The Fourth Way to Alaska: Cruising the Northwest Passage

Right now, National Geographic Resolution is somewhere in the Canadian Arctic, working her way west toward Nome. She boarded 138 guests in Nuuk, Greenland on July 30 and is due to disembark them in Nome on August 20: a 21-night crossing of the Northwest Passage, the ice-choked route over the top of North America that explorers spent four centuries dying to find.

She is sailing to Alaska the way almost nothing does.

Quick facts

Three ordinary roads, one extraordinary one

Alaska's cruise fleet assembles every spring along three well-worn paths. Ships winter in the Caribbean and come through the Panama Canal. Ships winter in Asia and Australia and cross the Pacific. Ships winter on the West Coast and simply run north. Sixty-five ships called in Alaska in 2026, and nearly all of them arrived one of those three ways.

The fourth way exists mostly in the record books. Since Roald Amundsen completed the first transit of the Northwest Passage in 1906 (a crossing that took him three years), the Scott Polar Research Institute has counted 465 complete transits of the passage by 317 different vessels. That's every icebreaker, every research vessel, every adventurer's sailboat, everything. Only about 100 of those transits were made by passenger vessels.

For comparison: the Panama Canal handles more than 30 ship transits on an average day.

When is the Northwest Passage open to ships?

The passage threads the islands of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago through a series of choke points with names that read like a casualty list: Lancaster Sound, Peel Sound, Bellot Strait, the Victoria Strait that trapped Franklin's expedition in the 1840s. Sea ice locks the route for most of the year. Even in the brief late-summer window, ice conditions at the choke points decide who gets through and when; a route that's open one week can close the next.

That's why every passenger transit is an expedition rather than a cruise in the usual sense: ice-strengthened hulls, flexible day-by-day routing, and itineraries that promise a direction rather than a schedule. Resolution, with 138 guests, 116 staff and crew, and a Polar Class 5 hull, was built for exactly this. On this crossing, Lindblad's route plan includes the Bellot Strait, which the line calls one of the narrowest and most infamous stretches of the passage: a 16-mile channel between the mainland's northernmost point and Somerset Island.

The 2026 over-the-top club

Three passenger ships are crossing the roof of the continent this season, and the direction of travel tells its own story.

National Geographic Resolution is westbound into Alaska, Nuuk to Nome, July 30 to August 20, after which she continues down the Alaska coast toward Japan. Seabourn Venture is running the passage twice, in luxury-expedition trim: two 24-day crossings between Kangerlussuaq, Greenland and Anchorage, departing August 6 and August 29. And HX's Roald Amundsen, named for the man who did it first, is going the other way entirely: a 26-day run from Seattle to Reykjavik, leaving Alaska by the same door the others are entering through.

One fleet's worth of ships comes to Alaska down and around. A few come over the top, and Scott Polar writes each one into a register that has fewer entries than the Panama Canal collects in a month.

Related on CruiseMigration

• National Geographic Resolution ship page — follow her crossing
• How We Track Cruise Ships: AIS, Itineraries, and Why Glacier Bay Goes Dark — including why remote waters go quiet
• Two World Cruises, One Pacific Crossing: Volendam vs Coral Princess
• MS Volendam in Kodiak: The Off-Script Alaska Port

Sources

• Scott Polar Research Institute — Northwest Passage transits to the end of the 2025 navigation season (R.K. Headland) — the transit register itself
• Lindblad Expeditions — Northwest Passage: Greenland to Alaska — itinerary, route plan, and NG Resolution specifications
• National Geographic Expeditions — Northwest Passage cruise — Polar Class 5 vessel details and ice-dependent routing
• Seabourn, 2026 Northwest Passage expedition announcement
• HX (Hurtigruten Expeditions), Northwest Passage itineraries
• Panama Canal Authority, transit statistics