Juneau - 15th August

We awoke to find ourselves docked in Juneau, the capital of Alaska. It’s a city nestled on the edge of a channel and surrounded by mountains. It has about 44 miles of road, which connect nowhere else – sea or air is the only transport. It isn’t large – about 30,000 people, but it certainly the largest city in south-eastern Alaska.

Though this part of Alaska is famous for rain and mists – Juneau has fifteen sunny days a year – we had a beautiful, clear day.

The famous sight at Juneau is the Mendenhall Glacier, a “drive to” glacier that sprawls 12 miles down a valley before its ice face on Mendenhall Lake. There were four large cruise ships docked in Juneau. Booths on dockside sell tickets to tours, while nearby shops offer a tourist shopping experience. Apparently, many of the shops close to the docks are either owned by the cruise lines or have commission arrangements with the cruise lines. Jewellery seems to be the most common wares, particularly diamonds and tanzanite. Exactly why you would come to Alaska to buy diamonds isn’t clear. Other ships sell shirts and various tourist curios.

Sockeye salmon spawning

We bought bus tickets to Mendenhall Glacier, which is about 13 miles out of town. You walk up to the visitor centre on a boardwalk beside a small stream. Sockeye salmon spawn at this time of the year. We saw large sockeyes in the stream. They were their spawning colour – a deep red. The female create small depressions in the stream bed for their eggs and the females and males keep other fish away. Dead salmon are seen – some have been taken by bears, others have died after spawning. It was great to see the stream with so many spawning fish making their way upstream.

Mendenhall Glacier

We walked to a photo point to see Mendenhall, which you see from a distance, across the lake that the glacier calves into. The visitor centre also has some good presentations.

Back to town, we had a drink and meal in the Red Dog saloon, an old saloon with a sawdust floor and a honky-tonk player.

The Juneau Library over the road gave us access to Interest and the opportunity to catch up on mail. The weather started to close in, with light rain and mist, so we headed back to the ship.

That night we ate at the East Meets West restaurant, the steakhouse on the ship. The steak was excellent - a large rare rib-eye, with an excellent Californian cabernet sauvignon.