Downtown Juneau Walking Tour Self-Guided Audio Tour

About this tour

Juneau looks like a postcard. It's actually a paradox. A capital city that no road can reach. A state government glued to the side of a mountain so steep that the only ways in are by boat, plane, or birth canal. A creek you can almost step across that started a gold rush so massive it built a city, then quietly disappeared into a concrete straitjacket. A wooden Russian Orthodox church an Indigenous community paid for themselves in 1894 — and the reason why will not be the reason you assume. This walking tour is the version of Juneau the cruise brochures don't tell you. The deaf bull terrier who became the official greeter of Alaska's capital and is buried under bronze made partly from the hair of dogs who never met her. The light cruiser that shared this city's name and was gone in twenty seconds. The five brothers who all went down with her, and the federal policy their mother's grief created. The Wyatt Earp revolver that absolutely cannot be Wyatt Earp's revolver — and the part of that story that is, somehow, still completely real. You'll learn why Juneau is the capital of the largest state in the union despite three separate attempts to move the government somewhere a road can reach, and why those attempts keep failing for a reason nobody talks about. You'll learn how a single mine manufactured most of the ground you're standing on, acre by acre, by accident. You'll learn why the church bells, the bar music, and the bush plane engines all belong to the same story. This is Juneau told the way Juneau actually happened. Walk it once. You will never look at it the same way again.

Stops on this tour

1. 1The Boomtown
2. 2The Red Dog Saloon
3. 3The Grand Dame of the Territory
4. 4St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church
5. 5The Great Debate
6. 6The Governor's Mansion
7. 7Seward's Folly and the Tokeen Marble
8. 8The Floatplane Base
9. 9The Tidelands
10. 10Tahku the Whale
11. 11The Concrete Creek
12. 12The Last Lifeline
13. 13Patsy Ann's Legacy
14. 14Bonus: USS Juneau

Route map