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Alaska Cruise & Denali National Park
Alaska Cruise & Denali National Park – a fabulous Alaska experience. Spend 7 nights cruising from Vancouver to Seward before spending 2 nights in the awesome Denali National Park.
Alaska Cruise & Denali National Park
1 night Vancouver
7 night Alaska Cruise
2 nights Denali National Park
2 nights Anchorage
from £3375p
Alaska Cruise & Denali National Park
Alaska Cruise
With eight ships in Alaska, Holland America Line offers convenient Alaska cruise options from multiple embarkation ports, including Seattle, Vancouver, Seward and San Francisco, many with weekend departures. It’s never been easier to see Alaska.
More Options for Viewing Glaciers
Holland America Line offer more visits to Glacier Bay National Park than any other cruise line. Every Alaska cruise includes one or more glaciers: Hubbard Glacier, the twin Sawyer Glaciers of Tracy Arm, College Fjord glaciers or Glacier Bay National Park.
Up-Close Encounters
Holland America Line ships’ wraparound decks offer a front-row seat to Alaska’s splendour. Explore Glacier Bay with a National Park Service ranger and a Huna Totem member. Enhance your Alaska experience in port with EXC Tours™, our award-winning shore excursions.
Denali National Park
Denali is the iconic centrepiece of Alaska’s Interior and the #1 reason to combine a Holland America cruise to Alaska with an overland adventure. Only Holland America Line offers up to three nights in Denali to really settle in and explore, and is the only cruise line to include the deeper Tundra Wilderness Tour into Denali National Park on all of our two- and three-night Denali Land+Sea Journey itineraries. Immersing visitors in all that Denali has to offer is so important that we’ve created each of our Land+Sea Journeys to include up to three nights at Denali, at our beautiful 60-acre riverside McKinley Chalet Resort.
Our new Denali Square at the McKinley Chalet Resort is the ultimate base camp for adventures to Denali, followed by relaxing evenings. Enjoy soaring views across the Nenana River into Denali National Park from virtually anywhere on this amazing property, as well as great dining, quality entertainment, and unique local shopping opportunities.
Our exclusive longer stays, which include the Tundra Wilderness Tour, give our guests an up-close view of the mountain and the best wildlife viewing. It is rare not to see some combination of Alaska’s Big Five: grizzly bears, caribou, moose, Dall Sheep and wolves, along with other animals on this expertly guided six- to eight-hour tour. In addition, there are myriad once-in-a-lifetime adventures to choose from—such as river rafting, flightseeing (including the chance to land with a ski plane on Denali itself), or visiting the home of an Iditarod dog musher.
With more than six million acres of pristine Alaska wilderness, Denali National Park with its abundant and easily viewable wildlife and North America’s tallest and most impressive peak will be sure to make your Land+Sea Journey experience one you’ve dreamed of.
Price Includes
- Return flights from the UK
- All transfers*
- 1 night in Vancouver
- 7 night Alaska Cruise
- 2 nights at Denali National Park
- 2 nights in Anchorage
Price Excludes
*Transfer from Vancouver hotel to ship is NOT included.
Price based on 2 share, various dates available May – September
Flights also available from most UK airports, please ask for details
Itinerary
Private car transfer included.
Once a trading post and a rough-and-tumble sawmilling settlement, today modern Vancouver, Canada is many things. It’s a bustling seaport, a hub for outdoor enthusiasts looking for active things to do in Vancouver, an ethnically diverse metropolis and Hollywood of the North. Hemmed in by mountains and sea, Vancouver seduces visitors with its combination of urban sophistication and laid-back attitude against a backdrop of glass towers and modern sights and plentiful green spaces.
Vancouver's culinary and cocktail scene is on the rise—and its excellent restaurants and hopping bars have a distinctively local stamp on them. If you are looking for where to go in Vancouver for music, theater and the arts, they are thriving in the city’s many museums, galleries and performance venues. Beyond the downtown attractions in Vancouver, days of exploration and sightseeing await among the colorful suburbs, unspoiled islands and the vast, rugged wilderness.
