Alaska Through Five Senses: What Nobody Tells You Before You Go

Elizabeth and Wendy on what Alaska actually feels like - not just what it looks like.

Every photo you've seen of Alaska is true.

The glaciers are that blue. The mountains are that tall. The wildlife is that close. Alaska photographs beautifully, and the photographs don't lie.

But photographs only tell you what Alaska looks like. They don't tell you what it feels like to stand inside it.

After eleven nights sailing the Inside Passage - through Ketchikan, Klawock, Sitka, Juneau, Icy Strait Point, Hubbard Glacier, and Valdez - here's what we'd tell you. Not the itinerary. Not the logistics. The experience. Through all five senses.

Sight

Wendy:

Standing on our veranda in the early morning. The moody clouds hanging so low in the sky it felt like you could touch them. The fog swirling around the tops of the green mountains - moving so quickly that it changed the entire view every few seconds, like watching a painting repaint itself in real time.

Nobody told me it would be like that. I expected the big dramatic moments - the glacier, the wildlife, the scenery from the deck. What surprised me was the quiet visual drama of an ordinary Alaska morning. The way the light moved. The way the clouds behaved like something alive.

Elizabeth:

Watching the seemingly endless green mountains fly by from the shuttle window in Denali. Hour after hour. The scale of it never resolved into something manageable. Every time I thought I understood how big it was, there was more.

Alaska is a place that defeats your ability to contain it. And once you stop trying, something shifts. You stop measuring and start just looking.

Sound

Elizabeth:

Standing in the middle of the forest in Sitka National Historical Park, looking at an ancient carved totem pole.

The silence was absolute. Not the silence of a quiet room or an early morning - something older and more complete than that. The deafening silence of a place that has been here for thousands of years and doesn't require anything from you.

I didn't want to move. I didn't want to speak. I just stood there and let it be what it was.

Wendy:

Walking the path to Hoonah along the water at Icy Strait Point. The mountains were so tall, the water so wide, and there was no one else around - not another person in sight, and hadn't been for quite some time. It was like we had the wild landscape all to ourselves.

Elizabeth said something about the stillness being so pronounced that you can't help but be swallowed up by it.

She was exactly right. There's a particular quality to Alaskan silence - not the absence of sound, but the presence of something bigger than sound. Like the landscape itself is breathing, and you're just catching its rhythm.

Smell

Wendy:

Standing on that veranda in the early morning - the same one where the clouds were swirling - breathing in air that is so fresh and clean in a way that it simply is not in the lower 48 states. It’s cool, it’s crisp, and smells “green” and alive - earthy, cool, and pine-y.

I don't know how to describe it more precisely than that. It smelled like the world before it got complicated. Like something that hadn't been breathed in yet.

Elizabeth:

The crisp, clean, salty sea air while we sat on the rocks in Seward. The ocean right there. The mountains behind us. The particular smell of a place where the land meets the water at the edge of everything.

Some smells are just air. Some smells are a place. Seward smelled like a place.

Taste

Wendy:

Pel'meni in Sitka. If you've read any of our Alaska content, you've seen us mention it. Now let me actually tell you what it was like.

I had read about Pel'meni before we went. I knew it was a Siberian dumpling, a Sitka institution, a tiny counter with long lines and devoted locals. What I didn't know was how a simple dumpling could make me fall in love.

I ordered the potato flavor with all the fixings - topped with melted butter, sour cream, curry powder, fresh cilantro, and sriracha hot sauce. They were soft and pillowy and melted in your mouth. Hot out of the fryer, the richness of the butter hit first. Then the curry powder and cilantro and sriracha built into something with real depth - and then the sour cream arrived with a cold tangy contrast that cut through everything and made you want another bite immediately.

They were little bites of heaven. Eaten in a tiny storefront in Sitka and then again, standing up on a sidewalk in Anchorage. That's the whole experience, and it was perfect.

Elizabeth:

The spicy hot sauce on my handheld Pel'meni while I walked down the street to make my tour. Hurrying a little, because we were running slightly behind, eating something extraordinary, in one of the most beautiful places I'd ever been.

There's something specific about eating food you love while moving through a place that moves you. It compounds. Everything tastes better when you're fully alive.

And then there's the hot chocolate at Hubbard Glacier.

Standing on the deck of the Pursuit as we approached Hubbard Glacier, something warm appeared in our hands. Hot drinks provided by the ship as we sailed toward one of the most spectacular sights in the world.

The contrast of holding something warm while the cold air came off the glacier. The sweetness of the drink against the wildness of the view. It was such a small thing. It was exactly right.

Touch

Elizabeth:

Standing on the deck near Hubbard Glacier, the contrast of the hot chocolate in my hands and the cold air across my face.

Cold in a way that Alaska gets cold - not unpleasant, but insistent. The kind of cold that makes you feel like you're somewhere real. Like the world has edges.

Wendy:

In Valdez, watching the sea lions playing in the weir. Moving so slowly, closer and closer to each other - and to us. The amazement at their sheer size. The way I vacillated between pure delight and small twinges of concern.

If they come for us, can we outrun them?

Probably not. But standing that close to something that wild and that large - close enough to feel the shift in the air as they moved - is a kind of touch that doesn't require contact. It's the touch of being genuinely in the presence of something that doesn't need you there, but allows it anyway.

What We Didn't Expect

We expected to be moved by Alaska. We are travel advisors. We had done the research. We knew the statistics - the scale, the wildlife, the glaciers. The way people return to it year after year after year.

What we didn't expect was how physical the experience would be. How much of Alaska you feel in your body rather than just register with your eyes.

The cold air on your face at Hubbard Glacier. The silence that swallows you in a Sitka forest. The taste of something perfect eaten standing on a sidewalk. The presence of something enormous moving slowly toward you in the water.

Alaska gets into you. Through all five senses, simultaneously, constantly.

You can see it in photographs. But you have to go to actually know what it feels like.

Ready to feel Alaska for yourself? View The Alaska Shortlist → for our curated sailings - or reach out directly and let's find the right one for you. We've been there. We know what's waiting.