Juneau (named for Joe Juneau, one of the two gold miners who first set up shop in the area) is the state capital of Alaska--and must be about the smallest state capital that I have ever visited. I remember that some years back, there was talk of moving the state capital up towards the center of the state, on the grounds that the shortage of buildable land around Juneau made it impossible for the state government to grow. The Libertarian Party members of the state legislature essentially said, "Wait, that's a feature of Juneau, not a bug!" There is no access by car to Juneau--you can only get there by ship or airplane.
The big industries are government, tourism, and the Alaskan Brewing Company. I drink perhaps an ounce of alcohol in a year (generally wine or champagne), and never beer. (I hate the smell and the taste of it.) But not everyone on this trip has the same view of the foul-smelling liquid that I do, so we went on the tour.
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They have a bottle of as many of their competitors as they can obtain, from many states, and many countries. As you might expect, Germany is a very long shelf, and it is only because most German beers are apparently not bottled, but only in kegs, that it isn't longer. One of the more amusingly cheeky collections are from Utah brewers. You may have heard of Polygamy Porter (their slogan, "Why have only one?") but I was unfamiliar with St. Provo Girl, parodying the St. Pauli Girl beer label. (The light wasn't great, and a flash didn't help, sorry about the blur--pretend you have been sampling the local product for a while):
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There are also some amusingly labeled beers from California, such as the Lobotomy Bock in the center of the top shelf.
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By the way: they give you a chance to sample every beer they make, all eight of them--no charge. By the way, one little surprise: most (all?) states have laws that either prohibit supplying alcohol to minors, or prohibit anyone but parents supplying alcohol to someone under 21. Alaska law makes it a felony punishable by up to five years in prison to supply alcohol to someone under 21. I would suspect that at least part of the reason for this very severe punishment is that Alaska has a lot of Indian villages where alcohol has long been a serious social problem. A number of villages completely ban alcohol as a result.
The bottling plant was operational when we arrived, but it had shut down by the time we were done. I took this picture to show you the CDs that they apparently play while bottling beer--and primarily because a friend of my was one of the producers of the documentary Standing in the Shadow of Motown:
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Anyway, we went to visit the Mendenhall Glacier. As someone (maybe with the Park Service) explained it to me, this isn't the biggest glacier in Alaska, or even in this area. It just happens to be the most accessible by car in the area, so it is the tourist glacier.
None of the pictures that I have taken really captures the majesty of Alaska, and this set of pictures is even more inadequate to really get how beautiful and vast of a place that it is. The name "Alaska" is reputedly from the Aleut words for "The Great Land," and it really is.
There were bald eagles everywhere--but generally too far away for me to get a decent shot.
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Here are some shots of the Mendenhall Glacier from various distances--and this should give you an idea of how big this is.
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On the right (south) side of the glacier there was a waterfall--but until you get close--and notice the scale of the people below it--you don't really get the size.
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This was a mildly challenging rock climb to get to--not really difficult, but enough of a struggle to impress our kids that Mom and Dad weren't too old and decrepit to attempt it.
The underlying rock is granite with big, beautiful quartz intrusions in it. If you are a gold miner (like Joe Juneau was), they are especially beautiful! If you see quartz veins in granite, a gold miner could do worse.
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This not terribly impressive building (photographed through a foggy bus window) is the current Capitol building--a leftover federal building that was never replaced with something more grand while they were arguing about whether to move the state capital out of Juneau or not.
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