Sailing the Inside Passage offers opportunities to spot some of Alaska’s most iconic wildlife, with humpback whales and orca plying the bountiful waters alongside the ships, bald eagles soaring overhead and brown bears lumbering on the shoreline.
Numerous ports along the way recount Alaska’s colorful history. In Sitka, an onion-domed church marks Russia’s onetime foothold in the Americas; Ketchikan provides a glimpse of the Native Alaskan experience, with historic totem poles and native-arts galleries; and the legendary town center of Skagway bustles as it did at the turn of the 19th century, when it served as the rowdy Wild West gateway to the Klondike Gold Rush.
Ketchikan has long been an important hub of the salmon-fishing and -packing industries—visitors can try their luck on a sportfishing excursion or simply savor the fresh seafood at one of the local restaurants. It is also one of the best spots along the Inside Passage to explore the rich cultural sights of Native Alaskan nations like the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian. You can see intricately carved totem poles at the Totem Heritage Center and Totem Bight State Park, while the attractions of Saxman Village just outside of Ketchikan offers the chance to see Tlingit culture in action, with working carvers and a dance show in the clan house. And leave time to explore the sights in the town itself, including historic Creek Street, a boardwalk built over the Ketchikan Creek, where you can shop for souvenirs, smoked salmon and local art, while exploring gold rush–era tourist attractions like Dolly’s House Museum.
The city itself is pleasant, but the real highlight of a visit to Juneau is tracking down some wildlife. You can hike up Mount Roberts to chance upon wild deer and bald eagles. Most sightseeing and whale-watching tours head north to Auke Bay—bring a good pair of binoculars to get the best view of these majestic and surprisingly graceful creatures. If you prefer land mammals, catch a floatplane to a nearby wildlife reserve such as Chichagof or Admiralty Island to spy some bears lolling around.
The sleepy, misty city of around 32,000—mostly fishermen and small-business owners—has a frontier town vibe, but welcomes more than a million visitors each summer to its natural attractions, cementing Juneau as Alaska’s number-one tourist destination
At every turn, you’ll find yourself immersed in gold rush lore, from the infamous Red Onion Saloon that still keeps a pistol that Wyatt Earp left behind en route to the Klondike, to the White Pass & Yukon Route Railroad, a classic narrow-gauge railway that traverses rugged mountains and passes cascading waterfalls and towering glaciers as it connects Skagway to Whitehorse deep in the Yukon. Much of the town has been preserved as part of the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, where rangers offer free walking tours around the historic district. Here you’ll also find a vibrant local community, home to a rich collection of local galleries, curio shops and restaurants serving seafood plucked fresh from nearby waters.
The area’s first European explorer missed it all—but with good reason. When Captain George Vancouver sailed here in 1794, a vast shield of ice, more than 1,200 meters (3,937 feet) thick, dominated the area. In one of the fastest retreats on record, the glaciers shrank back 105 kilometers (65 miles) by 1916. The formerly glacier-squashed land is rebounding now, rising 30 millimeters (1.18 inches) each year. Visitors can observe this rebirth: A spruce-hemlock rain forest has sprouted near the mouth of Glacier Bay. Farther north, the more recently exposed land shows sharper edges and thinner vegetation. Still, it’s enough to encourage the return of wildlife, from bald eagles to bears, moose and humpback whales.
While the national park is open year-round, most travellers prefer the warmth of late May to early September. Even in summer, be prepared for any weather—especially rain! Pack a hat, gloves, wool or fleece layers, a warm coat and waterproof gear if you want to admire the landscape from the open deck of your ship.
