My Name is Teresa and this is my 5th season working for the Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge. I work at The Princess Homestead, our employee housing located in Healy.

I lived right here in Healy, Alaska for 25 years……..yes year round. Its a great place to raise kids and enjoy a simple life from 90 degrees above zero to 60 degrees below zero.

In 2006 I got a wonderful opportunity to work here in employee housing as a front desk clerk. The following year I came back as the front desk supervisor. I must say if ever there was a job made just for me it is this one. I truely love each and every employee and love working for Princess.

Princess has been a very generous neighbor in our community. A few of the wonderful things that have happened for the residents of Healy includes holding a charity garage sale with all proceeds going to the local non profit for providing Christmas food boxes; providing cookies and milk for the opening day of school; holding the High School Prom in the Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge lobby before the season even started. Princess has been there for Healy!

When my husband retired in 2008 , we chose to move to Wyoming and leave Alaska. But I have returned for the last 2 years to work again for Princess because of the employees and the company. What a great place to WORK!!

I worked at the Front Desk of the hotel and made friends from all over the world.  I gained valuable experience and training for my resume.  Every day off I was in the Park, hiking & exploring and finding my own adventures.  It was truly an amazing experience.  At the end of the summer, some of these new friends and I took advantage of the discounted cruise program available to seasonal employees, and did 3 cruises!  The first cruise was to Bermuda for 7 days and then the next 2 were back-to-back cruises from Ft. Lauderdale to Valparaiso, Chile.  After traveling through Peru and hiking at Macchu Picchu, I called home to get monetary assistance for a plane ticket back home (aka, I called the Bank of Mom) to make it just in time for Christmas. 

The next spring, after volunteering for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and working at a local ski resort, my mom prodded me that it was time to get a “real” job.  But I wasn’t ready to be working 40 hours a week in a cubicle for some job that didn’t excite me or offer interesting opportunities to see the world!  So I decided to go back to Alaska and work for a company that offers a great working environment, training and travel opportunities.  This is now my 10^th summer in Alaska and with Princess.  Never did I imagine that my fun summer job would turn into my “real” job—I guess you never know what’s going to happen when you spend a summer in Alaska working for Princess!

I love my job! I was born and raised in Fairbanks Alaska and love showing my home to visitors. Our passengers are always happy and fun to talk to. My fellow employees, whether Driver/Guides, outfitters or supervisors, are very professional and always willing to help. I try to give my guests the Alaskan Experience I would like to receive. The company has great training and are great people to work with.

Driver/Guide – summer job

High School teacher – winter job

Wade – Driver Guide – Fairbanks, Alaska

My second season I wanted a chance to get out of the office, so I applied to be an outfitter. The job terrified me at first because I was pretty sure I was entirely incompetent at dealing with people. With the help of a great supervisor and awesome coworkers, I gained a lot of confidence and quickly got over the fears I had about talking to guests.

My fourth season I became an outfitter supervisor, and I loved almost every minute of it. At that point, even the toughest, loudest yelling guest couldn’t unnerve me and I loved being able to fix their problems and help change their view of Princess for the better.

I’m now in the middle of my sixth and final season and I’m currently the Fairbanks Logistics Coordinator. I’ll miss being able to come back to my friends in Alaska every summer, but I know that my experiences with the company will help me fulfill my goals for the future.

Reagan – Logistics Coordinator – Fairbanks, Alaska

I started working in Ketchikan; I was there for two seasons. It was a great time! I met friends that I am sure will be my friends for many years to come. The most important thing I learned in Ketchikan was how to give a good tour. I made mistakes, but since the tours coincided with the ships, I might give 2 tours a day, so I could make adjustments quickly if I found I needed too. Then, three years ago, I started working In Fairbanks. Boy, was that a change. Since there are no ships it is a 24/7 operation. It was a bit strange the first time I had to be at work at 3:00am to pick people up from the airport and I was wearing my sunglasses because the sun was still shining! I did the multi-day highway tours for folks that book the land tours either before or after their cruise. That is when my experience in Ketchikan played a huge role. I knew what it took to make a good tour. I did my homework about the mountains, vegetation, rivers, glaciers, roads, and lakes that we would be seeing. I knew from my own experience in taking tours that a driver/guide with a good personality can make or break a tour, but more importantly the information needed to be accurate, and MOST importantly I had to be a good, safe driver. I always want guests to feel safe while I am driving.

