Bay Crossings visits with Ellen Searby, author of Alaska’s Inside Passage Traveler
It’s possible to take public transportation from San Francisco all the way to the Aleutian Islands at the westernmost tip of Alaska (just 60 miles from Russia). But don’t try using your Fast Pass: the fare (about to go up) is $642 for the ferry plus Amtrak between San Francisco and Bellingham
Published: January, 2001
How did a good Stanford girl find her way to working on – and writing about — the Alaska ferry system?
I was working in the Calaveras County Planning Department putting my Master’s in Geography as well as a Bachelor’s in Biology to good use but I decided I would like to try seasonal work. The first interesting offer was the US Forest Service for the Shipboard Naturalists on the Alaska ferries. I had never even heard of them but I was offered the job and it sounded like fun and I did it for three summers.
By the third summer it was clear that the dishwasher was making quite a lot more than I was and so I went to lifeboat school and got my seaman’s papers and joined the Inland Boatmen’s Union.
ELLEN SEARBY worked on the Alaska ferries as a shipboard naturalist for the U.S. Forest Service during the summers of 1975-77. From 1978 to 1990 she worked as part of the ferry crew. Answering questions for thousands of passengers, she learned what the Inside Passage traveler wanted and needed to know-and wrote it in this book, annually revised. She worked several winters as a research analyst in Alaska’s coastal management office. With a B.A. in biology and an M.A. in geography from Stanford, a long-time interest in mountaineering (I climbed with a lot of good people on their days off.) and a commercial pilot’s license (she flies a 1948 Luscombe), she finds the Inside Passage a challenging place to be. In her spare time she started SEADOGs, the Southeast Alaska search and avalanche dog team.
She did the research, wrote, and published The Costa Rica Traveler (new 4th edition, 1997) and the Vancouver Island Traveler. She has edited and published The Panama Traveler by David Dudenhoefer. She is married to Henry Jori, a retired forestry pilot. In 1990 she retired to full-time travel writing and publishing, and now lives on the family farm among the California redwoods.
So what was it about working on the ferry that made you want to leave behind your career as a city planner?
Well, working on the ferry was fun. It was tough, but it was fun. I really enjoyed doing the nature program for the Forest Service and I realized that the Ferry service needed to provide more information about the system and how to make the most of it. So many riders were just getting on at one end and going through to the other end and missing so many of the things they would have enjoyed if they’d stopped over. So, at the end of the second summer, I told the director of the ferry system that he and the division of tourisim ought to put out a little manual on how to make the most of the system. But the two agencies weren’t really talking to each other much in those days. That’s why I went home and wrote it. The first publisher who attempted to publish it went broke and so I got my manuscript back from the impound warehouse. The second publisher didn’t know how to market it, so I took up marketing it myself and that’s how Windham Bay Press started.
How many people use the Alaska marine highway?
Around 400,000 people a year and 100,000 vehicles ride it. And this can include everything from the little league baseball games, trailer load of dogs and goats and horses going up to the Southeast Fair, frozen halibut and salmon from the cold storage plants up and down Southeast Alaska, whatever needs moving. Even the package mail goes on the ferries and a lot of the fresh groceries. In fact, in Alaska the ferries are considered part of the national highway system.
What percentage of the riders are tourists and what percentage are residents?
In the winter, the majority of them by far are locals, yet I noticed there were quite a few folks who would get on, particularly at Christmas, and ride the ferry for a week up to the end and back again, just enjoying the scenery and the quiet cruise and the un-crowded ship. In the summer, there is a high percentage of tourists. It’s the way that creative tourists can design their own trips. A lot of people bring their RVs, you get whole canoe expeditions or just a couple with a pair of kayaks getting on. You can launch a kayak within fifty yards of every dock in the system. And so people will get on with their kayaks and ride to some port and get off and paddle to the next port or just paddle a tour around the islands in that area and get back on the ferry. To give you an idea of how convoluted the coastline is, there’s one island, Prince of Wales Island, that has over a thousand miles of coastline.
What goes into putting together a good travel guidebook? Walk us through the process.
