Having explored Indian and African wildlife, I never had Alaska on my priority list until my daughter moved to Vancouver a couple of years ago and I started hearing about the Alaskan wilderness. Once I had made up my mind to visit this part of the world, I planned the trip and landed in Vancouver last month with cameras packed, appetite sharpened and the Pacific stretched ahead of me like a promise. Alaska had occupied a particular corner of my imagination — a place of immense silence, muscular weather and animals that have never agreed to live on a human scale.
Our route took us north through the Inside Passage. It began in Ketchikan, continued to Juneau and Skagway, and ended amid the monumental ice fields and waterbound wilderness of Glacier Bay. As a wildlife photographer, I travelled with the usual instincts — follow the light, stay patient, anticipate movement. As a restaurateur, I brought another kind of attention, to the waters that sustain this extraordinary place, to the stories behind its seafood, and to the taste of salmon caught close to the cold, clean source of its life.
Alaska is often photographed as a vast landscape. But what stays with me is its aliveness.
Ketchikan: In bear country
Ketchikan arrived in rain, the kind that does not simply fall but seems to belong to the forest. The town sits at the edge of the Tongass National Forest, a world of cedar, spruce, moss and dark streams.
A humpback whale breaks the silence, Bear cubs with their mother in Ketchikan, A bear with a fresh catch of salmon
Everything appeared saturated: the timber, the rocks, the air itself. For a wildlife photographer, it is a thrilling place to be, especially during salmon season. Brown and black bears walk near the rivers where salmon return from the ocean, moving upstream in a cycle that has shaped this landscape for millennia.
The first sighting is difficult to describe without resorting to exaggeration. A bear does not merely enter the frame; it changes the frame. Suddenly, every branch, every glint of water, every sound becomes part of a tense and ancient scene. We watched bears working the river with astonishing focus, waiting, lunging, and emerging from the shallows with a flash of silver-pink muscle in their jaws.
Photographing them required restraint. The best images came not from chasing a moment but from allowing the moment to unfold. A paw lifted above the current. A salmon twisting in mid-air. Two bear cubs watching their mother from the bank. Steam rising from fur in the cool rain.
Overhead were bald eagles, sometimes perched like sentinels On the tallest trees, sometimes circling the rivers with unnerving precision. In Ketchikan, eagles are not a rare spectacle. They are part of the daily visual grammar of the place — white heads catching the flat northern light, hooked profiles visible against a sky that never quite settles.
Then there was the salmon. I have eaten salmon in celebrated restaurants across the world, prepared by fine chefs with impeccable technique. Yet the salmon I tasted in Alaska carried something more elemental. Whether simply grilled, smoked or served with the barest seasoning, it had a purity and depth that needed no embellishment. As a restaurateur, I found it humbling. Great ingredients do not ask to be overexplained. They ask to be respected.
Juneau: Where the sea comes to life
From Ketchikan, we continued to Juneau, Alaska’s compact and dramatic capital, hemmed in by mountains, water and wilderness. It is a place where civilisation feels provisional, and beautifully so. The sea is never far away, and neither is the sense that something immense may surface at any moment.
Juneau is widely celebrated for whale watching, and it is easy to understand why. The waters of Auke Bay and the surrounding channels offer an extraordinary chance to see humpback whales feeding, travelling and sometimes breaching with a force that seems almost impossible for an animal of such size.
A whale sighting begins quietly. A guide points. The boat slows. The water, which had seemed empty, becomes charged with possibility.
Then comes the spout, a brief burst of breath against the horizon. Another appears farther away. Soon the surface is marked by movement — backs rolling through the water, fins breaking the reflected grey of the sky, tails lifting before disappearing into the depths. The humpbacks were the headline act, of course. But the experience was richer for the smaller details — sea lions crowded on rocky outcrops, porpoises slicing through the bow wake, gulls wheeling above baitfish, and vast, forested slopes descending directly into the sea.
For the camera, the challenge was timing. For the heart, there was no challenge at all. Watching a humpback raise its tail against the mountains was one of those rare moments when every person on board seemed to forget to speak.
Skagway: A different Alaska
Skagway offered another side of Alaska. After the overwhelming scale of mountains, forests and oceans, the town brought a sense of history and human drama to the journey.