When I came to Fairbanks to work, I also started working as a trainer. I teach new employees how to drive our motorcoaches. This can be a pretty stressful job. But I believe it is so important to teach new drivers what it takes to be safe drivers. There have been many days when I was out in our parking lot setting up cones for people to drive around at 20 below zero, and I am cold and miserable, but in the long run they always become better drivers because of the time all the trainers put in to teach good driving skills. For me it is also a good chance to get to know a lot of the new drivers. These are going to be my co-workers, people I will look for to help with luggage or share a good laugh while waiting for the riverboat to come in.

I have had the opportunity to do every highway tour that the companies offer. I love doing them all for different reasons, they each are unique and test me in different ways. This summer I came back because I wanted to do tours to Prudhoe Bay. It is one of the remote places in Alaska that tours on motorcoaches are done. The challenges in doing this tour are huge, but I feel that I have risen to the occasion because of my training and the support of the management team when problems do come up. In my years, I have seen moose, bears, eagles, glaciers, whales, willow ptarmigan, musk ox, the Arctic Ocean, Denali Mountain, and Beluga whales. I have driven the Denali highway, the top of the world highway, the Taylor, the Dalton, the parks, the Seward, the glen, and the Alaska Highway. I have met people from just about every state, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Poland, Great Britain, hungry, Italy, Brazil, Mexico, Sweden, Argentina, Japan, Thailand, South Africa, and France. These are experiences and people I would have never have met working in laboratory in southern California.

Jill – Driver Guide – Fairbanks, Alaska

Heidi – Driver Guide – Fairbanks, Alaska

Gary – Driver Guide – Fairbanks, Alaska

My first year, I will always remember how I hated salmon before moving to AK. The Alaska Salmon Bake venue gave us a free comp ticket to try their food so we could give our guests the suggestion to dine there while in town. I was impressed they actually got me to try salmon and surprisingly I loved it, because of their brown sugar based secret sauce. Well, I got so excited about the food, I did tell the guests about it and sold a bunch of dinner vouchers, as well as tickets to see the Palace Saloon show (since I’m the theatre buff). To my surprise, at the end of the season, Alaskan Experience (who owns the Salmon Bake and Palace show, as well as another dinner and show venue in Ester that I sold) awarded me with 2 round trip Alaska Airlines tickets for being the top seller in Fairbanks! Wow! What great perks at this job! The connections with our vendors are awesome! A few years later, I also worked for Alaskan Experience partially because of that connection!

After working a few seasons, I finally took advantage of the space available cruise program for employees. It was unbelievably inexpensive and my first request was confirmed a month in advance to be on the brand new Island Princess’ 3rd voyage through the Inside Passage in August 2003. I worked right up until I started to see guests arrive in Fairbanks who would be on the very cruise I was going on! I ended up finally doing the exact tour that I had been a part of on the other side. Now I could truly put myself in the guest’s shoes! I took the train to Denali and McKinley, stayed a few nights, and did a bunch of comp tours. The cruise itself was an amazing experience and even living in Alaska, I had never been to all the little southeast towns. Snorkeling in Ketchikan, Hiking in Juneau, and catching a Salmon bare handed out of a stream running with tons of them in Skagway were among the highlights of my ports of call! The ship was beautiful, the food was superb, the staff was friendly and knowledgeable, and the theatre shows were so vibrant and intriguing!

When I got back from my trip, I felt even more prepared to answer the guests’ questions since I had actually been through the whole tour myself. I loved telling people about other things to look forward to at our other lodges, on the ship itself, and neat things to look out for on their ports of call. I had a wonderful sense of my job being a breeze, with each day being another shared experience between the guests and I. Although there are days where you juggle lots of issues at once, I always found it to be a fun challenge, and being busy makes the day go by quickly. I even took on a position one summer of being a Luggage Liaison between the company and the Airlines. I helped track down any delayed luggage and worked any issues guests had with their luggage. I know it may not sound like fun, but working with a good crew out at the airport made it easier! I also implemented an organized system with detailed notes and a log book that is still being used today. I think it wasn’t always that scary when I had to tell a guest their bag didn’t make it on this flight, because my confidence and knowledge of the system left them feeling like they were in capable hands and they would soon receive their bag in their room.

Getting off work (as much as I like being there) and doing things around Fairbanks is a nice change of pace. Go canoeing on the Chena River, have a BBQ with friends at Pioneer Park (or Alaskaland as it will always be remembered by the locals!), catch a summer movie, go for a hike, relax at Chena Hotsprings, go on a 4-wheeling adventure, horseback riding, ride a bike, try rock wall climbing, go out dancing with friends, a baseball game, the Solstice celebration, Golden Days festivities, go to the Fair in August, etc…play in the midnight sun! At the end of your work day or work week, you should definitely take the time to put aside a little of your hard earned cash and enjoy yourself. There’s so much to do outdoors and the friends you make here, how could you not enjoy the summer!

