Tourism

Despite rainy weather, the luxury cruise liner Crystal Serenity arrived in Nome on schedule, Sunday morning.

About a thousand people poured out of the floating hotel and emptied into the town of Nome for a full day of scheduled activities and events, including the formal commemoration held at the Nome Mini Convention Center.

Commemoration speaker and Nome Mayor Richard Beneville said it’s days like these that make him feel excited to be mayor of Nome.

“And I got to be honest with you, as mayor of this town, I am so proud,” Beneville said. “I am so proud of our city employees that have come out to help this happen; I’m so proud of our volunteers that have worked on it; I’m so proud of Kawerak, who brought people in from the villages to sell goods. So it’s such a win-win-win, and it’s beautiful, and there’s a buzz in the air, and it’s energy, and it feels great.”

Many of the passengers getting off the boat were stepping onto Alaskan soil for the first time, Beneville learned from people onboard.

Passenger Marc Sola described the activities he was able to participate in as he ventured into Nome.

“We went to the church, we went to the visitors’ center, and then, there’s a little gift gallery we went to, and now we’re over here at the blueberry festival,” Sola said. “We just came out of that, all kinds of things going on in there, singing, gifts, all that kind of stuff.”

Carl Topkok and Linda Kimoktoak, a drummer and dancer for the King Island Dance Group, were thrilled to share some of their culture with these newcomers inside the Mini Convention Center.

“It really means a lot to us, it has to come from the heart, and you have to want to love it to do these songs,” Topkok said.

“Oh, it’s amazing to pass down our culture to people who haven’t experienced it before,” Kimoktoak said. “You kind of get goosebumps, and you get a really good, tingly feeling.”

Crystal Serenity captain Birger Vorland will have to traverse the icy Arctic waterway in order to successfully land in New York City within 30 days. An icebreaker vessel is accompanying the cruise liner throughout the journey.

The Norwegian ship captain was presented with a key to the City of Nome yesterday in the Mini Convention Center, and he took the opportunity to sink all rumors of his cruise liner being the next Titanic.

“We are the largest ship ever to attempt to go through the Northwest Passage, and when I say ‘attempt,’ that’s just for show, you know. We are going to make it, guaranteed,” Vorland said.

Captain Vorland and the Crystal Serenity’s next stop will be Ulukhaktok in the Northwest Territories of Canada.

Crystal Cruises is already booking passengers for another trip through the Northwest Passage next year.

The luxury liner Crystal Serenity is on its way from Seward to New York City through the Northwest Passage.

It’s the largest cruise ship to navigate the route, which hugs the coasts of Alaska, Canada and Greenland. And it’s attracted international attention, with many wondering if it’s a sign of what’s to come as the Arctic sees increasingly ice-free summers.

The ship has 13 decks, eight restaurants, a casino, and a spa. Staterooms for this trip started at about $20,000 and run as high as $120,000 (with personal butler service).

Sitting in her room, with a deck looking out over the Seward harbor, passenger Moira Somers said for most of the people on board, the ship is as much a destination as the Arctic.

“When you start your cruise, no matter where in the world you are, and you see the ship, it’s goosebump stuff,” she said.

Somers and her husband live in Victoria, B.C. (she’s originally from Namibia). Like the majority of people on board, they’re repeat cruisers – she says this is perhaps her 16th trip with Crystal.

But this time is a little bit different.

“Maybe we’re not so sure what we’re letting ourselves in for?” she said, with a laugh. “But there’s so much, we’ve read so much, we’ve prepared ourselves, and we know it’s a big thing.”

Until about a decade ago, the Northwest Passage was only open to ships with icebreaking capabilities. And while smaller cruise ships have visited the region for years, the Crystal Serenity, with more than 1600 guests and crew, will become the largest passenger ship to traverse the full, winding route across the top of Canada.

It’s a dry run for large-scale tourism in a region that hasn’t seen anything like it before.

But the man in charge is not concerned.

Birgir Vorland, the master of the Crystal Serenity, has spent 38 years at sea. Originally from Norway, he says the Northwest Passage has special resonance.

“My countryman Roald Amundsen did the first transit here, between 1903 and 1906,” Vorland said. “He spent three years on this passage. We’re going to do it in 32 days and a lot more comfort.”

Crystal Cruises has spent more than three years planning the trip. Standing on the navigation bridge, Vorland ticked off the special preparations: systems to detect ice, two Canadian ice pilots joining him in Nome, an escort ship in case he runs into trouble.

“We have crossed all the t’s, dotted all the i’s,” he said. “Nobody has ever planned a cruise as diligently and as detailed as Crystal Cruises has done for this particular voyage.”

