I just heard about this today and I’m really intrigued on the whole concept. It seems more like a budget transportation cruise made by the US government. This person has a blog of their trip with lots of pictures. Here’s the DOT of Alaska’s website and the wikipedia site too.
Has anybody done this? I would love to hear some stories/feedback.
Hmmm. North Carolina has ferries, too: while bridges access those parts of the Outer Banks that are across relatively narrow waterways, other parts would require inordinate expenditure to build bridges, and permitting vehicle access by ferry is the less expensive way to go.
While most of Alaska is on the North American continent, and the exceptions are on neighboring islands, large parts of the state are in the position of being small flat or hilly settled areas surrounded by essentially inaccessible terrain – the sort of thing that in the Rockies or Cascades one would either go around, do massive regrading to go over, or build a tunnel through. Here, however, you’re talking dozens of instances of a few thousand people in a habitable coastal valley, and the cost of building land-based connections would be many times that of running the ferry service, for the benefit of only the residents of those individual small valleys plus what relatively few people decided they wanted to drive there.
Alternatively, you could simply say that these people are supposed to pay U.S. income tax, gas tax, etc., for the purpose of subsidizing freeway construction in the lower 48 states, but themselves have no right to access to the highway system they help pay for. Using Federal money to build a road into town would certainly be legitimate, same as building a highway to connect, say, Miami and Sarasota, or a bridge connecting Miami Beach to Miami. But it would be inordinately more expensive that subsidies of a ferry service.
Like many another thing that at first seems to be special privilege for a few, it turns out on examination that it is the lowest-cost way of providing them equal benefit with others.
Yup. In May 2003, I took the AMH ferry from Bellingham to Ketchikan, then up the coast to Petersburg, Juneau, and Skagway, and then back to Juneau and across the gulf to Seward. FANTASTIC trip. I’d probably skip Skagway if I were going to do it again, because it’s just your basic cruise-ship tourist town and you can see plenty of that elsewhere, but I highly, highly recommend it. You see bald eagles all along the coast, and the occasional whale, and porpoises like to swim right along the ferry.
Couple of practical tips: No cooking facilities on board, and the ferry food tends to be overpriced and generally unimpressive, but they do have hot water, so if you’re on a budget you can stock up on instant noodles and oatmeal and that sort of thing. If you have a mattress pad and a good sleeping bag, you can get very comfortable on deck without having to pay for a cabin (and waking up on the back of the ferry with a view of the mountains is the very best way to wake up).
It does take some planning to make sure you hit all the places you want to go, so if you have only a week or so to play with you’re probably better off taking a cheap cruise, but if time isn’t a major issue, the ferries are cool, and it’s a good way to meet people who actually LIVE there instead of other tourists.
I grew up in Wrangell, Alaska, which is served by the Alaska Marine Highway System.
As the vast majority of the communities in Southeastern Alaska are either located on islands or located on areas of the mainland which are not served by a highway system (including the state capital, Juneau), the ferry system provides a way for those communities to be connected to each other, the remainder of the state and the remainder of the country.
I’ve taken more trips on the AMHS than I can conveniently count. It’s probably the best way to see Southeastern Alaska - and if you’re a resident, it’s the only really feasible alternative if you want to go to another town. As one random example, high school sports teams quite often take the ferry to games. If you want to visit friends, you take the ferry. If you want to go to a movie (there wasn’t a theater in my hometown), you take the ferry. If you want to do more-than-baseline clothes shopping, or furniature shopping, or just get the hell out of town for a day or two, you take the ferry.
If you have specific questions, feel free to ask 
It’s been a few years since I sailed the friendly seas, but I doubt the experience has changed all that much
I did the Inside Passage ferry years ago after hitchhiking across much of the interior in an attempt to see what parts of the state I’d not worked in yet. That started in Skagway and cruised down through Juneau, Sitka, Petersburg and other interesting little towns down to Ketchikan. Just threw a sleeping bag on a lawnchair on the open rear deck and enjoyed the Humpies, Killer Whales, Dall and RM Bighorns and the aurora. It was pretty wonderfull actually.