Unique and Beautiful Juneau

Juneau, Alaska is one of the busiest places in the state due to its unsurpassed beauty, and accessibility by cruise ships. The town is surrounded in mountains which are often hidden in fog and rain, but grace the eyes when the sun comes out. Downtown  is full of oddities which reflect the independent people renowned for living there. Due to the surrounding mountains, most of Downtown is accessed by an intricate boardwalk and staircase system which connects houses and properties perched on its steep slopes. Its amazing that houses could be built there at all! As I walked around Juneau and the greater surrounding area, I was struck but its uniqueness and setting. Here are 10 shots to help convey the beauty of the area.

The steep hillsides of Juneau, and the surrounding mountains forces buildings to be built on high-grade slopes. Here’s a colorful array of buildings in upper, down-town Juneau as seen from the boardwalks.

These iron chickens caught my eye as I walked through the streets of Juneau.

A raft of scoters and other sea-birds sits in Juneau Harbor on a sunny day. Surrounded in mountains, the scenery is endless!

Spring was in full bloom in Juneau, and early rising skunk cabin dotted the landscape in bright yellow.

High up in the hillsides of Juneau, the Perseverance Basin boardwalk and trail offer beautiful view of Junea.

The ice caves of the Mendenhall glacier are stunning, and glaciers define the entire Southeast Region of Alaska, including Juneau.

This old mining building is a piece of the Treadwell mine of the late 1800s. In April 1917 this mine was flooded by a high tide, and “questionable” mining practices (http://www.juneau.org/parkrec/facilities/documents/treadbroch1.pdf)

Early blueberries are a species which have flowers before that bloom before leaf out. The water drop perched precariously here caught my eye.

This is a panorama captures the mountain range across Favorite Channel from Eagle Beach.

A mountain sits on the far side of the inlet at Eagle Beach. I was fortunate to have some sun on my last day in Juneau.

Into the Mouth of an Ice Beast

The receding glaciers in the Bays of Southeast Alaska are opening up barren landscapes and new lands for colonizing vegetation and birds like arctic terns. As we walked along Sitaantaagu (Tlingit : “The Glacier Behind the Town”), I felt connected to the misty, snow covered mountains, and rocky lake shore. It is renowned and spectacular country!

Mendenhall glacier is receding at up to 150 feet per year, and in 1900 the large quantities of melt water began forming Mendenhall Lake.  The lake is now home to salmon which have colonized glacial streams. Remarkably, it seems that colonization by salmon occurs in a decade or two. Much shorter that I ever suspected!  As we, a large group of wildlife biologists, walked along the shoreline of Mendenhall Lake and told stories of field seasons gone-by or hypothesized on natural processes, icebergs which had calved from the glacier drifted in the middle of the lake.Naturalist Bob Armstrong introduced me to a small, alpine wildflower called purple mountain saxifrage.  This early bloomer, he stated, is a critical resource of early emerging insects like the bumble bees.

Purple saxifrage is one of the first spring flowers to bloom in the Juneau region.

Purple saxifrage filled with the rains of Juneau.

The face of the Mendenhall Glacier got bigger, and bigger, and bigger as we approached. By the time I reached the front of the glacier it loomed in front of me for almost a half mile.  I walked up the river of melt-water in front of the glacier and  touched the edge of the the ice cave it had carved. I grinned a bit, threw myself over a three foot bolder guarding the cave and stepped inside into the mouth of the icebeast. I was awestruck. Curved, turquoise ice hung over my head like whipped meringue. The sound of the river reverberating in the small space was numbing, and was fed by each drop of water that fell from the ice into the river. Looking further up the cave, the color transitioned from turquoise to cerulean blue. As I walked further the surrounding area turned so blue, that I could have been scuba diving in an ocean.

The hardest part to capture in these pictures is the scale of the ice cave. It stretched back over 100 feet, and as I walked in the ceiling diminished from 7 feet, to 5 feet, and finally I was relegated to crawling on my hands and knees in the narrow space.

Panorama of the face of the Mendenhall Glacier

The river of melt-water flows out to the face of the Mendenhall Glacier.

The face of the Mendhall glacier.

The turquoise ice of the ice cave entrance.

As I walked further into the ice cave, the ice color transitioned from turquoise to blue.

I did some posing as an Ice Cave Man to give the cave some size perspective.

This was as far as I went into the ice cave. Here the ceiling was less than 3 feet tall.

The way ‘out’ was graced by a set of rock ptarmigan. These birds, allowed me to get very close, and I framed up this shot with the face of the Mendenhall Glacier in the background. These ptarmigan won’t be white for much longer!

A beautiful rock ptarmigan in front of Mendenhall Glacier

A puffy rock ptarmigan!

Glacial recession in expansion in Alaska has occurred since the last glacial maximum. The Little Ice Age caused the expansion of Alaskan glaciers about 4,000 years ago, and recent recession has exposed what has been buried for nearly a millennium. These stumps were exposed by the receding Mendenhall glacier and were aged to nearly 1,500 years ago! “Deep time” can be hard to comprehend, and it amazing to think the Imperial Chinese Empire had been established for 800 years and that Medieval Europe was enforcing fiefdoms through rigid monarchies when these hemlock and sitka black spruce were buried!

A large stump of a forest buried by ice ~1,500 years ago. It has been determined the forest was composed of hemlock and sitka black spruce.

This stump field is degrading fast, but it’s likely more forests will be uncovered as the Mendenhall Glacier receeds even further.