Trip Report: Juneau, Alaska

Festivals, Spruce Tips, Porcupines, and a little Travel Guide

Flying kicks on Mendenhall Glacier

Descending into the Juneau International Airport is its own highlight. You fly over the Gastineau Channel looking out your window or your neighbor’s window at the mountain tops above you. All around is the green of the mossy woods, some white mountain tops, and the blue of the water below. It’s a dramatic introduction to a small slice of city settled in the wilderness with no road connections to the outside world. A pilot friend told me this is the most frightening airport he’s flown into.

Sea Shanty intermission at Red Dog Saloon

Juneau (Tlingit name: Dzánti K'ihéeni) has surprised me as a festival town. This was my second trip to visit friends. The first trip was for Juneau’s big drag celebration, Glitz, put on by Juneau Drag. It was a huge event filling up the main convention center with crowds watching drag artists from all over Alaska, and a few from the lower 48.

This year I went for the Alaska Folk Festival. Everyone comes out and supports their local artists and visiting performers. During the Folk Festival the town fills up with musicians. Seemingly everyone but me on the flight carried on an instrument. Bands play their 15 minute sets at the convention center and then book shows around town the rest of the week. The songs range from a lady on piano playing a simple tune made up in her head on a hike, to a stage full of old timers playing bluegrass classics. I’m hoping to come back in 2025 for Áakʼw Rock, an indigenous music festival. Each time I come I’m surprised by how many people come out to celebrate. For the big events it sometimes feels like all 32,000 residents are out.

Drag performance at Glitz

It’s the kind of place where my favorite cafe, a Filipino cafe with Occult Magic themes, Black Moon Koven, closed because the owner moved on to become a death doula. A new cookie shop opened, Brujeria Cookiery, with a witchy theme and cute bunnies with pentagrams on their foreheads in the window. There is plenty of the outdoorsy, Arc'teryx wearing crowd here, but there’s a magic loving side to this town I see pop up that I love. Maybe they overlap? I don’t know. I will say I’m a white guy from out of town coming into a place with a strong indigenous culture. Finding magic here may just be me coming up from Los Angeles and reacting to everyone else’s everyday. I’m doing my best to not romanticize a culture while also giving my honest reaction.

If you live there you seem to run into your friends everywhere you go. Neighbors pop in to each other’s houses to walk their dogs, they let each other know when they’re walking to the market in case they want them to pick up something, it feels like the communal promise found only in sitcoms. (Ugh, I need to get out of LA.) That’s probably just small town life that I, as a big city dweller, am romanticizing. Everyone knows each others’ dirty laundry, but in that knowing of it they seem to accept it. Not much is hidden.

River along the flume trail just above the city

Spruce Tips

Every time I’m in Juneau I get excited to find anything flavored with Spruce Tips. Foraged in the Spring, spruce tips are the new growth on spruce trees. All types of spruce trees produce them, but some are better tasting and less bitter than others. It has a lemony citrus taste with a bit of pine and it is full of Vitamin C. It makes a great syrup to then flavor whatever you want with. I particularly love it in beer or gin, but that’s where I’ve found it the most. Part of its appeal for me is it’s seasonality. You forage it in the spring and then start making stuff with it.

Animals

Keep your eyes open for bears and porcupines. The trash cans are all bear proof. You can tell if one isn’t by the trash scattered around it. Everywhere you look there are giant ravens going about their day like it’s their city. The dump is covered in bald eagles. Juneau is not on the edge of the wilderness, it’s in it.

Amongst all of this, outside of downtown, most dogs are off leash. Dogs here have to learn quick not to approach a porcupine otherwise they spend the day getting quills carefully removed from their face.

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Places to go:

Pel’meni