The first thing is knowing what your reader needs to know and that I got the handle on working for the Forest Service based on the questions people asked and the things that seemed to confuse them. And in some cases, I use the actual words that seem to get through to people who are a little bit tired and on the go. Initially my object was that the book should be very easy to use on the go, and that hasn’t changed a whole lot. You should be able to get off when the ferry dropped you in Petersburg at one in the morning and find what you needed. So I worked with readable size print and tried to write as simply as possible and figure that people don’t want to carry an encyclopedia. I feel very responsible for every pound they’ve got to carry on their trip. By the way, did you know that all Alaska ferries are named for glaciers?
Glaciers have names?
Yes! All the glaciers have names and it’s traditional for Alaska ferries to be named for glaciers with one exception. The Bartlett was named for a politician who was important in the early statehood of Alaska, but all the rest of the ferries are named for glaciers.
How many copies of your Alaska book are in print?
Around 90,000. The first one was published in 1978 and I basically I come out every year with an update.
Has the Internet changed things for you?
Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com are major customers. I answer a lot of questions on AOL.
How did you come up with the name Windham Bay Press?
It’s a pretty little bay with nobody there to sue you for using the name, south of Juneau about 60 miles. Not getting sued was a consideration. There was somebody with a giveaway fish wrapper advertiser in my early days called Inside Passage and this guy came to me and offered to get an injunction to make me burn the whole printing. I might have called it something like Southeast Alaska but nobody down here knows where Southeast Alaska is nor do they care, but now Inside Passage, everybody knows that.
Windham Bay Press also puts out a couple of other books. We do the Costa Rica Traveler because I went to Costa Rica on vacation in 1982. At that point, I didn’t have enough seniority to work on the ferries in the winter. I had been working in coastal management in the winter. So I had time off and that was one of the reasons for working for the ferries, because I could get the time off, as much as I could afford to live without pay. So I went down there on vacation and I had a copy of the Alaska book with me. People looked at that and said, We need something like that for here, because there weren’t any guide books for Costa Rica then, none at all.
How do you keep your books up to date?
I retired with a lifetime pass on the ferries so I go up annually and take pictures in whichever towns I need new pictures the most, usually hit about six or seven of them in a trip, just ride the ferries around. Last time we were up, I made a point of riding on one of the new ferries, the Kennicott, which has quite a different layout from the other ferries and I needed to be able to explain that to the readers. What’s different about the Kennicott is that they got federal funds that covered using it for an emergency base for oil spill cleanups and earthquakes. It’s got stabilizers and such that the other ferries don’t have like a floating dock on the car deck that can be deployed aft to tie up fishing boats that are working on a spill cleanup. It’s got a heliport up on the rear, on the stern, which blocks a lot of the view from the solarium and gives it the aesthetic lines of a fish processor. And because it’s got to take heavy water going out to Kodiak and the Aleutians in the winter, it has a lot less open deck space but it also has some little roomettes that go for very cheap for people who want to ride all the way up from Bellingham to Seward or Valdez, where it goes once a month. But people need to know they’re not getting a full stateroom when they book one of those.
Describe a typical trip on the Alaskan Marine Highway from Bellingham, which is just north of Seattle.
Well, from Bellingham it’s nonstop to Ketchikan. So you’re going to leave Bellingham on a Friday night and get to Ketchikan on a Sunday morning. And depending on your interest, you’d pick the towns you want to get off. Ketchikan has totem parks north and south of town. It’s the jumping off place if you have an RV and you want to do some driving. Ketchikan is on an island but there’s a shuttle ferry several times a day over to Prince of Wales Island where there are miles of gravel roads and you can do a lot of freshwater and saltwater fishing. You could launch a kayak and go sheltered water paddling. There’s a lot you could do over there. Or you could ride the ferry on. The ferry’s going to stop in Ketchikan for a couple of hours and then the next stop is Wrangell, five and a half hours north. Wrangell has the only regulation golf course in southeast Alaska.
What’s it cost to ride the Alaska ferry?
Bellingham to Skagway nonstop was $262 last year without room or meals. The fares this year, incidentally, are going to go up five to ten percent but we don’t know exactly how much yet. There’s a heated enclosed solarium open to the rear on all the ships and showers are free. You can also get a stateroom. If you want stateroom, you want to reserve well ahead of time. I mean they’re going to start taking reservations December 4 for next summer. And you might want a stateroom if you’re starting out of Bellingham, because you’ve got two nights on the ferry, Friday night and Saturday night. If you do a lot of stopping over, a lot of the other legs are so short that you don’t need a stateroom. They’re not big and plushy, they’re two-bunk rooms, there’s an upper and lower with a ladder. Otherwise you make do in your seat. If you bring a vehicle, it gets a lot spendier in a hurry, especially if you bring a long vehicle. It’s best to bring the smallest vehicle you can.
