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A Trip On the Inside Passage 
By John Rybickt 
the Chain of Islands off the shore of Western Canada and the panhandle 
of Alaska, from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Skagway, Alaska, forms a 
channel along the coast. Ships traveling through the channel are protected 
from the rough waters of the Pacific by the islands. Because ships are 
almost always within a short distance of land on both sides, the route of 
ships along the coast is called the Inside Passage. 
It first became famous as the route of the gold rush of 1898. Gold 
prospectors boarded ships in Seattle or Vancouver and traveled to either 
Haines or Skagway, Alaska. Form there, they crossed over the mountains 
through either Chilkoot Pass from Haines, or White Pass from Skagway, 
to the Yukon River. They could get a river boat to take them deep into 
the Yukon Territory. 
In May of 1963 I took a trip up the Inside Passage. There is an abundant 
supply of wildlife along the largely uninhabited route. I boarded the “Yukon 
Star,” one of about five passenger ships that go up the coast, in Vancouver 
during late evening. When I arrived on deck the next morning, I began 
watching for birds. A short time later, a bald eagle appeared and circled 
the ship at close range several times before leaving. Although I saw bald 
eagles a number of times during the trip, this was the first one I had ever 
seen, and because it came quite close to the ship, the bird was particularly 
memorable. 
The ship was followed the first two days by a noisy flock of Glacuous- 
winged Gulls. These large gray and white gulls flew over the wake of the 
ship, sometimes coming almost within arm’s reach of the stern, If the 
smallest piece of trash were thrown into the water, several gulls would 
put on a demonstration of their gliding ability. They would bank into the 
direction of the ship, turn away, and dive toward the food floating in the 
wake. 
From time to time during the entire trip, I would notice in the distance 
what at first seemed to be a cloud of rapidly vibrating black specks. 
Through binoculars, these could be identified as flocks of White-winged, 
Surf, or Common Scoters. They fly in silent, fast moving, poorly formed 
formations only a few feet above the surface of the water. 
Only twice during the trip did I see marine life. First, on about the 
second day I saw a whale surface and then dive, about 500 yards from the 
ship. On the trip back, a school of porpoises swam under the boat. 
The “Yukon Star’ is one of two boats that regularly make the trip 
up the Tracy Arm. An arm is a natural canal or waterway formed by 
the water that breaks off a glacier as ice and then melts. The Tracy Arm 
extends about ten miles into the mainland. The sides of the arm are cliffs 
on both sides, as much as several hundred feet high. These cliffs drop 
straight into the water. There is no beach. 
As the boats goes up the arm, one sees increasingly greater numbers 
of ice-floes that have recently broken off the glacier. Eventually the boat 
must go very slowly, sometimes striking an ice-floe head-on, breaking it in 
two with a crunching sound that can be heard throughout the ship. Some 
of the ice-floes were very large, perhaps 100: feet long. The ship didn’t hit 
any of these. The ice that has recently broken off the glacier shows a beauti- 
ful deep blue color. 