Disembark and enjoy deluxe motorcoach sightseeing to Denali National Park for a two night stay at this majestic national treasure (lunch included)
One of Southcentral Alaska’s oldest communities, Seward is ground zero for the Klondike Gold Rush's Iditarod National Historic Trail, a dogsled route that connected the Kenai Peninsula’s ice-free port with Nome during frontier-era winters. Though the modern race makes a ceremonial start in Anchorage, it’s inspired by the famous run of 1925, which dashed along parts of this older path. It allowed 20 mushers to carry urgently needed diphtheria vaccine more than 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) in just over 127 hours.
Natives and explorers from Russia, Britain and the United States all frequented this area before Seward’s official founding in 1903. The early settlement included a colorful neighborhood known as Homebrew Alley which was erased by a 9.2-magnitude megathrust earthquake—the second most powerful ever recorded—which dropped the shoreline nearly six feet in 1964.
Today this mellow town welcomes visitors to Resurrection Bay and Kenai Fjords National Park, not to mention the 204-kilometer (127-mile) Seward Highway—honored as an All-American Road—stretching north to Anchorage. In town, favorite stops remain the Alaska SeaLife Center, a research aquarium open to the public, and the steep, stony 920-meter (3,018-foot) Mount Marathon, which hosts one of America’s oldest footraces each Fourth of July.
Denali is the iconic centerpiece of Alaska’s Interior and the #1 reason to combine a Holland America cruise to Alaska with an overland adventure. Only Holland America Line offers up to three nights in Denali to really settle in and explore, and is the only cruise line to include the deeper Tundra Wilderness Tour into Denali National Park on all of our two- and three-night Denali Land+Sea Journey itineraries. Immersing visitors in all that Denali has to offer is so important that we’ve created each of our Land+Sea Journeys to include up to three nights at Denali, at our beautiful 60-acre riverside McKinley Chalet Resort.
Our new Denali Square at the McKinley Chalet Resort is the ultimate base camp for adventures to Denali, followed by relaxing evenings. Enjoy soaring views across the Nenana River into Denali National Park from virtually anywhere on this amazing property, as well as great dining, quality entertainment, and unique local shopping opportunities.
Our exclusive longer stays, which include the Tundra Wilderness Tour, give our guests an up-close view of the mountain and the best wildlife viewing. It is rare not to see some combination of Alaska’s Big Five: grizzly bears, caribou, moose, Dall Sheep and wolves, along with other animals on this expertly guided six- to eight-hour tour. In addition, there are myriad once-in-a-lifetime adventures to choose from—such as river rafting, flightseeing (including the chance to land with a ski plane on Denali itself), or visiting the home of an Iditarod dog musher.
With more than six million acres of pristine Alaska wilderness, Denali National Park with its abundant and easily viewable wildlife and North America’s tallest and most impressive peak will be sure to make your Land+Sea Journey experience one you’ve dreamed of.
You will be dropped off at your Anchorage hotel and enjoy a 2-night stay in Anchorage.
McKinley Explorer Dome Railcars
Holland America Line operate the largest fleet of dome railcars in Alaska, there are a total of 10 McKinley Explorer train cars that were first placed in service between 2004 and 2006.
One of the most unique things about the McKinley Explorer is its schedule. Although service is offered to Anchorage, Talkeetna and Denali Park… it is a separate train from the Alaska Railroad’s Denali Star, and operates on a different schedule.
McKinley Explorer rail cars seat 86 to 88 passengers in the upper level dome. Each passenger has a reserved seat and the large curved glass dome windows run the full length of the car, offering superb 360 degree views. Seating is comfortable, with foot rests and fold down tray tables. Each car has its own host guide who provides tour commentary, answers questions and offers gift shop items. Full bar service is available upstairs for purchase. Both levels of the McKinley Explorer are wheelchair accessible.
On the lower level you will find restrooms, an outdoor viewing platform and a restaurant. Similar to the GoldStar dome and Wilderness Express, guests rotate through the dining room since it cannot accommodate all passengers at the same time.
Private car transfer included