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Glacier discovery: wildlife abounds on Holland America Line's Gulf of Alaska adventures.

Article Excerpt
The jet-boat raced down the Chilkat River just outside Haines, Alaska, and 21-year-old Amy Gross, a business major at the University of Alaska in Anchorage, was clearly enjoying her summer job as the boat's captain.

It Was an overcast but warm day in June. Amy's classes were over until September, and here she was, a fully licensed captain skippering a fast boat through the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve. What more could a young, Alaska-loving Haines native ask for but to be here, in the proverbial right place at the right time? The speeding boat, with its muffled twin outboard jet engines and propless propulsion, zigged and zagged, dodging sandbars, floating branches, and tell-tale snags spreading around protruding obstacles. The river ran like hundreds of veins, branching across the landscape, sometimes within view of the Haines Highway, other times disappearing into the forest.

"This is my favorite moose-viewing spot," Amy said to her 10 bundled-up passengers as we jetted slowly and quietly into a shallow lake. A snowcapped mountain, grooved from the top by a thin glacier, loomed in the distance. The swampy waters fringing the shoreline, with its thick shrubbery and cover, looked like moose heaven. For us tenderfoots, who had come from the luxurious pampering of Holland America Line's Statendam, docked 30 miles away in Skagway, this was the call of the wild.

"Look! Over there!" The whispered exclamation broke the deafening silence and all eyes eagerly followed the extended arm and finger pointing toward a stand of low trees where a momma moose and her wobbly offspring lazily grazed through the watery thicket. Later we spotted dozens...