Celebrity Solstice 2026 to Alaska | Jim & Kathleen Travel

Day 4—Hubbard Glacier

by Jim Bellomo | Jun 19, 2026 | Uncategorized

Sometimes when I am doing a live blog like this, it is hard to remember the day before yesterday. Especially when you have a really big excursion on the intervening day. Yesterday we were in Juneau and went out whale watching but that’s a story for tomorrow. Today is Hubbard Glacier which we visited on Wednesday—the day after we visited Icy Strait Point.

For the uninitiated, one of the biggest reasons people cruise to Alaska is to see the glaciers. There are four glacier-viewing areas any ship can visit, though some are much better than others. In our 13 cruises to Alaska, we have visited all four. By far the best is Glacier Bay, followed by Hubbard, Misty Island Fjords, and Tracy Arm.

This year, there are only three because Tracy Arm has been experiencing rockslide activity, and the cruise lines are avoiding it. When I first went to Glacier Bay, I was so impressed that I wanted to know why everyone doesn’t go there on every cruise. I found out it’s an environmental issue. Glacier Bay is a national park, and the number of ships that can sail in is highly regulated through a permit process. Because the permits are grandfathered (cruise lines that have been here the longest get first call), if you want to see Glacier Bay, you need to cruise with either Holland America or Princess, as they have been doing Alaska the longest and have the permits to show for it. Or you can take one of the smaller cruise lines that leave midweek, when Princess or HAL are not sailing and not in the Bay. Permits are issued to X number of ships per day.

Hubbard is used by the second tier of cruise lines (in terms of the number of years they have been cruising in Alaska, then Tracy Arm and finally Misty Island Fjords. While in Glacier Bay, you may sail by more than 10 glaciers. When you visit Hubbard, you see two—Hubbard and Turner. Hubbard is the main attraction as Turner is receding.

According to Wikipedia, receding glaciers, also known as glacial retreat, occur when a glacier melts and shrinks faster than it can accumulate new snow and ice. Because glaciers naturally flow downhill like slow-moving rivers, “receding” simply means the ice is melting away at its lower edges—or terminus—faster than the glacier can replenish itself.

Hubbard is an advancing glacier. When a glacier advances, it gains more snow and ice (accumulation) than it loses to melting or breaking off (ablation), causing the end of the glacier (the terminus or snout) to grow and push further downslope or out into a valley.

In layman's (and photographic terms), Hubbard advancing means the front of the glacier is pretty much a beautiful white and blue, while Turner (right next to it) is white but covered in all kinds of black debris. Check out my photos to see what I mean. In the distance above is Hubbard.

Whew! Now that you know more about glaciers than you ever wanted to know, here’s what happened to us on our Hubbard Glacier day. Wait. You still need to know about the ice. As glaciers advance, pieces of ice fall off. And if there is a huge ice field in front of the glacier, the ship can’t go there. And when we went to Hubbard, there was a HUGE ice field in front of us, so we barely got to see her. We spent 90% of our time in front of Turner's dirty face, and later in the day got to see Hubbard from afar.

I created a small map to show you how close we got to Hubbard and its position relative to Turner. We could go no further around the point than into the aptly named Disenchantment Bay due to the buildup of ice in the water. On previous visits to Hubbard Glacier, the ship we were on had been able to get much closer to the face of the glacier—not on this trip. If this were your only cruise to Alaska, you would not get the big deal that many of us make about viewing glaciers.

All this said, I will just let you look at the photos, and the captions will do a better job of explaining our distance, viewing angles, etc.

“A glacier doesn't die in thunder. It dies in silence. Drip by drip. Story by story. What we're losing isn't just ice— It's the future, melting away.” —Anurag Maloo

Day 3—Icy Strait Point

by Jim Bellomo | Jun 18, 2026 | Uncategorized

Way back in August 2007, we last visited Icy Strait Point. Back then, it was a tiny tourist attraction featuring two things: the longest (at the time) zip line in the world and an old cannery that had been turned into a museum. Here we are, just under 20 years later, and we are back again. When we were here the first time, this was a tender port (for the non-cruisers, that means to get to the port, you get into a lifeboat and they take you to a small dock in the harbor where you get off, see everything, and then get back on). Not anymore.

We visited here with our Martini Mates that year on Celebrity’s Infinity. We came ashore and walked around for about an hour. We took the shuttle bus into the village of Hoonah (where, really, there was nothing to see), then it was back on the tender and back to the ship.

WOW! How things have changed in 19 years. Now there are two piers big enough to handle a cruise ship, so we didn’t have to tender. The two piers are fairly far apart (about a 30-minute hike on a nice trail), so they built a gondola that takes you from the pier where we docked over to the original area, which has now been built up. In 2007, there was a snack bar. Now there are at least four restaurants, a couple of snack bars, and coffee places as well. The Cannery museum is now less of a museum and more of a mini shopping mall. The zip line is still there, but sadly, it was too windy for it to be in service. And no, we were not going to ride it ourselves. Too long and too high, thank you. Plus, we are way too old.

When Solstice arrived, there was a Princess cruise ship on the pier we were to dock on, and because Celebrity has a deal with the locals and helped build the two ocean piers, they got first choice, so the Princess ship had to pull off the pier and tender the rest of her guests back to the ship. The other pier was occupied by Celebrity Summit, a ship we know well after sailing her from Newark to Québec and back in 2018.

Solstice had docked at the pier where you needed to either hike or take the gondola to see the Cannery area. So Mike, Cathy and I jumped into one of the cars and headed over. The gentleman running the gondola was very good at his job. He had three lines, and the gondola hardly ever stopped. You just got on as it slowly came through the on-and-off section. Really simple and easy to do. The ride took about 15 minutes, and we were dropped off at the gateway to the Cannery area.

It was a very short walk down to the Cannery museum and shops, along a really nice boardwalk with stairs that periodically led to the beach. There was also a great statue of an orca whale (see my pics below). We walked down, saw the shops, talked to some folks, were mistaken for someone on a whale watching tour, Mike and Cathy got a beer, and I set off to walk the trail back to the ship. Got lots of photos on the way and had a great time. There are bear warnings all over the place, but the path was well traveled and, as Bob says, “Don’t worry about bears unless you are the slowest person you can see nearby.” I stopped to buy some postcards on the way (yes, I still send paper postcards), and then it was back aboard and off to drinks and dinner.

Sadly, after an awesome sandwich we had for lunch that passed the Steve Test (see yesterday’s post if you don’t know what the Steve Test is) in Luminae, dinner was a total failure. Bob ordered a steak, and it was a huge, thick chunk of beef with absolutely no flavor whatsoever. I know, because he gave me a piece, and I tried it. It was like eating a chewy piece of nothing. No sauce, no grill marks, no nothing. Just a big hunk of beef barely seared on four sides. My cannelloni wasn’t much better. Two pasta tubes, stuffed with too much meat, too little cheese and too little sauce. This time the meal wasn’t fine. It was bad.

Lunch today was an adventure, but I will tell you about that tomorrow. And about our visit to the Hubbard Glacier.

Don't forget: if you click the first shot, you can scroll through using your arrow keys or by swiping. When you do that, you can also see the captions for the photos. These are the first shots of the trip where I was able to show off my photography expertise, so please check them out on a computer or tablet, not your phone.