Alaska is enormous – more than six times the size of the whole UK – but with just one per cent of the population.

Plus it’s also a long way – so I broke my journey in Seattle, where the temperature stuck at over 100F.

However, 1,400 more miles north to Anchorage, the skies turned to grey with a chilly breeze; pretty much par for the summer I understand in this rather unappealing hub of the USA’s 49th State.

But no matter; I was staying – at least on land – for only a few days. I’d come to see Alaska by ship, not foot or car.

So after 48 hours of being land-bound, during which I took the Alaska Railroad to the delightful little town of Talkeetna (allegedly the setting for the TV series Northern Exposure), and an afternoon boat ride through the Kenai Fjords (sightings of humpback whales, sea lions and puffins gave me my first taste of what the next 12 days were going to be like) I boarded the MS Clipper Odyssey for the cruise to Vancouver.

Now the beauty of small-ship ‘expedition cruising’ is that it includes frequent opportunities to board inflatable dinghies (‘zodiacs’) and get right up close to nature. So early on our first morning, I took the chance to visit Harriman Fjord with its three great glaciers (in Alaska, you pronounce it ‘glay-sher’), and what a baptism ... by ice that proved to be.

Thunderous booms echoed from the shifting ice, and within minutes we witnessed a HUGE ‘calving’ (vast chunks of ice breaking off into the sea).

But that wasn’t all; an iceberg larger than a house (assuming the principle of ‘only one-tenth’ held true) starting moving as if driven by an unseen hand – trapping one of the zodiacs and threatening to push it back into the mass of ice.

Somehow – though frankly I don’t know – the driver managed to work the boat free and we all breathed again.

By afternoon, the drama of just a few hours before forgotten, we were in bright sunshine, under azure skies, and there were the sea otters.

Curious, but skittish and timid, they watched as we drifted close enough to see them preparing lunch – lying on their backs in the water, breaking open shellfish with stones they have carefully selected (they keep their favourite implement in a pouch inside their front leg).

A magical moment, and you had to stare hard to convince yourself that this was the real thing and not another David Attenborough documentary.

We managed our first wet landing (ie you wade ashore, and there’s a prize if you manage NOT to let the swell break gently over the top of your boots) at Kayak Island.

No sooner ashore than we spotted, almost as an ominous warning sign, fresh bear tracks.

Obviously, no-one wandered off from the group here.

Now, when you’ve seen one glacier, as they say, you’ve seen ’em all, but Hubbard Glacier was something else.

North America’s longest tidewater glacier stretches 76 miles and its sheer 400ft cliff-face is six miles across.

Thankfully, the wildlife is keen to get in on the action too and not let the scenery take all the glory.

For instance, just after dawn we turned away from the Gulf of Alaska into Icy Strait (these names lend themselves readily) and at Point Adolphus we watched a group of giant humpbacks taking breakfast.

Another small-ship advantage is the chance to stop at places where the vast cruise liners cannot – and so we arrived at Haines.

Founded by a Presbyterian missionary in 1880, it boomed during the Klondike Gold Rush, before a border dispute with Canada in 1903 led to the building of Fort Seward.

Now its fine white-framed buildings are private residences perched gracefully above the town.

Here we had our first contact with the local Tlingit (‘Kling –it’) people and their culture (now being strenuously revived and preserved, after official efforts to suppress it just a few decades ago) and visited the world’s only museum dedicated to ... hammers. Mmm.

Meanwhile sightings of bald eagles were becoming wonderfully frequent.

The eagle and the raven (‘the trickster’) are central to Tlingit culture and beliefs, and – with the bear, wolf, beaver, killer whale and salmon – they feature widely on totem poles and other carvings.

Indeed, we saw much of this during our stop at Kake, home to Alaska’s largest totem, 132 feet high and carved from a single tree.

Next stop was the fishing port of Petersburg, founded by Norwegians at the end of the 19th century; in fact, Norwegian Independence Day is celebrated every May, and fans of the Discovery Channel series Deadliest Catch which demonstrates the very real perils of Alaskan king crab fishing were able to board Saga, one of the featured boats.

Seeing it ‘in the flesh’ so to speak, it was hard to believe that such a small vessel could withstand the battering it takes from the savage Arctic seas.

Overnight we crossed into Canadian waters and British Columbia, towards the deep-sea port of Prince Rupert (places here are often named after rather obscure royals – a cousin of Charles II, he was the first governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company). The port was established in 1906 as the proposed terminus of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad.

In 1912, Charles Hays, the magnate who masterminded the founding of Prince Rupert, set off for England to raise capital to complete the railway.

Hoping for some useful ‘networking’ on the return trip, he joined the fateful maiden voyage of the Titanic ...

As a result, Vancouver grabbed the initiative to become Canada’s major Pacific port, and the only sign today of Hays’ ambitions is his statue beside City Hall.

On the waterfront, the Cow Bay area is home to Smiles Cafe, a local landmark since 1934 (during the Second World War, it stayed open 24- hours a day, serving the thousands of US and Canadian troops stationed here), as well as Cowpuccino’s coffee-shop and the ‘fashion’ outlet Udder Bags.

Our final shore excursion took us to Alert Bay, home for several thousand years to the Namgis First Nation, and now once again an important centre for native art and customs.

Reboarding the Clipper Odyssey for the final leg of our journey, our final challenge was to spot some of the ‘resident’ killer whales (orcas), one of the complex family groups which frequent these waters around southern Vancouver Island.

And sure enough, our guide (who in a previous life played a key role in the release of Keiko, the star of the movie Free Willy) drew on his local contacts to help find them.

A magical end, then, to an unforgettable journey.