Crystal Cruises plans port of anchorage departure: booking now for the Northwest Passage cruise to New York City.

• Author: Seely, Nichelle
• Position: ARCTIC IDEAS

Oil, fish, gold ... these are the much-touted resources of Alaska. But there is another natural resource, another commodity that retains its luster through the waxing and waning of politics and environmentalism. It is the idea of who and what we are, the wild landscape, the romantic history--the legend of Alaska, if you will. This is what brings thousands of visitors flocking to our shores and communities every summer and what inspires the multitude of cruise ships that can be found clustered on the docks in the summertime. Princess, Royal Caribbean, Holland America--these companies have found a way to mine the ultimate renewable resource: tourism.

We're all familiar with the sight of these gigantic floating luxury hotels and the fleets of branded vehicles carrying their passengers to and from our national parks. The itineraries are controlled like clockwork--they've got it down to a science, without a lot of room or necessity for innovation--or so it appears.

New Kind of Cruise

But now there's something different on offer: Crystal Cruises is advertising a new kind of cruise, starting in August 2016. According to their press release, the luxury vessel Crystal Serenity will leave from the Port of Anchorage (or maybe Seward) and travel north and then east through the Northwest Passage, arriving thirty-two days later in New York City. Along the way, they plan to stop at Kodiak, Dutch Harbor, and Nome, Alaska; Ulukhaktok, Northwest Territories; Cambridge Bay and Pond Inlet, Nunavut; Ilulissat, Sisimiut, and Nuuk, Greenland; Bar Harbor, Maine; Boston, Massachusetts; Newport, Rhode Island; and finally New York City.

This ambitious trip isn't their longest--that would be the 108-day world cruise beginning and ending in Miami; nor is it the company's only Alaska cruise--but it is by far most expensive when viewed on a cost-per-day basis. The website advertises rates beginning at $22,755 per person, which pencils out to more than $700 a day. For that kind of outlay, one expects a one-of-a-kind experience, which is exactly what Crystal Cruises promises.

The first thing I wondered about regarding this trip was what people were going to do during their thirty-two days at sea? The ports-of-call aren't exactly metropolises teeming with hundreds of tourist activities, unless you count all the individual bars along Front Street in Nome. The Crystal Serenity has room for over a thousand passengers and more than five hundred crewmembers. There's likely to be...