Juneau, Alaska, offers a unique blend of natural beauty, adventure, and rich culture, making it a must-visit destination for travelers seeking an extraordinary experience.
Washington DC, United States Jul 25, 2026 ALN: There are no roads leading to Alaska’s capital, leaving just three ways to reach this northwestern Brigadoon by boat, plane or being born here. And you may wish you were born in Juneau because this is, by far, the most visually striking state capital in the US.
Located along the Inside Passage, Juneau is too beautiful, its culture and history too rich, to get cynical about its popularity with the cruisers. By land mass, it is the largest state capital in the nation, its tall peaks remain snow-capped well into summer, seaplanes buzz overhead, local residents include bears, mountain goats, and whales. With its remote location and a terrain that’s worlds away from a typical American town experience, it feels like you need a passport. What you need, though, is an insulated rain jacket.
The whole region surrounding Juneau is located inside the incredibly biodiverse Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest. Juneau has around 230 rainy days a year, with June being the sunniest with about 50% wet days.
“It does rain a lot here,” admits Nathan Hickok, a local heavy equipment operator who’s lived in Juneau his whole life, “but one sunny day makes all the wet and cold days totally worth it.”
Juneau is off the beaten track, to say the least. But fortune favors the bold who make it this far. With average summer temperatures that peak in the low 60s, this town on the edge of real wilderness draws in those who love communing with nature and wildlife, unique American history, and seafood.
Mendenhall Glacier, which looks like a light blue frozen tsunami rolling through the valley, is remarkably accessible. You can easily see it from the main road north of town, aptly named Glacier Highway. You can hike close to it, dogsled on it, glide into its lake on a boat, kayak or raft, or take a helicopter tour that lands on it.
Like so much of Juneau, it can get crowded in summer and is more peaceful in the spring and fall (and inhospitable in the winter). But the sooner you have this experience the better as it’s quickly receding due to the climate crisis. In fact, as of just last year, it no longer touches the lake it feeds into.
Of Juneau’s more than 1.5 million annual visitors, more than 90% take their first epic glimpse of this town from the deck of a massive cruise ship. Tides of summer cruise ship passengers wash up on its shores, leaving souvenir shops and fleets of excursion buses in their wake. But this year, for the first time, the city is capping the number of people who can disembark to 16,000 on most days, about half the size of Juneau’s population, from a peak estimate of 21,000 souls.
Less accessible and crowded as Mendenhall Glacier but just as dramatic, is the Tracy Arm Fjord, with ice cliffs, waterfalls, and the Dawes Glacier. Any boat tour going through it, mainly run by True Alaskan Tours, takes the better part of a day and requires advance booking.
The other big local attraction is the humpback whales growing to about the size of a city bus. In Juneau, they graze on krill and other fish in the waters off of Auke Bay after breeding in Hawaii in the winter, a 6,000-mile roundtrip swim. Long summer days – more than 18 hours in June – mean long feeding hours too.
While busloads of cruisers were being herded like sheep around Statter Harbor during a visit in June, the very reasonably priced and family-owned Juneau Whale Tours made a stealthy extraction of its small group of about a dozen passengers (including this writer), quickly pushing off while bigger groups were still in the parking lot, calling roll. Their custom 50-foot-long catamaran features a wraparound deck for paparazzi action.
On this two-hour excursion in early June, whale-watchers lucked out with dry weather and “muggings” (as close encounters of the whale-ish kind are called) by a humpback and pack of orcas.
The orca pack of 10, which surfaced in impressive synchronization, represents such a rare sighting that Captain T.J. Miller asked the passengers not to mention them on social media lest they create an expectation by other groups.
Humpbacks, spotted by 20-foot-high spouts, are the guaranteed stars of the show, breaching and diving in massive tail-waving fashion.
Juneau’s attractions get undeniably busy in high season, but according to Hickok, local nature trails provide a great way to avoid the crowds. “The Alaskan experiences here are endless. There are enough trails here that my wife and I couldn’t get to all of them in the summer if we tried.”
Just as accessible, yet far less visited than Mendenhall Glacier, is Gold Creek Flume Trail. “Hike the flume,” as locals suggest, referring to this easy walking escape above the downtown streets. A boardwalk runs along the spot where a water wheel and generator gave the town its first electric power plant in 1893.
It’s now an Instagram-worthy boardwalk that leads to a waterfall before looping back to town. It’s not unheard of to see a black bear or mountain goat up there as well. With some of the boardwalk being restored, a temporary detour leads into a small trail through fiddlehead ferns and tall, moss-draped spruce and other evergreens, snaking alongside the rapids of Gold Creek. You may get slightly more than you bargained for in the detour, but you’ll emerge from the adventure unscathed if a little muddy. The city hopes to reopen the full trail by August.
Walking back into town, you might easily pass the white, columned governor’s mansion, located on an ordinary residential street. It may remind you of a famous “Saturday Night Live” portrayal of a certain former Alaska governor and the comically false detail that she could “see Russia from my house!”
A little farther out of town, the historic national Perseverance Trail crosses bridges, skirts old mine ruins, and offers stunning rainforest canyon views.
In the north part of town, the Mendenhall Basin Trail runs along the back of the airport (including a water landing strip for floatplanes), and along the beautiful valley, punctuated with far-off mountains. On one Sunday morning in June there were only a handful of other visitors enjoying the space until a pack of about a dozen showed up, everyone with cameras. What appeared to be a cruise ship excursion was actually the Juneau chapter of the Audubon Society. This trail skirts the Mendenhall Wetlands Refuge.
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