I’m writing to you from my tiny, tiny little cabin on the most wonderful expedition yacht in the world as we race back to Whittier trying to avoid a dangerous storm in Prince William Sound (PWS).

Our 6-day PWS cruise was a voyage into a dreamworld of bright, primary colors and loud, symphonic noises. Deep green, towering forests were so thick that every step onto three feet of glimmering moss bounced you right on! Bald eagles soared among thousands of gulls funneling above bubbling seas at the base of glaciers that just calved.

We kayaked next to icebergs to discover seal lions stalking us from behind while we watched sea otters play with their young under an intense almost hot sky. The changes were so fast, though. The absolute peace of crystal clear, lustrously deep blue skies carved by towering snow-capped mountains in a moment became pelting rain and intense fog so thick you couldn’t see the back of our little boat that swung sometimes violently back and forth.

Six days ago we drove to Whittier from Anchorage, delayed by a gigantic forest fire of the sort never seen in this part of the state before. While winter was ludicrously warm and wet, the spring and summmer has been hot and unbelievably dry.

I’ve traveled to PWS for nearly 15 years, and never have I seen such contrasts in one voyage. Captain Dean agrees it’s climate change, and it’s mostly not good.

The kittiwake colony just outside Whittier is today hardly a thousand birds from its peak of seven thousand. Kittiwakes unlike so many seabirds are fickle eaters with a diet of only a couple type of crustaceans and small fish. With such a poor defense for rapid adaptation, they become a marker for climate change.

Nor did we see any whales or dolphins, although we did see orcas. It’s likely that these accomplished masters of the sea have moved to where their food is, far from the Sound into open sea. Even Oyster Dave, the fabulous personality we visit who is one of the very few farmers of oysters in Alaska, said he has to lower his oyster cages 60 feet deeper than in years before.

Because the water is so warm.

It sounds silly, but all of us couldn’t help but remember the film at the Museum of the North reminding viewers that Alaska was once tropical. Is that happening, again? It’s frightening, really, to be able to answer that from personal experience.

But the radical changes we encountered let us see so many wonderful things, and the most wonderful of all which is so damn hard to explain to people, are the glaciers. More of the world’s glaciers are in PWS than any other single place on earth.

We watched these monstrosities calve and throw up lakes of water after thunderous sound. The colors are so amazing as the light of the day and grey of the storm passes over them. It’s as if they’re alive, but moving with a cadence of the time of a universe.

We visited nearly a dozen glaciers, watching them, hiking around them, kayaking among them.

In the depths of the forests among the glaciers was another world. Skunk cabbage; billions of berries yellow, orange, red and white; bundles of lichens white and blue and green; hidden lakes with mergansers screaming; high pyramids of fir trees thousands of years old covered in beautiful mosses. And here and there and everywhere, bubbling clear water streams over multi-colored rocks.

The Discovery was our yacht, and no luxury cruise vessel can dance through the Sound and point at the glaciers the way this little boat can. We were eleven people and we saw what hundreds of thousands never will.

Jim is on safari in Alaska, out of touch with neither internet or cell service. Come back next week for his full reports!

Jim is on safari in Alaska guiding in Prince William Sound where there is no internet or cell service. He’ll report back as soon as he can. Come back next week!

Talkeetna is known by its bumper sticker, “A Drinking Village with a Climbing Problem.”

This is where all the serious climbers of Denali begin, although the climbing season is already over. It’s growing shorter and shorter as Alaska heats up. Denali moves into the summer season by shedding billions of tons of snow in catastrophic avalanches: not a situation a climber likes.

Because I feel that the flightseeing around Denali is so spectacular, and because the thought of taking that 8-hour bus ride back from our west side lodge to the train station is so depressing, we’ve got to pad out the trip at this point. I’ve got to anticipate Denali’s fickle weather, which close down small aircraft nearly half the time.

Fortunately, we went on schedule and that meant two nights followed in Talkeetna, which frankly isn’t so bad at all. But I needed that in case we were delayed by the weather.

