When I mentioned that I was headed to Alaska, friends and colleagues recommended helicopter rides, dog sleds, multiday kayaking trips and nights on ferries under the stars.
But my plans, to be honest, included nothing of the sort. My husband, Jason, and I had been lured to Alaska by a free place to stay, and most of our itinerary involved “camping” under our friend Brian’s roof in the sleepy state capital of Juneau.
Juneau is treated by most Alaska travelers as a one-day cruise stopover, if they get there at all.
But, as we learned, the state capital deserves much more respect: What Juneau lacked in advance billing it more than made up for in actual excitement.
We saw bald eagles lock talons in midair, tumbling toward the ground like comic-book foes before they soared free. Just a few feet away from us, a black bear hunched into an intimidating pose, glaring at us as she waited for her cubs to join her. We were close enough to a humpback whale that we could hear its tail slapping repeatedly against the water’s surface.
Did I mention that was just on our first day?
I envisioned Alaska as being kind of like the rest of America but with amazing natural attractions within a day’s drive or so. I was wrong.
In Alaska, you don’t need to seek out nature; it comes to you.
To see salmon spawning, we could just pull over to a roadside stream. Our own personal porcupine waited for us reliably at the turn into Brian’s street. And a colleague of Brian’s fiance, Michele, even found a bear in his kitchen recently, the bear’s snout planted in a bowl of blueberry yogurt on the counter. Like a reverse Goldilocks, the bear had wandered into the house through the doggie door.
Even though Juneau is not on an island, there are no roads connecting it with any other city. Locals will tell you there are only three ways to get to Juneau: by boat, by plane or through the birth canal.
We chose option two, arriving at night after stops in Chicago and Seattle. While the entire travel time took 12 hours, counting layovers, the leg from Seattle to Juneau was only 21/2 hours — closer to “the mainland” than I imagined Alaska to be.
Our first day in Juneau was scheduled in advance: a co-worker of Michele’s who happened to be a former commercial fisherman offered to take us fishing on his boat.
Considering that regular charter fishing trips cost hundreds of dollars per person, and we were only on the hook for $30 each to pay for gas, it was a much-appreciated offer.
Before meeting Joe the fisherman at 10 a.m., Michele took us to the Mendenhall Glacier, about 12 miles from Juneau’s downtown.
While I had previously thought of glaciers as occurring in remote areas, Juneau’s glacier is visible from main roads, located just around a corner and down the road from a Safeway grocery store and a movie theater.
The glacier is fed by streams teeming with salmon, a fact well known to the bears that come there daily to eat. There are even viewing platforms over the streams, a setup that helped explain how Brian had been e-mailing us close-up bear photos so fantastic that Jason had nicknamed him the Bear Whisperer.
During peak season, thousands of tourists visit Juneau every day via cruise ships, arriving at the glacier by the busload.
But by going in the early morning, we had beaten the cruise-ship traffic. So we were practically alone when we saw our first bear amble into the stream, splashing about in an effort to catch salmon.
We started walking along the trail for a better view of the glacier and soon found that we weren’t the only ones headed in that direction.
A mammoth mama bear was leading her two cubs that way, and when she saw us, she froze and stared, standing completely still, facing us, for what seemed like at least a minute. We were so close that our pictures came out extremely dark, her black fur filling almost the whole frame.
When her cubs caught up with her, the mama bear proceeded ahead of us, crossing the trail right under a yellow “Closed” sign (closed, ironically, for bear activity).
Michele later confessed she was nervous and was prepared to “get big,” waving her arms aggressively to scare the bear if she had charged us. Black bears, though relatively shy, can certainly be dangerous.
In hindsight, I’m embarrassed to admit that it didn’t even occur to me to be scared. The bear was so accessible — and I was so excited — that I sort of forgot that I was in the wild, not in a video game or a zoo.
Because we saw bears nearly every day we were in Juneau, it was a good lesson to learn early. After our bear encounter, we picked up lunches and fishing licenses and met Joe at Tee Harbor, where his family has owned a marina for several generations.
We set out for fishing, but found ourselves surrounded by whales. After a few minutes, I became accustomed to their behavior patterns: a plume of mist, followed by several flashes of fin, finished off by a flourish of tail as they dove for food. Sometimes, as many of four whales would feed together in a row, each diving down a split second after the one next to them.
Whales are so plentiful in Juneau that tour operators offer a money-back guarantee on whale-watching trips — something that I can’t imagine they have to honor very often. Commercial whale-watching trips cost about $100 per adult for several hours on the water.
We also caught several varieties of salmon, including a baby king salmon that we threw back, three coho salmon and a pink salmon that Joe cut up to use for bait. The largest of the coho measured nearly 30 inches, and the smallest one was enough to feed four of us for dinner that night.
Later in the week, Jason and I tried several hikes during the day while Michele and Brian — both lawyers for the state — went to work.
Downtown Juneau is built into a mountain range, with steps alongside some of its streets.
We tried two hikes originating from downtown Juneau. One, the Perseverance Trail, followed a road taken by gold miners more than a century ago. The other, the Mount Roberts Trail, led up the mountain to the upper station for a sightseeing tram that ran from downtown.
Around the tram station, the area was packed with cruise-boat passengers hiking up a short distance to see a giant wooden cross erected in the early 1900s. Past the cross though, the crowd disappeared.
Jason and I hiked about two hours more to reach Gastineau Peak, the steep terrain getting rockier and more desolate and the trail narrowing to follow the ridgelines.
On the way back, we treated ourselves to lunch at the Timberline Bar and Grill in the tram station overlooking Juneau and to a tram ride back downtown. (The tram costs $24.95 for adults to ride both ways, but only $5 to ride down.)
During the week, we also toured the Alaskan Brewery headquarters (the tour was just Jason, Brian and I until a busload of cruise passengers showed up) and peeked at the salmon swimming upstream at the Gastineau Salmon Hatchery.
Jason and Brian played nine holes at Juneau’s only golf course, wearing the non-country-club, but necessary, golf attire of galoshes and windbreakers.
Our final day in Juneau, Michele and Brian took us on a hike to the ice caves. Though we’d seen the Mendenhall Glacier several times now from afar, this time we’d actually be hiking into it.
The hike was just a few miles long but was barely marked and required several vertical scrambles over giant rocks. As we neared the caves, we had to cross several times over a rushing, ice-cold stream — a feat that required carefully balancing over rocks.
But when we finally reached the caves, they were simply unbelievable. Up close, the blue color of the glacier looks more like a Disney World prop than something that actually exists in nature. The smooth cave walls seemed to glow from within, made up of giant ice cubes that seamlessly melded together.
We proceeded into the cave at our own risk, aware that there is a danger from falling ice — and we actually exited in a hurry after a large block of ice did fall. But the minutes in the ice cave were totally serene — “it’s Superman’s Fortress of Solitude,” Jason whispered inside, staring down at a pool at the bottom of the cave.
We boarded the plane home at 1 a.m., excited to get home to spread the word about a trip that had totally exceeded our expectations. And I can now spout off advice of my own: If you’re going to Alaska, don’t miss Juneau.
Scripps Howard News Service
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