Cruise ship season dominated by politics ends on a pleasant — and short — day for Juneau visitors

Mike Callis says he convinced a couple of friends to take a late-October cruise to Alaska by cashing in airline miles to get the tickets. The gamble mostly paid off with relatively good weather leading up to their stop in Juneau on Thursday aboard the final ship of the year here, even though it had to depart two hours early due to a high wind warning to the south.

“I like the mountains,” he said when asked why he’d visit at the very end of the tourism season, adding he visited Alaska a decade ago when he started in Fairbanks and then took a boat from Anchorage down the coast.

Their trip aboard the 2,376-passenger Norwegian Jewel, which departed Juneau at about 6 p.m., marked the end of a peculiar cruise ship season that saw traffic roughly equal to last year’s record 1.67 million passengers — and an international spotlight cast on the community due to a ballot measure seeking to ban ships on Saturdays.

The measure was defeated in the Oct. 1 municipal election, but immediately afterward a new controversy arose with the announcement of a planned private cruise port in west Douglas that could drastically change the economic impacts of cruise visitors by redirecting a large percentage of visitors away from downtown.

Callis and the two friends he’s known since childhood, all from Killingworth, Connecticut, were waiting in line at a food cart in Marine Park on Thursday afternoon with two crew members from the ship. Zach Rampone, the only member of the Connecticut trio who hadn’t been to Alaska before, said there was almost no hesitation when he was asked about taking the unseasonably late trip to the state.

“I was like ‘I want to go on a vacation, a lot of my friends are either working or busy or something,’ so it was like ‘Oh, an opportunity to go on vacation with my friends. I’ll take it.’ And both of them also talked up Alaska. They were talking about how amazing it is here and how beautiful it is. I was nervous, though, about the cold.”

For Chett Vogt, the third member of the trio, that wasn’t a concern since his previous experience in Alaska was serving at Elmendorf Air Force Base.

The group spent the day visiting historic sites and shops downtown — although many were closed — similar to how they spent their time during previous port stops in Sitka and then Skagway (the latter of which was notable for its brutally cold wind).

Other visitors wandering through downtown streets shared varying experiences about efforts to explore other parts of town and beyond, although one thing all had in common is low fares are what lured them onto the last cruise ship of the year. Many were also from colder climates.

“We live in Vancouver so it’s not that different from home,” said Chris Jorissen, visiting with four members of his family. “Yeah, it’s a bit colder, but we have the same the same First Nations. We have the same trees and the same bears and same eagles.”

The family rented a car to drive to the Mendenhall Glacier, since it was cheaper than a bus, hiking the trail to the waterfall once they got there. Jorissen’s son, Ethan, said while he’s aware the glacier is much smaller than it was a few decades ago, that’s a reason that makes it worth visiting.

“I think it’s important to go there and see that it’s receded like a mile or so,” he said.

Also, while many of the downtown shops are closed, “all the places we want to go are open,” Ethan said.

“They’re places where the people who live here exist, rather than like crap that’s open to sell tourists jewelry,” he said.

Pattie Cochran, visiting from Corvallis, Oregon, said this is her first cold-weather cruise after taking 11 to other destinations.

“It’s a bucket list,” she said. “We have to see the icebergs before they’re gone.”

Cochran and her traveling companion, Karen Sjolund, coped with the cold in Skagway by taking the White Pass and Yukon Route train to see both the fall colors and snow in the mountains. However, they were deterred from taking a Mendenhall Glacier tour Thursday after being told it wasn’t visible from the visitor center due to fog.

Overall they said they’d recommend a late-season Alaska cruise to others — even from warmer states — because of the low cost and because the ship wasn’t packed with families with children. They also said they weren’t aware of the political debate raging in Juneau about the ballot initiative and the people they met in Juneau were welcoming — although some were looking forward to what they’ll be doing next.

“We asked some questions like ‘Are you so glad it’s the last day?’” Cochran said. Among the replies were “‘Oh, yes, I have to go home into my family now.’”

“I didn’t realize that people came here just to work the season,” Sjolund said.

• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.