Talkeetna is a hoot of a town, very touristy on the one hand, but rip-roaring on the other. I got a superb organic roast latte and listened to two old-timers tell me about their 46 years up here. One was a government worker and one was a painter, and they both looked like they’d been here far too long! But the stories rival anything Robert Service has come up with, and it’s this type of interaction you get at every corner of Talkeetna.

The McKenzies, Gross’ and Christine Godfrey went river rafting; Conor & Bill Godfrey and Mica Bumpus went hiking; and my daughter, son-in-law and I went salmon fishing.

With two-thirds of Alaska’s tourists cruise customers, almost all the activities offered anywhere in the State on a day basis are designed for cruisers, and their demographics aren’t quite as adventuresome and their bodies not quite as fit usually as my clients!

So the rafting and hiking left something to be desired, but Rob, Liz & I were fishermen, and that’s a demographic all to itself! Most people who travel to Alaska to fish don’t do anything else!

Every time I’m in Talkeetna I try to go king salmon fishing, and did so, again. I got a 35-pounder. Rob got a pink salmon and I also got a silver and a rainbow trout. We couldn’t keep anything but the silver. The king season is quite short and I missed it this year; the trout was too small; and the pink didn’t meet the guide’s standards for good eating!

The story of salmon is a remarkable one. After the spring hatching in 2 or 3 inches of crystal clear frigid water high in some mountain stream, they wiggle ultimately out to sea, where depending upon the species, they stay for 2 – 5 years.

When they return to spawn they return to the exact place from which they hatched! But in our case at Talkeetna that means they have to navigate 75 miles of silt heavy glacial rivers (the Susitna and Talkeetna) before meeting their crystal clear stream (in our case) where another 10-20 miles brings them to their gravel spawning grounds very near the origin of the stream.

That takes anywhere from 1-3 weeks. When they leave the sea, they stop eating. Their body changes and the king morph into this fighting animal with a giant hooked nose. They grow colorful as they lose their fat. So those that take a long time lose all edibility. That was the assessment by our guide of Rob’s pink.

But the silver was deemed OK, so Rob bought charcoal, spices, cheese and fantastic Roadhouse bread and even prepared the fish’s caviar! We got a bottle of cheap champagne and had a wonderful cocktail evening with the group on the banks of the roaring Talkeetna river!

Now, on to absolutely magnificent Prince William Sound! Stay tuned! I’ll post whenever I can.

We saw good bears, some caribou, several fabulous golden eagles and not much else except spectacular scenery and that is what usually makes the Denali experience so fabulous.

Especially for us Africaphiles, wildlife is not a Denali feature. We usually see 4-5 bears on the trip from the train station to our lodge in the far west side of the park, and so we did this time.

The Denali grizzly is the smallest of the sub-populations found in North America, and similar to what will migrate down to the lower 48. This is because they are the only sub-population that doesn’t eat principally fish, so their protein needs are more difficult to satisfy. We saw a gigantic hole one had dug, his nose and face completely sodden with dirt, but no squirrel in the mouth!

There were 4 individuals foraging obsessively for the blueberries and other ground berries just bursting to ripeness. One was a sough with 3 adorable chocolate cubs. We saw all of them from the bus at between 100 and 300 yards.

The caribou were few in number given the recent news that the “small Denali migration” was in town. Unfortunately, we missed that if it is happening, but did see a couple along the braided streams.

But what most people will always remember is just the sheer and magnificence beauty of this place. I write often about my love of the vast prairies of Africa like the Serengeti, and in terms of simple distance they can rival this. But put on these vast distances the skyrocketing towers of North America’s greatest mountains, crease them with deep glacial valleys, then brush everything with the green of summer, the white and red of endless carpets of lichen, and it’s almost indescribable.

