It’s fall road trip season for motorists driving the ocean via ferries around Southeast Alaska
- Laurie Craig
- Oct 9
- 8 min read
Autumn transitions include tourism businesses packing in operations, parents moving to where kids attend schools, and people stocking up for winter
By Laurie Craig
Juneau Independent
October is typically a time of transition for Panhandle residents, and a peak period when the Alaska Marine Highway lives up to its name as people drive their vehicles onto and off car decks of ferries docking at ports throughout Southeast Alaska.
Seasonal lodges and commercial fishing vessels wrap up their summer operations. Hunters load game trailers — even freezers — behind their pickups and depart for moose or deer range. Parents head to larger towns for the school year so their children can receive broader education and sports options.
On Thursday, Oct. 2, the M/V LeConte put wheels on the water at the Auke Bay Ferry Terminal, 14 miles north of downtown Juneau, with a full load of vehicles headed to Hoonah and Gustavus.
Although few Southeast Alaska villages and towns are connected by pavement, the state ferry provides drive-on, drive-off service for a variety of vehicles that make the ocean the region’s water highway. The LeConte was commissioned in 1974 with a home port of Juneau. The ship is 235 feet long and 57 feet wide. It is designed to carry 225 passengers with a crew of 25.
The state ferry’s year-round role as a highway involves routine matters such as transporting Alaskans to medical appointments, grocery stores and bulk shopping trips, and packing high school sports teams to competitions. There are also special events such as spelling bees, fine arts camp, music festivals, road relays on foot or bicycles, and regional state fairs that fill the ships with excited youth and their chaperones, as well as residents seeking a change of pace and venue.
Alaska’s Native culture brings tradition and time-immemorial history to life on board ferries, too. Celebration, held every even-numbered year, attracts hundreds of Native dancers and performers to Juneau with suitcases filled with priceless regalia to be displayed and honored before friends and relatives.
The seasonal travelers departing Juneau on Oct. 2 included drivers of refrigerated vans carrying chilled produce and frozen foods. A tow truck backed a red Jeep onto the car deck, unloaded it and then returned to the Auke Bay parking lot, leaving the Jeep. Later in Hoonah, a driver met the ferry and drove the red vehicle off the ship. An empty boat trailer was deposited likewise, awaiting its owner in another port to fetch and use. A couple drove their pickup truck full of building supplies on board so they could winterize their Gustavus cabin and restack their firewood pile before the snow fell.
Depending on the car deck arrangement, vehicles are positioned based on size and destination. On Oct. 2, as dawn had yet to brighten Juneau’s horizon, commercial drivers backed two heavily-loaded dump trucks down the loading ramp to park centered on the car deck for weight and balance. Sand filled the bed of one truck; gravel filled the bed of the other. Both trucks had lengths of ribbed drainage culverts secured on top. The ship listed to starboard as the heavy trucks rolled on, then leveled to an even keel. The trucks would make another appearance on the LeConte later in the day.
All this activity is orchestrated by experienced ferry staff who direct drivers to specified loading locations. On the LeConte, the key person is Andrea Stevens, the ship’s bosun, or "boatswain" in formal maritime jargon. Along with her colleagues, Stevens determines vehicle placement to maximize available deck space for efficient unloading at either Hoonah or Gustavus. There was a family with three active youngsters waiting on standby to get home. Stevens and her crew puzzle-fitted all the vehicles to be sure the young family’s car made it onto the LeConte.
Vehicles are parked bumper-to-bumper to maximize capacity. Passengers are not allowed to remain on the car deck when the vessel is underway.
Despite the complicated juggling of vehicles, the ferry was loaded and its lines cast off a few minutes after the scheduled departure time of 7 a.m. That is the same hour the LeConte’s cafeteria opens for breakfast with a menu ranging from full meals to dried cereal. Enticing passengers into the cafeteria line was a warming tray filled with perfectly cooked bacon. A blueberry pancake cooked on the griddle beside two eggs.
Prices for food on the ferry are reasonable. Diners sit at tables with educational Alaskan flora and fauna painted on the tabletops by an Alaskan artist, and supported by state and federal agencies.
Many passengers relax in the forward observation lounge or sit in reclining seats in a side lounge where occasionally movies are screened. Some riders remain in the cafeteria to talk with fellow travelers. Others take in the scenery on the upper deck under the warming heaters in the solarium.
The ferry route on Thursday continued to Gustavus, then returned to Hoonah before sailing back to Auke Bay for a 12-hour round trip. The colorful sunrise sky in Juneau dimmed to layers of gray by the day’s end, but shipboard conversations remained warm and familiar. As the passengers disembarked, farewell calls of “See you next season,” or “Look for me in six months,” echoed through the LeConte’s passageways.
