When travel advisor Elaine Smalling booked a Celebrity Edge Inside Passage cruise to celebrate her 25th anniversary, she expected Alaska to be breathtaking — she never expected it to strand her in the rain and save her soul at the same time.
At a Glance
Alaska's Inside Passage cruise delivers rainforest, ocean, waterfalls, mountains, glaciers, and wildlife in a single week-long itinerary. The ship-based structure allows travelers to experience diverse ecosystems and indigenous port communities without the logistical challenges of driving or rail travel through vast terrain. First-time visitors find the concentrated access to nature and culture transformative.
There is a moment, somewhere in the old-growth shadows of Tongass National Forest, when a family of four stopped walking and simply held their breath. Through the trees, a mother bear moved slowly through the undergrowth, her two cubs tumbling close behind. No soundtrack. No tour commentary. Just the soft percussion of rain on leaves, the distant sound of a glacier-fed stream, and four people standing perfectly still in one of the last truly wild places on earth. For Elaine Smalling, a travel advisor with Hills Travel Service, that moment became the image she cannot stop telling people about — and the one that crystallized exactly why she does the work she does.
Smalling and her husband planned the Celebrity Edge Alaskan Inside Passage cruise to Dawes Glacier as a 25th anniversary celebration, and they did it the way she does most things: thoughtfully, and with family at the center. Their two daughters, aged 19 and 23, joined them aboard, turning a milestone into something larger. "To be able to share this experience and celebrate with our 19 and 23 year old daughters made it extra special," Smalling says, and the warmth in those words carries the full weight of what the trip became.
A Wilderness Beyond Expectation
Alaska, as it turns out, is not a destination that rewards assumption. Smalling had researched, planned, and anticipated — but nothing she read fully prepared her for the scale of what she encountered. Bald eagles drifted past the ship's railing with the casualness of city pigeons. Humpback whales broke the surface in the ship's wake. As the Celebrity Edge eased toward Dawes Glacier, seals sprawled across floating islands of ice, indifferent to the vessel gliding past them. The landscape shifted daily from towering rainforest to open ocean to cascading waterfalls to the bone-white face of the glacier itself, continuous and unbroken from the ship's deck. Smalling reflects, "I would never have fully grasped how vast and diverse Alaska's untouched wilderness and wildlife are, if I had not experienced it first hand." It is the sentence where she stops being a traveler and becomes an advocate, and it changes the way she will speak about Alaska for the rest of her career.
But the trip also stirred something quieter and more complicated. Smalling found herself moved not just by Alaska's grandeur but by its fragility. The environmental challenges facing wild places weighed on her throughout the journey — until the communities she visited along the Inside Passage offered something unexpected. The stewardship she witnessed, local towns protecting the wilderness surrounding them, renewed something in her. "Just when I thought I have seen the most beautiful sunset or sunrise," she says, "traveling to new places like Alaska just reminds me I have yet to be amazed by the amount of beauty there is in this world." It is a sentiment that arrived not as a postcard platitude, but as a genuine reckoning with what remains worth protecting.
Off the Beaten Path — and Stranded in the Rain
No moment on the trip better captures Smalling's approach to travel, or her hard-won expertise, than the afternoon her family decided to skip the organized shore excursion at Mendenhall Glacier and go their own way. They called an Uber, headed up to the glacier trails, and chose to hike at their own pace. The decision paid off richly at first. Their driver, a local who knew the area's history and culture with the fluency of a seasoned guide, became an unexpected gift. On the trail, fellow hikers tipped them off to a hidden waterfall tucked away from the main path. A couple departing the trail offered their bear spray as they left, a small gesture of trail community that Smalling still talks about with a smile.
Then the rain came. And the tour buses pulled away. Cell service near the glacier is unreliable at best, making an Uber pickup nearly impossible. "We found ourselves stranded in the rain, waving goodbye to the buses leaving with their tour groups," Smalling recalls. The image is vivid: four people at a trailhead in the Alaskan drizzle, watching their safety net drive off without them. Rescue came in the form of a local man who, apparently accustomed to finding stranded visitors at the trailhead, offered them a ride back to the ship without hesitation. The kindness of a stranger closed the loop on what could have been a disaster. The lesson, earned the hard way, is now one Smalling shares with every client considering an independent Alaska excursion: always have a confirmed, reliable ride arranged before you leave the ship. Cell service is not your friend near the glaciers.
The Best Way to See Alaska in a Week
The Mendenhall adventure, for all its drama, only deepened Smalling's conviction about the Inside Passage cruise as the ideal structure for a first Alaska experience. Before booking, she had seriously considered an open ocean cruise paired with an inland rail journey back through Canada. She ultimately ruled it out, and she is certain she made the right call. With a week to work with and family schedules to coordinate, the Inside Passage delivered everything: a rainforest, the ocean, waterfalls, mountains, glaciers, wildlife, three distinct port towns each with their own indigenous culture, local cuisine, and history, and a scenic Skagway rail excursion through the Yukon Forest of British Columbia. "Alaska makes even Texas look small," she notes, making clear why trying to drive or rail through it in limited time is a losing proposition. The ship becomes the vantage point, and the vantage point is extraordinary.
Smalling planned the cruise through Celebrity and independently booked her own shore excursions rather than defaulting to ship packages, a deliberate choice that reflects her active approach to curation. It is the kind of nuanced decision-making her clients benefit from directly. She is also clear about who this particular itinerary is and is not for. Nature lovers, those who crave stillness, travelers interested in indigenous culture and small seaside communities, and anyone who needs to slow down without realizing it yet will find the Inside Passage transformative. Those chasing nightlife, mega-ship water slides, or beach days in the sun should look elsewhere for their summer cruise.
A Trip That Opened More Doors Than It Closed
Perhaps the truest measure of a remarkable journey is what it leaves unfinished. Smalling returned home not with the satisfied closure of a bucket list item checked off, but with a family of four each holding a different wish to return. One daughter wants to kayak. Another wants to hike deeper into the backcountry. Her husband has his own ideas. Smalling herself wants to go back and linger. "Cruising peacefully through the Alaskan inside passage reminded our family how much we needed to slow down and be fully present," she reflects, and it is the philosophical payoff of everything the trip offered, from the bear in the forest to the rain at the glacier trailhead to the kindness of strangers who keep showing up when you need them most.
As for what comes next, Smalling is already looking forward. Her youngest daughter is exploring a study abroad semester in Florence, and this empty-nester mother has, naturally, already begun researching every corner of Tuscany and the surrounding regions. She plans to draw on her own research and, in her words, "the vast experience of my talented colleagues at Hills Travel Service who know Italy like the back of their hand." Another adventure is taking shape, and Smalling will arrive there exactly as she arrived in Alaska: prepared, curious, and ready to be surprised.