But remember, No Pain No Gain. There’s only one road through these 6 million acres and you can’t drive it. You have to get on a school bus. The drive is 7-9 hours long, depending upon the weather and what you see along the way. There are 4 places to stop along the way for toilets, minimal refreshments and all at spectacular lookouts. The Eielson Interpretive Center is particularly excellent. But there’s no way to see the extensive beauty all the way to Reflection Pond and Wonder Lake except on this hard-seat ride.

Most people – the vast majority – stay at the east side of the park where the train meets the entrance. Here they can buy bus tickets into the park and might decide not to do the whole route, while enjoying the best of accommodations.

But we went all the way to far western side, and most people who do that – unfortunately – have to reverse the ride to get out. Instead, we took small planes, circled around Denali in a spectacular morning flightseeing, and then landed at Talkeetna for two nights.

Stay tuned! Our two days of exploits in Talkeetna follow!

Today I begin nearly 7 weeks on safari, starting with … you’ll never guess, Alaska!

Travelers who focus on natural history usually begin in Africa (I’ll be there in a few weeks) and after one or two safaris there’s a common list of where they go next.

The Galapagos and Alaska.

I’m not sure I can explain this trilogy of interest from any natural history point of view, because the Galapagos doesn’t share any of Africa or Alaska’s common wow-factors like endless horizons of undeveloped wilderness, dangerous big animals and enormous size.

I think the reason the Galapagos ranks up there is because the way you visit it: on a cruise. Cruising brings in a whole section of the traveling public. Normally two-thirds of all visitors to Alaska stay on the big cruise ships.

For 2013 & 2014 cruise passengers to Alaska actually fell below one million to around 60% from the historical level of two-thirds. This trend will continue as Alaska develops its roads and self-driving, and as we old geezers are cycled out by the younguns.

I’m glad so many people can visit Alaska on those giant ships, because it’s often the only way they can afford to see this otherwise very expensive place. But believe me it’s not how I’ve shown people Alaska for 40 years, and frankly I can’t imagine stepping onto a cruise ship, especially the behemoths that ply into Alaska.

Alaska’s affinity with Africa comes only when you get into its interior, or into the nooks and crannies of the coast that a big ship can’t dare navigate.

That’s what we’ll do on the trip I’m now leading.

We start in Fairbanks, a weird little city that has hopes of becoming a metropolis someday, or so I’m told each time I come up here! Actually it has a leg up on other such remote towns, because this is the center of the University of Alaska. Space exploration and climate change are being studied from here more seriously than from practically any other place on the globe.

As the ice cap melts Alaska becomes a critical place for America’s interests there, and we’ve been falling behind for a number of years. While Russia has announced very new impressive ice-ships, America’s are almost as old as me!

From Fairbanks we head to Denali on the impressive Alaskan railway and scurry quickly out of the tourist confusion and congestion on the east side of the park. This is where all the cruise passengers on quick optional trips stay, and the place is like Macey’s at Christmas.

We’ll head 8 hours west to one of a handful of little lodges right under the mountain right adjacent the national park. Here the grandness of Denali isn’t obscured by the thousands of cruise passengers.

We’ll fly around North America’s highest mountain and then land in one of the funnest towns in America, Talkeetna! This is where all the real climbers of Denali start. The bumper sticker for the town reads, “TALKEETNA, ALASKA : A Quaint Little Drinking Village with a Climbing Problem.”

Will sample their sourdough pancakes as we sampled in Fairbanks and will in Anchorage. Some of us will go salmon fishing, some hiking and some rafting, all thanks to the magnificence of the foothills of America’s largest mountain.

Then after a quick night in Anchorage comes the pièce de résistance of this trip : a cruise! Don’t laugh! Unlike the 12,000 passengers on some of the Princess boats, ours takes … 11! (Plus crew, and usually plus a dog or two that belongs to the captain, bowsmen protecting us from orcas!)

We’ll explore the last great American tidewater glaciers tucked into some of the greatest scenery in existence: Prince William Sound! What?! You ask in disbelief. ‘Isn’t Glacier Bay where the last great glaciers are tucked into some of the greatest scenery in existence?’

