Glacier Landing / Dog Sledding

Does anyone know if the Helicopter tour Princess offers for Dogsledding actually stops on a glacier for a walkabout or does it just fly over the glaciers and then go to the dog camp?

You fly around the glaciers from the helicopter. When you land at the dog camp, you are on a glacier. So you walk on that for awhile. I went in Skagway through Princess and I loved it! The best excursion we did. We met and played with the dogs that were given us the sled ride. Since I grew up with Siberian Huskies, the musher let me meet all the pure bred huskies up there and I spent more time with them. There was only 5 of us on the tour so we had alot of personal interaction. I even held a 12 day old puppy. I cannot compare to an actual glacier Trek, but we walked about the glacier throughout the dog camp.

I was very sorry to miss out on dog sledding. It was about the only excursion I really wanted to do.....other than the canopy excursion in Ketchikan.

The dog sledding was not offered on our cruise, so I contacted about 6-8 companies offering this excursion....I was going to book on my own. They all said that because of the warm weather, snow melting, etc, that they were almost all going to close down by mid-August. One company said they might stay open until early-Sept...and two told me that one year, because of cold summer nights, they actually continued offering the excusions until about Sept 10. We don not even leave from Seattle until the last week of Sept.

I guess we'll have to plan an Alaska trip early summer and I'll get to go dog sledding sometime in my life.

Have fun....I'm jealous.

Kevin - Do you remember which company said they might stay open until early September?

There aren't 6-8 companies offering this on the inside passage. They probably tried to book with booking agents who looked at the same companies. There is only ERA, TEMSCO and Coastal on the inside passage offering glacier dog sledding. Out of Seward Godwins.

Glacier dog sledding goes on more snow, where the glacier landings are more ice.

When I went with ERA in Juneau, we landed on the middle branch of the Norris Glacier. However, we were far enough in the glacier that the dog camp was sitting on top of 7 feet of snow, below the snow was 1/4 mile of ice. Therefore, you technically land on a glacier, but its a snow covered glacier, so its really kind of like you're landing at your local ski resort, you can see or feel the ice below your feet. To get a real glacier ice landing experience, you need to take a separate excursion that actual lands on a glacier.

When I get home tonight, I'll try to take a look and see if I archieved those messages. Since they indicated they certainly would be still be operating, I'm not sure I kept the replies.

FYI....I simply Googled "dog sledding" and "Juneau," and it came up with many hits. I contacted those whose homepages looked like the actaul operator, not a consolidator.