As the ship prepared to leave Seward, passengers participated in an emergency drill. In the casino, guests wearing life jackets gathered around staff holding signs that read, “Life Boat 6.”

Despite Vorland’s assurances, plenty of people are worried about what happens if this scenario plays out in real life.

“There’s absolutely no capacity to respond to accidents,” said Elena Agarkova, who tracks shipping for the World Wildlife Fund, a conservation group.

There’s very little search and rescue infrastructure in the region, a major concern for authorities. On August 24th, just as the Crystal Serenity passes through the region, the Coast Guard, U.S. military and Canadian forces will stage a major training exercise in the Bering Strait. Called Arctic Chinook, it will simulate the response to a cruise ship going down with 250 people on board.

The question isn’t just whether the Crystal Serenity is ready for the Arctic, but if the Arctic ready for the Crystal Serenity. Some of the communities it’s visiting in Canada have populations smaller than the ship itself.

Agarkova said Crystal Cruises has done a good job of working with communities and addressing environmental concerns, with plans to forgo heavy fuel oil and exceed standards for discharging wastewater. But, she said, there’s no guarantee those precautions will be taken in the future.

“They’re doing these measures voluntarily,” she said. “So there’s nothing that would require cruise lines or cruise ships that would follow in their steps to adhere to the same kinds of standards.”

Agarkova also pointed out the irony of this new era — when the very changes making the region accessible are also transforming it.

That’s not lost on passenger Moira Somers.

“One kind of feels – I won’t say guilty, but you’re taking advantage of what is happening,” Somers said, adding that she hopes the cruise is raising awareness of climate change.

As for her more immediate goals? “My big dream is to see a polar bear,” she said.

After a moment she added, with a laugh, “And just being able to have a successful trip, I think. Getting through with no hiccups.”

It’s touted as the “world’s highest and longest” glass-bottom bridge, elegantly stretched between two mountain peaks in central China’s Hunan province.

And as of this weekend, it’s open to visitors. Now, one can walk the 470-yard length of the glass bridge, which is positioned a vertigo-inducing 328 yards above the ground, as China’s state-run news agency Xinhua reported.

The bridge is located in the Zhangjiajie National Forest, where the otherworldly, plummeting mountain faces reportedly provided inspiration for the forest setting in the film Avatar.

“I wanted to feel awe-inspired by this bridge. But I’m not afraid — it seems safe!” visitor Wang Min told Agence France Presse.

The bridge cost $3.4 million dollars to construct, and is “paved with 99 panes of three-layered transparent glass,” according to Xinhua. Only 800 people are allowed on the structure at a time, the news agency added.

And cameras, selfie sticks and stilettos are not permitted on the bridge, as AFP reported.

It was designed by Israeli architect Haim Dotan, who told Wired that he initially rejected the project: “[The developer] asked me, ‘What do you think about a bridge from here to there?’ And I said, ‘No.’ … He looked at me and said ‘Why, what are you talking about?’ And I said, ‘Why do you want a bridge? It’s too beautiful.”

But after more pressure from the developer, he gave in, as Wired reported. “I told him, ‘We can build a bridge but under one condition: I want the bridge to disappear.’ ”

But the big question for many visitors is whether or not it’s safe — especially after an “alarming glass bridge cracking incident at the Yuntai mountain in northern Henan in 2015,” as AFP reported.

Prior to the Zhangjiajie opening, Chinese authorities tried to reassure visitors by holding highly-publicized safety tests for the media. For example, participants were invited to bash in the glass panels with sledgehammers. In one such demonstration, the BBC’s Dan Simmons shatters the top layer of glass on the first swing, but fails to damage the lower layers after striking the panel a dozen times.

“Do you know what? I think this might be safe,” Simmons said while laughing, winded from sledgehammering. Authorities also held an event where they drove a car over the bridge.

China has quite a penchant for glass-bottomed bridges and skywalks — and while officials say this is the longest, similar structures have been appearing around the country.

“Glass bridges in China have been a popular craze for the daring photo opportunities they provide,” the BBC reported. “Events like mass yoga displays and even weddings have been staged on several such bridges.”

Architect Keith Brownlie told the BBC that it’s all about the “thrill.”

“It is the relationship between emotionally driven fear and the logical understanding of safety,” Brownlie said. “These structures tread the boundary between those two contrasting senses and people like to challenge their rational mind in relation to their irrational fear.”

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The cruise ship Crystal Serenity cast off from Seward Tuesday for a first-of-it’s kind trip through the Arctic’s Northwest Passage to New York City. It’s the first luxury liner to attempt the route — and the largest passenger ship by far.

