IN ALASKA, THE PARTY IS ON A light-struck wilderness awes new visitors

• Share

The names are narcotic: Skagway, Unalakleet, the Hazy Islands, Turnagain Arm. Saying ''Talkeetna'' aloud clears a city man's mind of lint. Whispering ''Aniakchak'' cures nervous debility. Think ''Last month, off Ketchikan'' while futilized in a traffic jam on the San Diego Freeway, and all the other cars disappear. Zap, there they go. Last month, off Ketchikan, from an altitude of about 1,000 ft., Bush Pilot Dale Clark spotted something glinting in the water of Carroll Inlet. He pointed. ''Down there, see?'' His passenger, a sightseer from the Lower 48, saw nothing but salt water. Clark, a burly, bearded man, threw his float-equipped Cessna into a tight, 80 degrees bank, and a few moments later landed in the light chop near a sizable school of big black-and- white orcas, the clownish and sociable five-ton mammals called killer whales. Pointed black fins and huge wet backs surrounded the plane in a companionable way. A mother whale and her calf bobbed by. The pilot watched in awe with his passenger. He could count on finding mountain goats on most any flight and . perhaps a few sea otters floating on their backs in the waves and cracking clams on their chests. But the schooling orcas were a rarity. ''You don't see this but a couple of times a year, if even that,'' said Clark, who came from Montana 14 years ago and thus qualifies as an old Alaska hand. Tourists in Alaska become old hands quickly, but at first view it is not merely whales and glaciers and steaming volcanoes that are marvels. The tiny single-engine floatplanes and ski-planes themselves, the delivery vans and taxis of the roadless north, are just as scary and exotic. They seem as unsubstantial as bicycles, all wires and struts. Wedge yourself into the right-hand front seat next to the pilot, and you may discover that you have a fully operable wheel in your lap and control pedals underfoot. You don't get pedals on the Eastern shuttle. The tourist is much intrigued. Could I learn to fly one of these contraptions? This line of thinking is scarier than orcas or floatplanes because it leads to seductive questions: ''Could I live in this chilly, light-struck wilderness? Could I be an Alaskan?'' Such wild surmising, which is half the fun of travel, churns dependable fantasies anywhere, in Salzburg or Ladakh. But for a U.S. citizen, the daydreams seem especially strong in Alaska. This is, after all, his own nation, yet it is stranger than Zanzibar. The pale north light itself is delusive, lingering in the weeks before and after the solstice till midnight and more. The tourist's mind accepts this fifth-grade geography stunner, but his blood and bone do not. They are roiled by restless energy, and they want to order another drink, carry it outside and watch the sun not set. (Whap! Smack! Fierce four-engine mosquitoes alter this plan instantly.) Roadlessness accounts for some of the newcomer's sense of dislocation. You can drive from Jersey City to Anchorage, a matter of some 4,500 miles. But you can't drive from Juneau, the capital, to Anchorage. The road from Juneau goes 40 miles and stops. Take a plane. Take a ferry; in Alaska, the ferries are part of the highway system. Taylor Highway, a gravel track passable in summer, heads north from the Alaska Highway through Chicken (so named, according to local lore, because its founders could not spell ptarmigan) and eventually reaches Eagle, where it stops. The most self-indulgent and leisurely way to reach Alaska is to head for Seattle or Vancouver, board a cruise ship and eat your way north. For its 625 passengers on a recent seven-day voyage from Vancouver to Whittier, a seaport near Anchorage, the Cunard Princess stocked its cold rooms with 12,500 lbs. of beef and 6,000 lbs. of seafood. Guests, who paid $1,325 to $2,670 for the trip, could experience the thrust and heave of great tectonic plates of nourishment at prebreakfast, breakfast, midmorning bouillon, lunch, tea, a five-course dinner and, of course, midnight buffet. Jay Johnson, 23, a well- and happily fed store owner from Durham, N.C., speared a chunk of king crab and admitted that anyplace else ''it would cost me a fortune to eat like this.'' Passengers on such cruise ships tend to be middle-aged or elderly. They have, perhaps, toured Europe's museums and castles as a pleasurable duty imposed years ago by college art history classes. Alaska, not a required course, is an agreeable extra. For Bill and Joan Armstrong of Philadelphia, who had seen Westminster Abbey and the Swiss Alps, the ship itself was an attraction. Gliding by at 20 knots, the view is astonishing: the vast Hubbard and Columbia glaciers tumbling into the ocean, the green islands of the Inside Passage, the jagged, snowblown Chugach mountain range. Landfalls are on a different scale. Skagway is a small, ramshackle old gold-rush boomtown made cheerful and shiny for tourists. Juneau, a brisk, up- all-night little city of 30,000, is the place to visit the Red Dog Saloon at twilight, which falls somewhere around midnight, and see the St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church, a tiny jewel box built in 1894. It is also a place to catch the scent of fear among businessmen who depend on boomtown prosperity. Alaska's oil boom has busted, but tourism may bail everyone out. Twenty-five ship tours are headed for southeast Alaska this summer, some of them run by firms that pulled out of the Mediterranean after terrorism wrecked the cruise business there. Governor Bill Sheffield nervously counts the house with what is beginning to sound like real optimism. ''Not bad, not bad,'' he says of the expected 1 million travelers, 200,000 over the now normal 12% to 15% growth rate. (Some 710,000 tourists showed up last year.) The state's tourism director, Don Dickey, says, ''This will be the party year.'' Already, as the state swings into summer, the party is on. The most spectacular sight in central Alaska is massive 20,320-ft. Denali, or Mount McKinley. Unfortunately, Denali is 200 miles away from the nearest cruiseship landing point. Customary transportation to Denali National Park in the Alaska range is by bus. Correctly figuring that most affluent U.S. tourists would rather take hookworm medicine than a bus, an outfit called Tour Alaska had the superior idea of buying several old domed railroad observation cars, built to take big spenders from Chicago to the West Coast in the '50s. These splendid arks, nicely refurbished and staffed with chefs and strolling musicians, now shuttle between Anchorage and Fairbanks every day as the Midnight Sun Express, stopping at Denali in mid-journey. Travelers sip champagne and goggle at moose and caribou while reflecting that a really high- tech society would reinvent the railroad, as an art form if necessary. Tourists can stay outside the park at the comfortable Crow's Nest Cabins on Sugar Loaf Mountain, overlooking Horseshoe Lake ($65 a night), or at any of several campgrounds in the forested foothills of Denali. The Wonder Lake