One of the suggestions I make in the book is that if you only have a week or two you’d do well to airline to Ketchikan or Juneau and then ride the ferries around and stop where you please and fly back from Ketchikan or Juneau. The ride from Bellingham is pretty and there are a lot of waterfalls but there aren’t any glaciers.
Take Public Transportation from
San Francisco to the End of North America
It’s possible to take public transportation from San Francisco all the way to the Aleutian Islands at the westernmost tip of Alaska (just 60 miles from Russia). But don’t try using your Fast Pass: the fare (about to go up) is $642 for the ferry plus Amtrak between San Francisco and Bellingham
Train:
San Francisco to Bellingham via Amtrak (approximately 48 hours)
Ferry:
Bellingham to Juneau (approximately 36 hours)
Juneau to Seward (the Southeast/Southwest) (approximately 26 hours)
Seward to Kodiak (the Inter-Tie) (approximately 24 hours)
Kodiak to Unalaska (the Aleutian Chain Trip) (approximately 36 hours)
Note: The Aleutian Chain Trip runs just once a month. Expect a multi-day layover at Kodiak waiting for your ship to come in. The boat doesn’t linger long once it reaches Unalaska (the intriguing name of the Dutch Harbor town the ferry stops at). This is one ferry you don’t want to miss: the next one won’t come for a solid month
Alaska Marine Highway Ferry Schedule Changes For Summer 2001
(excerpted from Alaska’s Inside Passage Traveler, by Ellen Searby)
Reservations are acted upon starting December 1, 2000.
Fares will increase slightly after holding for several years. The changes have not yet been finally approved as we write this, Nov. 1.
Bellingham, WA: The Columbia will sail north on Fridays, and (a change!) the Matanuska will sail north on Tuesdays. Both will go all the way to Skagway, with the Columbia stopping in Sitka southbound and the Matanuska stopping northbound. The Columbia is being refurbished and will have more 2-berth staterooms than before. With 2 ships sailing out of Bellingham, staterooms and vehicle space should be much easier to reserve than in other summers.
Prince Rupert: will have service 5 days a week in summer, though the Tuesday sailing of the LeConte will go only as far north as Ketchikan. The Taku will sail north on Sunday and Wednesday. The Sunday sailing will stop in Sitka, northbound on Monday and will turn around at Juneau, stopping again at Sitka southbound. The Wednesday sailing will go all the way to Haines and Skagway. The Kennicott will sail from Prince Rupert north on Monday and Friday, stopping in Sitka northbound on the Monday sailing, with monthly trips to Valdez and Seward.
Juneau: The Malaspina will sail daily from Juneau to Haines and Skagway and back, May 24-September 9. Note that this run is a popular day or several-day trip from Juneau. The car deck is often full between Haines and Skagway.
Smaller ferries: The Aurora and LeConte will exchange positions from previous years, with the Aurora sailing out of Juneau and the LeConte sailing out of Ketchikan.
Stewart-Hyder will not have ferry service in summer, perhaps permanently.
Stopovers: we still maintain that the best way to see the Inside Passage from the ferries is to stop over for 1 or more days in your choice of ports so you can explore these towns and the areas around them in daylight: Your ticket will be divided into segments as you choose. Later changes are much easier to make if you are walking on without vehicle or staterooms. If you travel with a vehicle, you really must plan your segments ahead of time so your vehicle is parked on the car deck according to the port where you will get off next.
For current info and to make reservations, call 800-642-0066. The website has schedule changes, any promotional fares, and lots of other info, http://www.state.ak.us/ferry Note that this web address is simplified from earlier ones.
We hope you have lots of sun on your trip!
To order Alaska’s Inside Passage Traveler:
Windham Bay Press
Box 1198
Occidental, CA 95465
707-823-7150
Reservations are acted upon starting December 1, 2000. Fares will increase slightly after holding for several years. The changes have not yet been finally approved as we write this, Nov. 1.
