We pulled into Juneau early, but it was 9:00pm, so it was dark, as well as still raining. Based on iOverlander reviews, we parked at the West Glacier Trail trailhead. We weren’t too sure it was okay, but there were a couple of carloads of young people hanging out and partying, so Tom asked them if it was both legal to park there, and if we would be crashing their party. They assured us that it was legal and we wouldn’t be bothering them, so we took the dogs for a last walk and went to bed.
It was still raining in the morning, so we decided not to hike the West Glacier Trail. We headed into Juneau with a stop at Safeway to shop. We left the “surburban” part of Juneau where all the shopping centers are, and took the highway to the downtown area near where the cruise ships come in so we could see the capitol building - our 42nd! We walked around the capital district for a couple of hours, and then went over to Douglas Island, where we went for a hike around the Treadwell mine ruins. We drove up to the Eaglecrest ski area, a city owned ski area, where RVs are allowed to park for the night. We were the only RV in the parking lot, surrounded by beautiful mountains and quiet.
In the morning, we left the ski area and drove to the end of the highway on Douglas Island, where we saw more beautiful waterfalls, a bunch of bald eagles, and a golden eagle which looked like one of the dragons from Game of Thrones as it flew in front of us over the highway. We went back over the bridge into Juneau and stopped to see the humpback whale statue and fountain. After running a few errands, we went to the West Glacier trailhead of the Mendenhall glacier and hiked about 5 miles towards the glacier. We found that due to flooding we could not get all the way to the glacier, but it was still a beautiful hike. It was late afternoon by the time we got back to the truck, but with a few more hours of daylight we drove to the end of the road as far north as you can drive out of Juneau. There wasn’t much to see besides more beautiful scenery, so we turned around and stopped for the night at a pull out about halfway back to the ferry terminal where we had to be at 5 AM the following morning.
We had taken the ferry to Juneau mostly because as Alaska’s capital, we had to visit it to check it off our capital list. However, we found ourselves charmed and fascinated with the state capital that can only be reached by air or water, but that manages to feel very much like a well run mid-sized American city. The city itself is in what looked to us like three distinct parts: the suburban shopping center interspersed with standard suburban neighborhoods, downtown with the cruise ship docks and government and business buildings, and Douglas Island, which is like another suburb but with small businesses instead of the big box stores. On all sides of this cloverleaf of a city, there is access to outdoor attractions, including fishing, hiking, skiing, rock climbing, and probably whatever else anyone may want to do out of doors. There are trailheads and small parks any direction you go, and from what we saw, the people of Juneau are using them. We had been a little worried that we wouldn’t like it because the downtown cruise ship port has to handle at least four or five cruise ships a day, but we found that most of the cruise people don’t go far from the ship, even in the downtown area, and the only downside we saw was that restaurant prices were exorbitant and we ditched our plan to have a seafood dinner. We had scheduled to be there only over the weekend, getting there Friday evening and leaving early Monday morning, and while we had initially been a little worried that we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves, as we left we agreed that we could have spent at least a few more days enjoying Juneau and the surrounding area.