The Klondike Gold Rush is inseparable from Skagway’s identity. The town became a gateway for prospectors heading towards the Yukon in search of gold, fortune and a better life.
Walking through Skagway, I found myself thinking about the extraordinary courage, and perhaps madness, of the people who travelled through these unforgiving landscapes more than a century ago. Today, tourists arrive with cameras, comfortable clothes and carefully planned itineraries. The prospectors arrived with dreams. The landscape, however, remains largely indifferent to both.
That is one of Alaska’s great characteristics. It does not bend itself to accommodate us. It reminds us that humans are visitors here.
Skagway is also a great place for whale watching, with both humpbacks and orcas, or killer whales. From Skagway, the waters of the Lynn Canal offered one of the journey’s most exhilarating wildlife encounters: whales on the move beneath a vast Alaskan sky. Humpbacks surfaced with their familiar rhythm, first a distant plume, then the dark arch of a back, and occasionally the unforgettable lift of a tail before slipping below.
More electrifying still was the sight of orcas, sleek black-and-white forms cutting cleanly through the steel-blue water. They travelled with a purpose and precision that made every camera on board rise at once. With snow-streaked mountains and thick coastal forest framing the channel, the encounter felt less like a tour and more like a privileged glimpse into a world ruled entirely by the sea.
Glacier Bay: Unreal blue
If Ketchikan belongs to the river and Juneau belongs to the sea, Glacier Bay belongs to scale.
Nothing quite prepares you for it. The mountains rise sharply from the water, their slopes clothed in dark forest before giving way to rock, snow and ice. Glaciers occupy the horizon with a presence that is both serene and unsettling. Their blue seems unreal. It is not the soft blue of a postcard but a deep, compressed colour formed by centuries of snow becoming ice.
We stood on deck in layers, cameras ready, as the ship moved through waters that felt almost ceremonial. The silence was immense. Then, from somewhere across the bay, came the crack and thunder of calving ice.
It is a sound that goes through you. A section of glacier breaks free, falls into the water and sends a shock through the landscape. It is beautiful, but it also reminds you that this place is changing. Glacier Bay is not a museum. It is a living, shifting environment, its ice, water, weather and wildlife in constant conversation.
Wildlife appeared almost everywhere: harbour seals resting on floating ice, sea otters drifting on their backs, mountain goats barely visible on impossible slopes, and birds tracing the air currents above the bay. Even at its most spectacular, the landscape never felt staged. It felt indifferent to our presence, and that was part of its power.
A feast with a sense of place
Travel is often reduced to a checklist: landmark, photograph, meal, departure. Alaska resists that kind of consumption. Its food, especially its seafood, is inseparable from the landscape. The salmon on a plate carries the river. The halibut carries the cold Pacific. Even a simple chowder feels connected to the fishing communities and working boats that make such meals possible.
As a foodie to the core, I came away convinced that the most memorable dining is always rooted in place. In Alaska, that connection is impossible to miss. A perfectly cooked fillet of salmon is not just dinner; it is the final note in a story that begins in the ocean, travels through a river and sustains bears, eagles, forests and people alike.I started the trip from Vancouver, looking north for a grand adventure. We came home with memory cards full of bears, eagles, whales, ice and rain, but also with something less easily catalogued.
Alaska recalibrates the eye. It reminds us that wilderness is not scenery. It is a system of lives unfolding beyond our control, magnificent precisely because it does not need our approval.
For a photographer, it was a gift of light, motion and patience. For a restaurateur, it was a lesson in provenance and simplicity. For anyone who travels there with an open mind, it is an encounter with a world still governed by tides, migrations, weather and wild instinct.
And somewhere in the damp green quiet of Ketchikan, beneath the wide northern sky of Juneau and before the ancient ice of Glacier Bay, I found myself putting the camera down.
Some visions are meant to be photographed. Others are meant to be carried home.
Shiladitya Chaudhury is a communications consultant and restaurateur whose brands include Oudh 1590, Chapter 2 and Chaudhury & Company. His passion for wildlife photography takes him to the remotest of landscapes.
Cameras used: Sony A9 with 200-600mm lens | Sony RX10 Mark IV