When it came time to plan our
family trip to Alaska this summer, my anxiety got the best of me.
Normally we go back to Fairbanks—we visit our
favorite haunts, stop by the swamp, and spend time with some of our favorite people.
This year, for a variety of reasons (some
adventurous and some anxiety-riddled), I booked us tickets for Juneau.
Juneau
is the capital of Alaska, a cozy town of approximately 32,000 stretched along an
inlet of the Inside Passage.
You can’t
drive to it, so the only way to get there is by plane or ship.
The prospect of seeing something new was
intriguing, so we took it. (Naturally, literally as soon as I finished
purchasing tickets, several people from Fairbanks reached out to find out if we
were coming up this summer and I kicked myself for being anxious and
self-conscious.
However, I also hate
paying fees to switch flights, so we stuck with Juneau.
Next year, Fairbanks, and we freaking love
you all.)
Juneau is a big little town. It’s big enough to have a Costco. It’s small enough that Costco doesn’t serve
pizza. It’s a major stop for the cruise
lines, but other than a couple blocks of tourist shops and a bizarre number of high-end
jewelry stores, it’s not really cosmopolitan.
You can walk across all of downtown in about two hours, including
stopping by the governor’s mansion and the capitol building. There’s a couple of museums, a branch of the
state university, and all the hiking you could ever want. There are eagles everywhere. Courtesy of the surrounding boreal rainforest,
it is very, very, very green. Above all, it is wet. We landed at the tiny airport just
after midnight and drove to our BnB.
Now, Alaskan housing can be…eclectic…even at the best of times:
trapezoidal bathrooms with washers and dryers across from the corner toilet, a bedroom
turned into an indoor jacuzzi, an entire room dedicated to the maze of hardware
and plumbing to keep it running. Our
home for the next week was no exception.
The “two-bedroom, 1 bath” did in truth sleep 8, even if it had clearly
started life as some garage/guest house hybrid and one of the bedrooms was a
wall with a curtain thrown up in one corner of the living room. The solid metal doors with a push-bar handle
took me straight back to high school. The kids’ favorite part was the possibly
haunted bathroom with the attic-access ladder that came down right by the
toilet. One child may have threatened to
sleep in the car instead. It was dry,
heated, and I didn’t have to go outside to pee, so all in all it was a win.
The house next to our BnB had a gargoyle on the roof...
...
and continued the odd Alaskan love of mannequins.
Yes, that is our current president elect.
We did
a lot of walking. Up and down the streets,
past the old Russian Orthodox Church and the capitol building, the boardwalk
with its sculptures and beaches and totem poles. It was the end of the salmon run so there were
more dead fish (and bear tracks) than usual, but it didn’t smell as bad as one
might expect.
A doll museum in a probably abandoned and definitely haunted building--the world's most unconvincing tourist attraction.
Checking out knives on the wharf.
A statue of Patsy Ann, a bull terrier who used to greet ships as they came into Juneau.
The statue at the end of the boardwalk.
Bear tracks on the beach.
St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church.
It’s a
personal goal of mine to drive every highway in Alaska (and it’s not hard,
there’s less than 10 of them in all), so
we also stuffed the kids into the rental car and drove the 80 mile round trip of
this leg of the Glacier Highway. It took
us to some beautiful views, including the Shrine of St. Therese and the
Jensen-Olson Arboretum. It also ended about two miles before the map said it should, with a gate across the road. I was thwarted.
There were lots of deer. No moose, apparently.
Fireweed just about bloomed out.
The Gate.
The
Shrine itself is a lovely old stone church set on its own small island,
accessible by walkway. There were ravens
and kittiwakes (gulls) all over the place, and we finally got an up-close
audience with some marmots. It was a
peaceful and very contemplative, with the stations of the cross ringing the
church. We also found a very helpful
local guide who was ferrying some tourists around but was happy to share
tips. Seriously, I can’t stress this enough—show
interest and appreciation to an Alaskan, and they will give you the best inside
info. It always pays off.
The arboretum
was a favorite with my resident botany-fan, and my farmer also appreciated the
ancient apple tree that was thriving.
The rest of the crew enjoyed clambering over the rocky shore and the
tide-pools.
There
were several small state recreation areas along the highway that were pretty cool, including one
along the banks of the Eagle River.
There were eagles everywhere, flanked by velociravens and screaming
gulls that were all there for the salmon sluggishly making their way
upstream. The fish were so slow it would
have been easy enough to just pick them out of the river, no pole necessary. Judging by the skeletons piled across the
delta, the birds had had good eating for weeks.
We finished
off our road-trip with a quick tour of Douglas Island, just over the bridge
from Juneau. The kids enjoyed playing on
the beach, and the drive rewarded us with a porcupine and a flock of very busy
ducks. We also ran into a corgi puppy named Marshmallow.
