Juneau Alaska
With its snowcapped mountains and frontier-style town, Juneau might just be the most beautiful US state capital.
The first clue that Juneau is a little different comes when I check into my hotel and a disclaimer is pushed across the desk: no smoking; no pets; no processing seafood. The US state capitals come in all shapes and sizes: for every Atlanta, Boston and Phoenix there’s a Bismarck, Albany and Topeka. But Juneau, the gloriously isolated, gloriously quirky capital of Alaska, is in a category entirely of its own.
This was an insane place to build a city. Impossible to access by road, Juneau is completely cut off, with its back to mountains and glaciers, and its face to the ocean. Even today, Juneauites joke that there are only three ways to get here: plane, boat and birth canal.
Taking the first option, after a two-hour flight from Seattle, I’m in a city of unpolished, unruly beauty. Juneau had a rugged upbringing on timber, Russians and gold before finding its calling as the capital of the 49th state, and there’s still a pervading sense of independent wildness: a dash of James Fenimore Cooper’s America in the long, languid carpets of spruce rolling into the frontier-style town; and sharp, snow-capped mountains looming overhead.
There’s a noticeable flavour of “Russianness” here, too, which is no surprise given Alaska’s years as a tsarist colony, beginning in the mid-18th century. It’s a tale told particularly well at Juneau’s gleaming new Alaska State Museum, where I spend a happy afternoon learning about the state’s history as a Russian fiefdom, until it was sold to the US for a trifling $7.2m in 1867 (the Americans struck gold suspiciously swiftly thereafter).
“Russian America” nevertheless developed a surprisingly enduring cultural base, which persists to the present. One of the most popular restaurants in town, Pel’meni, serves only Russian dumplings filled with potato or beef and the onion-domed St Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church near Juneau’s heart contains an impressive array of icons and religious treasures.
But it’s not Juneau’s Russian credentials that bring most visitors here today. Locals brag that this is not only the most remote state capital in the US (even Honolulu has motorways connecting it to other towns) but the prettiest, and during my five-day stay I see nothing to contradict this. I’m visiting at the height of summer, when days are light for nearly 19 hours, seals cavort in the sparkling Gastineau Channel, and frisky humpback whales go about their annual calf-rearing and feeding ritual. “Netflix and krill”, as one boat captain describes it, over a cold pint of Alaskan Amber back on land.
Mind-bogglingly, this capital has rainforests and glaciers within its municipal limits. I get a bird’s-eye view of both on my first day, joining a seaplane excursion out to remote Taku Glacier Lodge. Seaplanes are by far the best means to get around in these parts, and they line up along Juneau’s seafront like a winged-taxi rank, waiting to take passengers bear-spotting, glacier-hiking or salmon-feasting. My flight serves up an incredible wedge of raw natural beauty as we soar down the Gastineau Channel, passing low over a quintet of gargantuan glaciers before splashing down in front of the historic hunting lodge. Not bad for a lift to a salmon lunch.
All five major types of salmon swim wild in these waters, with appellations of humpy, dog, silver, king and sockeye. Juneauites favour the rich, red king salmon, a leviathan that can grow to a weight of 50kg up here, and is prepared to perfection at Taku Glacier Lodge, thanks to a glaze with a sweet base of wine and sugar that’s a carefully guarded family secret.
The cosy wooden lodge was built as a private retreat in the 1920s and is now one of the most popular day trips out of Juneau. And it is the perfect place in which to relax and recalibrate. Once I’ve eaten my fill of salmon served with spicy campfire beans and homemade lemonade, I retreat to one of the Adirondack chairs on the gently sloping front lawn and soak up the statuesque warp and weft of the monumental Hole-in-the-Wall Glacier, directly in front. Juneau has glaciers like other cities have parks (nearly 40 in total) and the following day I get to see the most famous of all, taking a canoe trip to mighty Mendenhall. Its frigid bulk extends a whopping 19km down from the Juneau icefield to an iceberg-littered lake.
Our traditional open canoe contains eight tourists and two guides, and we paddle in carefully choreograp
hed unison across Mendenhall Lake, past booming Nugget Falls (one way or another, everything comes back to gold here) until we finally reach the soaring 21m face of the glacier. Our guide, Bryce, casually drops into conversation that a black bear, which locals have named Curtis, is living near where we beach our boat, but “it’s probably too hot for him to say hello today”. (The locals are universally nonchalant about their ursine neighbours, often actively seeking them out. A female named Janet, who has a den near Costco, is particularly popular.)
There’s more to Juneau’s appeal than wild natural beauty and anthropomorphised animals, though. Grand gold rush-era buildings and saucy saloon-style bars cluster around the picturesque city centre, while an impressive array of galleries and museums speaks of a vibrant arts scene. “There’s a lot of rich, rich culture and history in Juneau,” says Mayor Beth Weldon. “Just because we’re a little harder to reach doesn’t stop us from having an outstanding opera, two theatres, a symphony orchestra and some of the best restaurants in the Pacific Northwest.”
The food scene in Juneau is enjoying a post-pandemic renaissance, with a coterie of acclaimed chefs coming from as far afield as New York and New Orleans to open restaurants, taking advantage of the incredible quality of local seafood. It’s a shift that has not gone unnoticed in the contiguous US; TV chefs Gordon Ramsay and Guy Fieri have flown up to Juneau recently to document the trend. The best food I have is at newcomer In Bocca Al Lupo on Second Street, where the white king salmon steak served with grilled red cabbage and Dijon sauce is so splendidly succulent that I order a second plate instead of pudding.
But Juneau’s biggest drawcard remains the great outdoors, and late on my final day, I tackle the most popular hiking route, the Mount Roberts Trail. A steep 90-minute ascent through ancient hemlock and spruce, it emerges near the top of Juneau’s popular sightseeing tram. From here there’s a panoramic vista of the entire city, clinging to its fragile sliver of land as it hugs an inward curve of the ocean.
In many ways, Juneau doesn’t make any sense at all: a remote 19th-century goldmining outpost that somehow functions as a modern state capital; a major US city with five times as many trails as roads; an urban hub where seaplanes are the principal means of travel. But it’s these idiosyncrasies that are at the heart of its unique brawny appeal. During summer months, when the lingering light makes it feel as if time is being somehow stretched, Juneau comes into its own as the most remote, most rugged and most manifestly magical state capital in the US. The Russians must be kicking themselves.
In the know
Taku Glacier Lodge feast and seaplane trip with Wings Airways from $A523 a person. Mendenhall canoe tours from $282.
traveljuneau.com
wingsairways.com
liquidalaskatours.com
Jonathan Thompson was a guest of Travel Juneau.
THE TIMES