The founding took a guide. In 1880, Chief Kowee of the A'akw Kwáan led prospectors Joe Juneau and Richard Harris up Gold Creek to the color they had failed to find on their own, and the camp that sprang up that October is often called the first new town founded in Alaska after the purchase. It nearly carried a different name — Harrisburg, then Rockwell — before the miners voted in 1881 to call it Juneau. Kowee's reward was smaller than his part deserved, and the town has spent a century restoring his name to the story.
North of town, the ice does the advertising. Mendenhall Glacier flows thirteen miles down from the 1,500-square-mile Juneau Icefield to a lake dotted with bergs, with Nugget Falls thundering beside it — close enough to walk to from a visitor center that was, in 1962, the first the U.S. Forest Service ever built. The glacier is retreating, and the blue ice caves that form and collapse along its edge have become their own pilgrimage. South of town, Tracy Arm's fjord walls and tidewater glaciers make the day-boat run; overhead, flightseeing planes trace the icefield itself.
Why People Visit Juneau Alaska
Juneau is the capital of Alaska as a civic destination and a wilderness port in one — the only U.S. state capital with no road access, the 1931 Capitol, a walk-to glacier, whales in the channel, and gold-rush ruins on the mountainside. People come by ship and plane for the ice and the whales, and find a small stubborn capital that likes being hard to reach.