I continued to work almost every summer since I first began, but being out of state for most of college, I skipped a summer or two. One of the summers I skipped was to actually take another space available cruise with my mom in Europe. (She worked as a driver guide one summer and loved it!) My mom is from Denmark, so going round trip Copenhagen for a 10 day cruise through the Baltic was awesome! Again the cruise ship never ceases to amaze me with gorgeous accommodations, awesome staff, delectable food, and great entertainment! The ports of call included Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Estonia, and Russia. There are too many fabulous experiences to reflect on, but I love telling friends and family all about these foreign countries and our adventures there! We also stayed in Denmark for a full month visiting family I hadn’t seen since I was a young girl. I was so grateful that my job with Princess had led to me seeing parts of the world I may not have experienced and family I may never have met had I not taken advantage of the perks; memories I will cherish for a lifetime!
After graduating with my BA in Theatre Performance and Youth Drama from Central Washington University, I worked for a bit there in Ellensburg before hearing my Fairbanks summer calling to me! I decided I would move back and have my summer job back. I drove the AlCan (Alaska-Canadian Highway) and survived with a small chip in my windshield. It was fun driving up with a girlfriend of mine and seeing part of the trip I took back in ‘99 to move with my family from Tampa, FL to North Pole, AK. It took 3 days from Seattle to get to Prince Rupert, we took the ferry for 2 days to Haines, and then made the last overnight right outside the border with only a handful of hours to drive the next day. It was the first week of March and there in the sky, the beautiful Northern Lights were dancing, as if to welcome us back to the great north, the last frontier! After dealing with a flat tire, we rolled into town and I was so excited. There’s that strange feeling that nothing really changed, the people with their small town friendliness and the Alaskan wilderness backdrop, and yet at the same time so much has changed with so much build up in the town as little as Fairbanks grows by leaps and bounds!

I went in for my interview with a manager, who offered me my seasonal position with no reservations, but mentioned that I might check out a position that was open for year-round full time and fully benefitted. I figured why not give it a shot since I enjoyed working seasonally, a full time position could be full of rewarding experiences! Having been around for many years, my knowledge of our operations and my eagerness to dive into a new position apparently rubbed off on my current bosses. I am now the Administrative Assistant for Interior Operations. I help manage our fleet for Alaska and cater to a senior level of executives. I work in Fairbanks year round and I really enjoy the position so far. The office staff and their constant buzz during the busy season around the office, makes for a great work environment. There also seem to be as many perks as the seasonal jobs and more! I’m guessing that the next chapter in this story of mine will be a fun, challenging and a great life experience just as the past years have been! So come join us for a great seasonal job, you never know where it might lead you!

Christina – Administrative Assistant – Fairbanks, Alaska

When I get to the yard, I check the highway board before going to my coach. I leave for Prudhoe Bay on Friday morning with 34 guests. The fireweed is in peak bloom, and there will be miles of magenta blossoms on either side of the haul road for a lot of the trip north. We’ll leave the fireweed and boreal forest behind us as we push toward the bay, traverse Atigun Pass scanning for Dall sheep, and hope that it doesn’t snow. . .even though it’s July. I can smile through my bag pull because I will be at the Arctic Ocean in 72 hours, because I will take photographs of smiling guests who waited years to stand on that beach or plunge headlong into the frigid water just to say they did it. Maybe someone will pull me into the picture with them, and I will live forever on a coffee table in a photo album in Witchita or Hong Kong or Sidney. “And that’s Elizabeth,” they will say to a friend. “She was our guide.”

My coach wakes to the turn of my key with a rumble, a sound I have come to love after three years and over 20,000 miles on Alaskan roads. We are partners in every adventure, over the Denali Highway, up the Dalton, out to the gold mine or just back and forth across town to the airport, her belly full of luggage and my head full of well-wishes for my guests’ journeys home. Come back in winter, we always tell them, and they laugh. But I mean it, I say, as they step down to claim their luggage, feeling awake and alive finally; this is home now, and if ever you return, I’ll be here, and it would be my pleasure to share it with you. . .again.

Elizabeth – Driver Guide – Fairbanks, Alaska

Christine – Driver Guide – Fairbanks, Alaska