Travel, Photography, Alaska

Twenty-Four Hours in Juneau

The beginning of our Great Alaskan Adventure

For the last three summers, Alaska’s vast wildness — her unending skies, glowing icebergs and and glacial slopes tumbling into ferocious seas — has beckoned us north. I can’t even begin to tell you how many nights I have lain in bed, trying to sleep, and have visualized the craggy peaks of the Baranoff Islands bathed in the last bit of “alpen glow” as we cruised through the remnants of a sky on fire last summer solstice.

Once you’ve had a taste of that wildness, there’s a lingering hunger for it that can never really be satiated. Indeed, the appetite for those wild places only seems to grow stronger.

So we saved up those frequent flier miles, packed up our waterproof gear, updated the firmware on my new Nikon Z9, and, in mid-June, we were off, excited to see the summer solstice at sea.

We were flying into Juneau and had the evening and part of the next day before we got onto our Uncruise Adventure.

We really like the small boats because they can get into places that the bigger cruise boats cannot go. Last year we went out on the thirty-two-passenger Alaskan Dream catamaran. This time around, we’d be with fifty-four other adventurous travelers on the Safari Endeavor.

Once we left Juneau, we would not see anything but wilderness until we pulled into port in Sitka one week later. Last year, we spent time in several small towns like Kake and Petersburg. But this year, the only other souls we’d be encountering would be grizzly bears, harbor seals, eagles and other creatures of the far north.

We flew into Juneau in the late afternoon and the sunlight on the water was so ethereal-looking.

We checked into our room and walked across the street to The Hangar on the Wharf. Their back deck is our favorite dinner spot in Juneau. We immediately noticed a huge difference between the view though from last year and the view from this year.

I hadn’t really understood what these big concrete pylons were last year — they are moorings for the cruise boats, which were not running last summer.

And the other big difference was the addition of docking for four water planes. We’d signed up for one of those flights for a glacier tour the next day. We watched the planes taking off and landing while we were eating dinner and I told my husband, “I just know we’re going to get the yellow one.” And guess what — well, maybe you have to wait and see….

After dinner, we headed out on the town. Our evening there coincided with a Pride Event and there were several live bands and festivities going on. We listened to some music and ambled the streets, so excited for the next day that we just could barely wait.

When we woke up the next morning, we knew there was just one thing that we had to do before our glacier flight — have lunch at the infamous Tracy’s Crab Shack. We’d discovered it last year and had been thinking about it ever since.

It’s times like these when I’m grateful to be married to a Louisiana boy — because he sure can de-shell those crab legs. I guess they are sort of like large crayfish.

That afternoon’s glacier flight was pretty epic — but that’s a story unto itself, coming soon….

Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, neurophilosopher, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her love and amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies).

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Photos and story ©Erika Burkhalter. All rights reserved.