NOME, Alaska — The giant luxury cruise liner was anchored just off Nome, too hulking to use the Bering Sea community’s docks on its inaugural visit. Instead, its more than 900 passengers piled into small transport boats and motored to shore, where they snapped photos of wild musk oxen, lifted glasses in the town’s colorful bars and nibbled blueberry pie while admiring Alaska Native dancers at Nome’s summer celebration.
The Crystal Serenity’s visit to Alaska’s western coast is historic. At nearly three football fields long and 13 stories tall, the cruise ship is the largest ever to traverse the Northwest Passage, where its well-heeled guests glimpsed polar bears, kayaked along Canada’s north shore, landed on pristine beaches and hiked where few have stepped.
Some remote villages along the way are seeing dollar signs, while environmentalists are seeing doom. They say the voyage represents global warming and man’s destruction of the Earth.
The terrible irony with the Crystal Serenity’s voyage is that it’s taking place only because of climate change and the melting Arctic, said Michael Byers, a professor in the political science department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The Northwest Passage, which connects the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, has long been choked off by ice. But melting brought on by climate change is allowing passengers to cruise up the Bering Strait and then head east toward Greenland over the Arctic Ocean before docking next week in New York City.
“And yet, by actually taking advantage of climate change, it’s contributing to the problem because the ship has a very large carbon footprint of its own,” Byers said.
The cruise ship left Seward, on the Kenai Peninsula, Aug. 16 with about 900 guests and 600 crewmembers on board. During its monthlong journey to New York, it will visit towns and villages in western and northern Alaska, Canada, Greenland and the eastern seaboard.
Smaller cruise ships, those that hold about 200 people, routinely make a port call in Nome and continue through the passage, but this ship is different.
“This is the game changer,” Nome Mayor Richard Beneville said.
Nome spared nothing to make sure tourists off the high-end cruise liner — tickets cost more than $20,000 per person, with a penthouse starting at about six times that — felt at home.
The guests came to town in waves so they didn’t overwhelm the available services in Nome, population about 3,800.
Charlie and Joan Davis of San Francisco signed up for the cruise within the first hour it was offered three years ago.
“We’ve been around the world many times, and this is someplace we’ve never been to, that’s somewhat unknown,” Charlie Davis said. “You know, just an adventure.”
They weren’t alone in wanting to be part of the historic cruise.
“This is the longest single cruise we have ever made, and it is the most expensive cruise we’ve ever made because it’s many days, and it’s very expensive to operate up here,” said the ship’s captain, Birger Vorland. “And it’s the one that sold out the fastest; 48 hours, it was basically gone.”
