{"id":31784,"date":"2016-09-10T02:57:03","date_gmt":"2016-09-10T09:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/giant-cruise-ship-makes-historic-trip-in-melting-arctic\/"},"modified":"2016-09-10T02:57:03","modified_gmt":"2016-09-10T09:57:03","slug":"giant-cruise-ship-makes-historic-trip-in-melting-arctic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/giant-cruise-ship-makes-historic-trip-in-melting-arctic\/","title":{"rendered":"Giant cruise ship makes historic trip in melting Arctic"},"content":{"rendered":"

NOME<\/strong> \u2014 The giant luxury cruise liner was anchored just off Nome, too hulking to use the Bering Sea community\u2019s docks on its inaugural visit.<\/p>\n

Instead, its more than 900 passengers piled into small transport boats and motored to shore, where they snapped photos of wild musk oxen, lifted glasses in the town\u2019s colorful bars and nibbled blueberry pie while admiring Alaska Native dancers at Nome\u2019s summer celebration.<\/p>\n

The Crystal Serenity\u2019s visit to Alaska\u2019s western coast is historic. At nearly three football fields long and 13 stories tall, the cruise ship is the largest ever to traverse the Northwest Passage, where its well-heeled guests glimpsed polar bears, kayaked along Canada\u2019s north shore, landed on pristine beaches and hiked where few have stepped.<\/p>\n

Some remote villages along the way are seeing dollar signs, while environmentalists are seeing doom. They say the voyage represents global warming and man\u2019s destruction of the Earth.<\/p>\n

The terrible irony with the Crystal Serenity\u2019s voyage is that it\u2019s taking place only because of climate change and the melting Arctic, said Michael Byers, a professor in the political science department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The Northwest Passage, which connects the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, has long been choked off by ice. But melting brought on by climate change is allowing passengers to cruise up the Bering Strait and then head east toward Greenland over the Arctic Ocean before docking next week in New York City.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd yet, by actually taking advantage of climate change, it\u2019s contributing to the problem because the ship has a very large carbon footprint of its own,\u201d Byers said.<\/p>\n

The cruise ship left Seward, on the Kenai Peninsula, Aug. 16 with about 900 guests and 600 crewmembers on board. During its monthlong journey to New York, it will visit towns and villages in western and northern Alaska, Canada, Greenland and the eastern seaboard.<\/p>\n

Smaller cruise ships, those that hold about 200 people, routinely make a port call in Nome and continue through the passage, but this ship is different.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the game changer,\u201d Nome Mayor Richard Beneville said. \u201cThis is the one that\u2019s on everyone\u2019s lips.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nome spared nothing to make sure tourists off the high-end cruise liner \u2014 tickets cost more than $20,000 per person, with a penthouse starting at about six times that \u2014 felt at home.<\/p>\n

The guests came to town in waves so they didn\u2019t overwhelm the available services in Nome, population about 3,800.<\/p>\n

They arrived at the small harbor dock and loaded into vans or school buses for their adventures, which included getting a gander at a herd of wild musk oxen that had taken up residence just outside town.<\/p>\n

Other activities arranged for the cruise ship passengers were hiking and birding tours and helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft flights. Organizers even rescheduled the annual Blueberry Festival so visitors could enjoy a $5 piece of pie while watching traditional Eskimo dancers or browsing tables of seal skin gloves and wallets made by Alaska Native artists. The event took place a block from where the world\u2019s most famous sled-dog race, the Iditarod, ends every March.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing at this festival here, the indigenous families that are here, I mean they are so proud of what they have, their handcrafts, their dancing, their music. They just love it, even with the hardships they have to endure, the prices they have to endure,\u201d said Floridian Bob Lentz, who was traveling with his wife, Linda.<\/p>\n

Charlie and Joan Davis of San Francisco signed up for the cruise within the first hour it was offered three years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been around the world many times, and this is someplace we\u2019ve never been to, that\u2019s somewhat unknown,\u201d Charlie Davis said. \u201cYou know, just an adventure.\u201d<\/p>\n

They weren\u2019t alone in wanting to be part of the historic cruise.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the longest single cruise we have ever made, and it is the most expensive cruise we\u2019ve ever made because it\u2019s many days, and it\u2019s very expensive to operate up here,\u201d said the ship\u2019s captain, Birger Vorland. \u201cAnd it\u2019s the one that sold out the fastest; 48 hours, it was basically gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

This cruise was three years in the making, and just about everything is unique to the trip, said John Stoll, a Crystal vice president who organized it.<\/p>\n

The Serenity was fitted with special equipment to operate in the Arctic, including an ice navigation satellite system. Its operators even chartered cargo flights to northern communities to gather fresh perishables for the vessel\u2019s five-star restaurants.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe planning and the logistics that has gone into this ship has been nothing short of amazing,\u201d Stoll said.<\/p>\n

The cruise company is planning another Alaska-to-New York City voyage next August, catering to travelers like the Lentzes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going off on a wildlife adventure right now, and that, to me, is what it\u2019s all about in our twilight years \u2014 kind of experiencing things before crazy humans destroy it,\u201d Bob Lentz said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NOME \u2014 The giant luxury cruise liner was anchored just off Nome, too hulking to use the Bering Sea community\u2019s docks on its inaugural visit. Instead, its more than 900 passengers piled into small transport boats and motored to shore, where they snapped photos of wild musk oxen, lifted glasses in the town\u2019s colorful bars […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-31784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31784\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31784"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=31784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}