On the return trip to Hoonah, the same commercial dump trucks were driven onto the car deck, but this time they were empty, having left their construction materials in the small Alaska Native community. The one-day trip put them back in Juneau.
Once all the vehicles were loaded in Hoonah for the return trip to Auke Bay, bosun Andrea Stevens had time for a short interview about her work. She was born and raised in Haines by a fisherman father and school teacher mother. She initially pursued a college degree in elementary education, but decided instead to join the Alaska Marine Highway System, first assigned to the ferry Taku as a “mess man” who delivered galley meals to the crew. Twenty-one years later, Stevens is currently the fleet’s only female bosun, she says. Her duties include directing operations on the car deck, supervising and handling lines on the LeConte’s bow along with able-bodied seamen, and occasionally walking through the vessel’s passageways to ensure all is well.
At each port, Stevens walked up the boarding ramp to assess the vehicles waiting in shoreside parking lots so she could evaluate the best locations for them on the car deck.
“I have a picture or puzzle or Tetris or whatever in my brain,” Stevens said. “And if that doesn’t work I have to make another decision.”
“I have the best guys working for me,” she said. “We work really well together. This is a really good crew, a good ship. It’s all about a safety mindset for me.”
Regarding passengers, Stevens spoke of what the ferry means to Southeast. “Seeing the friendships that happen, the people that get reacquainted, especially at this time of year. Some folks in Gustavus hadn’t seen each other for a while. Oh, it’s amazing,” she commented.
“It’s the small outreach communities where they don’t have the medical services that they have in Juneau,” Stevens said of the ferry system’s role. “It’s very important to provide that service for the people that need it, not just the shopping.”
“Sometimes they can’t fly out,” she adds. “And that’s why it’s so important to me as a bosun to try and get everybody on (board) all the time.”
“Even growing up in Alaska, being born and raised in Haines, you know you’re the bus. This is the bus,” she said, referring to the essential service of transporting people. “That’s why having a dependable schedule makes such a huge difference,” particularly for school groups traveling to games and competitions. An added benefit is watching Southeast youngsters grow to adulthood as she works on the ferry.
The crew witnesses special events at times.
“Last week a retiring teacher was greeted by 30 people in the Angoon parking lot” to congratulate and thank the educator, Stevens noted.
There have been unique moments with Alaska Native people who come onto the ferry drumming and gathering together to escort a deceased villager to their homeland for burial.
“Their family members will come down to the car deck,” she explained, “and we hold all traffic, and their family members will follow the truck with the coffin up the ramp. We’ll wait for however long it takes. And usually anybody who’s also going to those destinations is going to understand.”
While most passengers on the LeConte were Southeasterners, one traveler had a unique story to tell. Duluth, Minnesota resident Robin Ketchen was en route to Gustavus, wheeling a huge purple duffel bag containing several feet of ship’s line, to meet her 70-year-old husband Ian Bentley. Two days earlier he had docked in Glacier Bay National Park’s Bartlett Cove after traversing the Arctic’s Northwest Passage alone in the couple’s 40-foot Beneteau sailboat named Passage.
Modern communications via Starlink allowed the couple to connect daily. “It’s like we’d never been apart,” Ketchen commented in an interview on Monday, Oct. 6. Bentley kept his friends and family informed through a web blog titled “passagebeneteau40.wordpress.com.”
On Sept. 30, Bentley’s blog post summed up his voyage:
“For this is the end of the single-handed odyssey that began in Newfoundland in June, explored the west coast of Greenland, took in the North West Passage followed by transits of the Bering Straits, Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska.”
The duo plans to navigate Alaska’s Inside Passage and arrive in Bellingham, Washington, by the end of October. From there, the vessel Passage will be loaded onto a truck and returned via land to Minnesota.
When asked what he plans to do next summer, Bentley said Monday via phone that he intends to construct and tend raised garden beds in Duluth.
While Juneauites cannot easily venture to exotic locations like the high Arctic, residents can experience day trips on the Alaska Marine Highway ferries. Several voyages to Southeast communities depart Auke Bay at 7 a.m. and return the same day. An 18-hour ferry trip takes passengers briefly into the gentle swells of the Gulf of Alaska en route to Pelican.
And on the M/V LeConte, a traveler can find bacon at every meal in the ship’s cafeteria.
• Contact Laurie Craig at lauriec@juneauindependent.com.