An
entire day was devoted to Mendenhall Glacier and Nugget Falls, and both were
impressive. We took a hike above the
falls, about five miles round trip, that gave us a great taste of the Tongass National
Forest. The Tongass is the largest national
forest in the U.S., coming in at nearly 17 million acres and dates back to 1907 when it was
initially established as a national park by President Theodore Roosevelt. The hike was pretty vertical at times, but worth
it. The girls ate late-season berries off
the side of the trail and squeeed over mushrooms and moss. The only thing that dampened their spirits
was…well, the fact that they were damp.
Take them to a massive waterfall and they get distracted by flecks of iron pyrite.
As I
mentioned before, Juneau is wet. It
rains an average of 200 days a year, with a yearly average of 67 inches of rain
(just rain, the snow is its own thing). I
am unsurprised by these statistics because over the week that we were there, we
saw about 2 ½ hours of sun total. Two of
the girls loved it, but by day three Rick and I agreed that while it was a
gorgeous place to visit, we were never going to voluntarily live there. Ever.
I can take the long dark of the interior, but the interminable overcast
of the southeast? It disturbs my
calm. Fortunately, I had planned for the
rain and we all had layers and raincoats to get us through.
Just a little dance to pep for the day.
I had
also been a little concerned about the cold.
Juneau is a mild climate without a lot of extremes, but “mild” up north
is a lot closer to “frigid” by El Paso standards. After almost four years in the desert, I wasn’t
sure how my kids would handle highs in the 50s.
They acclimated quickly; if it hadn’t been for the rain, they’d have
been in short sleeves or a sweater at most the entire trip. It gave me some reassurance for our future
move.
Juneau has
a rich history (pun intended) and was one of the key players in the Alaskan
Gold Rush in the late 1800s. Of course
we hit a mine tour. Aeryn wasn’t a fan
as she’s a little bit of a claustrophobe and doesn’t love the idea of tens of
millions of tons of rock overhead, but we all made it through and even learned
something. There might have been a ghost at the back of the mine, but I'm 90% sure he didn't come home with us so that's a win.
This used to be the inside of the ore processing plant.
The
last day of our trip we hit a museum and took the tram up Mount Robertson. Now, theoretically, this should be an amazing
view (all the more amazing because the 10-minute tram saves you several hours
of hiking) but the clouds had other ideas.
We still took a hike through the rain, which by now we were more used
to. We saw some deer and got some
close-up experience with Devil’s Club, which is kind of like a thistle you’d
find in Hell, or Alaska’s version of cholla.
Luckily everyone kept on the trail, which is good because falling down a
mountain of Devil’s Club would have been memorable in the most terrible
way. As it was, we only had one kid who
brushed it and had to have some prickles scraped out of her leg.
Not loving the tram shaking in the wind.
Unimpressed by the rain.
Just look at that view.
Best advertising in Juneau.
The
food was pretty good. Breakfast is always bigger. We stopped by a
tourist trap, the Red Dog Saloon, that had the most delightful Old West/hoarder
esthetic including ankle-deep sawdust on the floor, walls covered with various heads, mining implements, and bear
traps, with live music and Wyatt Earp’s pistol in pride of place over the bar. It was your standard burger joint/steakhouse
fare, but the dessert (bread pudding
with cinnamon apples, caramel, and whipped cream) was *chef’s kiss*. At another local place, The Hangar on the Wharf,
Rick and I had a great meal with the older girls (the others just wanted Ramen
so they stayed home). I ripped apart a
Dungeness crab at T.K. Maguire’s that was actually pretty delicious for such an
unassuming restaurant. The best meal we
had, however, was Filipino BBQ that we got from a food cart off the docks in
the middle of Juneau. It was so freaking
good that we went back twice.
Twinning with the kelp sauce.
Oh!
I almost forgot the hatchery!
McCauley Hatchery raises salmon every year to
help replenish the stocks.
There is a
small visitor’s center with touch-pools and a column aquarium of local sea life,
a twenty-minute video about the process of raising and releasing salmon, and tanks with the year’s current baby fish.
The fish ladder was cool, and it was interesting to see the fish that
come back to their “spawning grounds” at the hatchery.
The best part, though, were the seals that
had set up shop in the dock right below the fish ladder.
I don’t think it was coincidence or just
their seal-ness that made them so round.
Even better, if possible, were the fishermen lining the rocks and docks
just past the “No Fishing” boundary.
And that
was Juneau. I can’t imagine living there and constantly fighting the pervasive wet
or the claustrophobia of being geographically trapped, but it was nice to experience
the edge of the wilderness again. There
just isn’t anywhere else like Alaska.
Even when it's a little soggy.
Back to the desert.
Everyone was ready to be in their own beds.
Ah, thanks for welcoming me back, little buddy.
P.S.