Many people are wondering if it’s a sign of what’s to come, as the Arctic sees increasingly ice-free summers.

Rachel Waldholz, from Alaska’s Energy Desk was in Seward as passengers boarded the ship.

TOWNSEND: Rachel, remind us why this is a big deal. There’s been a lot of attention to it nationally, internationally. Why is it a big deal?

WALDHOLZ: Well, it’s a big deal because this is a big ship. It can carry more than 1,600 people, including more than 1,000 passengers and more than 600 crew. A ship of that kind hasn’t attempted to cross through the Arctic before. And it’s in a region that hasn’t seen anything remotely on this scale before, it’s not sure the region is prepared for that. There just isn’t the kind of infrastructure or search and rescue capabilities. The towns it’s visiting haven’t seen this kind of tourism and cruise companies haven’t proven yet that they can handle the Arctic safely. This is really the first test. And to that end, it’s been a real wake-up call for authorities about getting ready for more shipping traffic in the Arctic. The U.S. Coast Guard and military actually have a joint exercise planned with Canadian forces next week in the Bering Strait, and they will simulate rescuing 250 people from a cruise ship, and it’ll happen just a few days after the Crystal Serenity passes through the region.

TOWNSEND: Have you been able to get aboard the ship? What’s it like?

WALDHOLZ: Well, I haven’t been able to get on yet. I have a tour scheduled for 3 p.m. and I’m really excited because it’s supposed to be super top-end luxery cruise ship. The basic stateroom is more than $20,000 — the highest end penthouse — which comes with personal butler service — is listed at more than $120,000. So this is really a very high-end cruise. It has as many as eight restaurants, a casino, a dance club, a spa, designer boutiques. That’s probably good, because this is a long trip and there aren’t that many places to stop along the way. It will take more than a month to travel from Seward to New York City. It’s stopping in Kodiak, Unalaska and Nome on its way, as well as several stops in Canada and Greenland.

The U.S. Forest Service plans to expand parking, extend a trail and improve an outhouse near the West Glacier trailhead.

The Alaska Department of Transportation recently awarded the Forest Service the $294,000 grant to pay for the improvements.

The Forest Service’s Ed Grossman, who manages recreation programs in Juneau, said the potential cost for the project could change, depending on contractors’ bids.

“It includes some additional parking, it includes about a four-tenths of a mile trail that’ll parallel the existing road and bike path,” he said.

The grant will help the final phase in a decade-long project to the fix the trail area.

“The road used to be dirt, and heavily potholed,” Grossman said, “and the parking was just pretty much willy-nilly, so all of that was improved in former phases.”

Over the past few years, numerous people have gotten lost on the trail—most recently Saturday, KINY reported Monday.

While the project will include signage, modifications won’t go beyond the trailhead, Grossman said.

“So there isn’t any additional work being done in this phase beyond the trailhead,” he said, “where it seems like more people are getting lost than they should.”

Construction could start as soon as this fall.

Crystal Serenity to Arrive in Nome on Sunday https://t.co/vRkmKmtqFA

— KNOM News (@KNOMnews) August 15, 2016

The city of Nome is busy preparing for the arrival of the Crystal Serenity cruise ship on Sunday, August 21, with the first boat of passengers docking at 8 a.m.

The Crystal Serenity carries about 1,000 passengers, and it is the first vessel of that size to travel to Nome.

Robin Johnson, a partner at local travel agency Nome Discovery Tours, said preparations for the Crystal Serenity began more than a year ago.

“They came to us and said, ‘What can you develop for us?’” she said, “and we worked on that. And they told us what they liked, and what sounded good. We’ve been talking a lot all year. There’s been a ton of communication.”

Nome Discovery Tours has prepared an extensive list of activities for Crystal Serenity passengers.

Passengers can choose from a variety of hikes and flying tours, as well as a trip to Shishmaref and even a flight to Russia.

Meanwhile, the Nome Berry Festival will give passengers a chance to experience the art, food, and entertainment that Nome has to offer.

“So that will be a full day of music and crafts and food and dancing and door prizes and berry buckets,” Johnson said. “And I think there’s going to be a polar bear swim that evening as well. If everything falls into place like it’s supposed to, it’ll be a good day.”

However, things might not fall into place if the weather is bad. Because the Crystal Serenity is too large for Nome’s port, the ship will anchor out at sea and passengers will be ferried to Nome’s shore.

Choppy seas could make it impossible for passengers to deboard, but Johnson isn’t concerned.

“Well, if the weather is really bad, getting them off the ship could be an issue,” she said. “But I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”