Juneau Life

What’s it like to live in Juneau? 

Incredibly beautiful.  It constantly surprises me with these jaw-dropping moments.  I look up at the ridges of mountains etched out in snow; a bald eagle swoops down feet away from me in the meadows; I walk through a shimmering green forest where plants have grown giant sized almost overnight and delicate little flowers bloom on intricate lacey beds of leaves where less than a month ago all was snow.  Or I turn off the highway, pass the Safeway on route to my apartment, a routine trip, and there, rising above the spruce trees, is a wall of ice encircled by mountains, the Mendenhall Glacier. Even the dandelions here are big and joyful, as yellow and as happy as buttercups, no one seems to weed them. There are islands, water, mountains, ice, snow, whales, bears all in profusion around me.

It’s a small city of 32,000 people, the state capital, a tourist destination and whale-watching port. Unpretentious, the magnificent outdoors is why most people live here, and they dress accordingly. The basic uniform is brown rubber boots, often with the tops folded down to show several inches of fabric lining, jeans and a fleece sweater.  Men add a beanie in winter or a baseball cap in summer. Women might prefer the ankle-high rubber boots called Tuffs. No one gets dressed up, except for the young who experiment. They dye their hair fluorescent orange, bright green or purple and add a range of metal to their facial protuberances. Tattoos are so commonplace it’s more radical not to have one, and gender fluidity widespread, especially in the guiding community.   

Juneau has the ‘live-and-let-live’ vibe of an island community, which locked in by the mountains to the east and the waters to west, essentially it is. One of the local jokes is, “There are only three ways you can get here - by plane, by sea … or by birth canal." It is a place on the periphery, the margins, the outer edges, the last frontier. If you didn’t fit in in the Lower 48 and love the outdoors, then try Juneau. That is equally true for the Freedom Party-Trump-leaning Libertarians as it is for the ex-hippies and the disillusioned, sustainable economy, Kennedy-leaning under 35s.

There are several good local breweries, and karaoke night at the Alaska Hotel is a step up from the terrible, loud, local bands who play clashing chords and shout. But most of the social activity with fellow guides is geared around hiking, rock climbing, volleyball and get-togethers around a firepit on the beach in the crepuscular light of the endless summer evenings. I haven’t yet found someone to teach me how to play a decent game of pool.  

I live in the suburban sprawl. There is very little flat land in the historic downtown area where the cruise ships dock and the state legislature meets. While downtown has coffee shops, an independent movie theatre, yoga studio, gift shops and 13 jewelry stores for tourists jammed alongside the west-facing flanks of Mt Roberts and Mt Juneau,  there are very good reasons not to live there. It gets twice as much rain and half as much sun as other areas.  Only white man’s discovery of gold in 1880 explains its location.  The local Tlingit people placed their village 10 miles away on Auke Bay where the whales spout and the sun shines.  I live half way between in the flatlands carved out by the retreating glacier.  I am five minutes drive from the five different hikes where I can let Eiger run off leash along the riverside or run on the beach and bathe in the glacial lake.  I like it that way.

Travel Tips:

• Book early if you come to visit.  There’s a distinct shortage of good places to stay

• Forget about the weather.  It changes so fast, you never know.  It can be forecast to rain for weeks and turn out to be a gorgeous sunny afternoon.

• If you dress up and carry an umbrella, you'll look really weird
  

• Photo credit Travel Juneau https://www.traveljuneau.com/discover-juneau/about-our-town/