakes, and rivers all run thick with fish, and the scenery around them is half the reason to wet a line. The state's signature catch is salmon, in every variety the run will give you.

• Salmon (Chinook, Coho, Pink)
• Trout (Brook, Cutthroat, Dolly Varden)
• Halibut
• Lingcod
• Rockfish

Salmon is the one you will hear the most about, and towns run derbies through the season for the biggest fish landed. King salmon, the Chinook, runs all year, but the true giants tend to come in May and June. Halibut, meanwhile, is the workout: hauling a barn-door flatfish up from the bottom is its own kind of Alaskan story.

Where to point the boat

The passage is lined with islands and towns, each with its own character. A few stand out for a first itinerary.

Chichagof Island

At just over 2,000 square miles, Chichagof is the fifth-largest island in the United States, and it holds a stranger distinction: the densest brown bear population per square mile of anywhere on earth. It is natural beauty and wildlife in unusual concentration.

Juneau

Alaska's capital is the largest state capital by area in the country, and one of the very few you cannot drive to. Every visitor and resident arrives by plane or ferry. Sitting against one of the largest wilderness areas in the United States, Juneau is a launch point for fishing, glacier trips, and wildlife viewing.

Mitkof Island

Just over 200 square miles, Mitkof is a landscape of low mountains and muskeg wetland, most of it inside the Tongass National Forest. Its high point, Crystal Mountain, tops out at 3,317 feet.

Prince of Wales Island

Slightly larger than Delaware at 2,577 square miles, Prince of Wales still packs in more than 1,000 miles of shoreline. It is also home to wildlife found nowhere else, including the Prince of Wales flying squirrel, alongside deer, bears, and gray wolves.

Glacier Bay National Park

Glacier Bay spreads across more than three million acres, its water dotted with calved ice broken from glaciers that can be anywhere from seventy-five to two hundred years old. It is the kind of place that quiets a boat full of people, and it is the reason so many trips run this far north.

Bring the water home

Between the wildlife, the glaciers, the parks, and the fishing, an Alaskan trip fills a lot of memory. A wood chart is a good way to keep it. Whether you hang it before you go to fuel the anticipation or after you return to hold the route in place, a 3D chart of the Inside Passage puts every cove and fjord back on your wall at its true depth. If you want the whole coast in one piece, the large Alaska chart takes in the full sweep of it.

Every guest who walks in will ask about it, and you will get to run your own slideshow, hands and all. Explore the rest of the West Coast charts and find the water you know best.