Blue Days In Juneau

Our return ferry trip from Sitka brought us back to Juneau under blue skies. At long last!! Before checking into our hotel we stopped for pizza at the Island Pub, a joint highly recommended by the young locals my kids interacted with. You never saw such a cast of characters: old, young, infants in tow. The going fashion was mostly about denim, casual, a wide range of shirt styles, not a high heel in sight. These people dress as if they just stepped off the trail or came from their fishing boats. I felt right at home.

Mendenhall Glacier in the sunshine.

Adam and Sarah woke very early the next morning for a hike of close to eleven miles coming back with stories of waterfalls, marshlands, bear, and a surprise encounter with a porcupine. No harm done there. After a lunch of elk, wild boar and water buffalo burgers we went along for another hike. Once again there were waterfalls but no wildlife. This is the trail that begins at a gold mining museum that wasn't open, but we passed some old equipment and a small portal that had really cold air literally blasting out of it, a reminder of the people who mined gold here a good century ago. It was a beautiful day and people are out en masse, on foot and on bikes,  accompanied by their dogs. The locals are in shorts, not jeans as I am.

Juneau stretches along the waterfront and is backed by mountains with snow-capped peaks. The old downtown starts on a small flat area, then it crawls up the steep mountainside, turning residential pretty quickly. Very steep and long flights of steps replace sidewalks in the uphill neighborhoods and I am amazed that the locals actually are brave enough to park vehicles on the steeper hills. It must be quite a ride on ice. At the waterfront there are multiple gift shops the locals say are owned by the cruise lines and are boarded up in the winter. Cruise ships are always docked there; once they came one to three times a week and now there are up to four boats daily...or so I was told. I discovered that the local people are really quite friendly but only after they hear you did not come on a cruise ship.