No. No longer. Climate change has horribly effected the Glacier Bay that I repeatedly visited when I was young. But you don’t hear this simple fact often, because it’s a place that the big ships can go because the inlet is so deep. But it’s lost its treasures and if you really want to see the best of amazing coastal Alaska, it must be in Prince William Sound.

Stay tuned! As much as I can I’ll be posting as the trip proceeds.

I’ve just returned from two months in Africa, my 40th year of guiding there. I took consumers into five different countries in sub-Saharan Africa, toured three of its big cities and 14 of its most famous big game areas.

We stayed in hotels, lodges and tented camps from mid-market to super luxurious. Sometimes we used our own vehicles driving from place to place, and at other times we flew from place to place and used the property’s vehicles.

Tomorrow I’ll compare it all for you.

But before I do I want to explain why I think this is so important. We travel professionals are being marginalized by the internet, and consumers should know better.

Internet travel reviews like those found in TripAdvisor are often if not usually grossly inaccurate. This is because single event analyses are rarely fair. You wouldn’t want a real estate agent brokering your purchase of a home, or a doctor operating on your gall bladder for their very first time.

Yet this is exactly what most travel reviews are: first-time consumer impressions. Strong reviews – good or bad – might be reflections of random events like unusual weather or public events or machinery breakdowns, or unusual personal interactions with an unrepresentative employee. None of these things might be recognized by the consumer as being unusual.

Moreover, most consumer reviews contain no measuring sticks of experience. They don’t know what it’s like next door or down the street, or at a different season. It’s a one-off experience that’s highly unlikely to be representative of the normal consumer experience.

And because many consumer reviews are from people who used consumer reviews before they planned their own vacation, mistake compounds mistake. Expectations might be way too high or way too low to begin with.

But of all the many reasons that consumer travel reviews are generally so wrong the single most obvious is consumers’ overwhelming demand for a low price. Especially among Americans price is the single-most driving factor in travel purchase.

Price should be an important consideration, but so many travelers believe they are due more than what they paid for. When price becomes this important it tends to erode performance and quality for a presumed gained “value.” This is the reason we’ve gone through such a horrible era of airline inconveniences.

Put all these things together and the typical consumer travel reviewer is not the type of person I would want to recommend a trip.

What I want is a person sufficiently experienced in the area of travel I’m considering. Indeed there are consumers just as good as travel professionals. When I find one of those it’s a bonanza, because that person isn’t saddled with the constraints of making a living out of her reviews and recommendations. But either way, a professional agent or a sufficiently experienced traveler is what will render a meaningful recommendation.

What constitutes sufficient experience? In my opinion there are four critical prerequisites for rendering a meaningful travel review:

✓ Multiple visits to the same place or property: More than two or three, the more the better, enough visits that both an array of seasonal weather and economic cycles are experienced, and enough visits that an anomalous situation can be recognized.

✓ Competitive selection. By this I mean experiencing a range of hotels, or beaches, or yachts, or trains in the same area so that the judgment rendered is contextual. You can’t apply the same standards to an Amazon jungle lodge that you would apply to the Peninsula in Hong Kong, or a kids’ family vacation to Disneyland to a week at the opera in Milan.

✓ Consistent purchasing. The “Honeymoon Weekend” purchased on LastMinute.Com won’t give you the same quality of rooms or package that buying it directly from the Niagra Falls Hotel will. It gets even more complicated: the same hotel room purchased directly from the Niagra Falls Hotel could render different qualities, frills and service depending upon how and when you made the purchase and what you actually paid for it.

✓ Minimize expectations. This is the hardest thing for a consumer to do, and understandably so. You don’t buy a vacation without expecting certain things from it. But the more this is the case, the less likely you will be able to render a meaningful review.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t heed the good advice of trusted friends and family. They’re like you: They know probably better than a random professional what you might enjoy best.

But at the same time you better give that travel professional equal if not greater weight for all the reasons I’ve explained above.

Tomorrow I’ll try to do that for safaris in sub-Saharan Africa at this time of the year. Please come back!