Juneau Glacier Driving Tour Self-Guided Audio Tour

About this tour

The Juneau Glacier Driving Tour is a GPS-triggered audio guide for the corridor between downtown Juneau and the Mendenhall — eighteen stops, told the way the place actually got there. Trace the 1880 gold strike to the Áak'w Ḵwáan corner of Gastineau Channel, where a Tlingit guide named Kowee led Joe Juneau and Richard Harris to the quartz that built the city. Drive over the AJ Mine's ninety million tons of waste rock — the tonnage that paved your route. Pass through the Tongass: the largest temperate rainforest on the planet. Learn what's emerging from under the retreating Mendenhall, including a 2,000-year-old forest the glacier kept in cold storage. Hear the Tlingit account of how far the ice once reached, carried down through generations of oral history. Find out why the Salmon Creek dam is the retired prizefighter still spinning out a small share of the grid more than a century after it went online. Hear how a Juneau dairy ended when the cows lost the lease and the moose moved in. Get the bush-pilot story — radio-physicist mythology and all. Watch salmon return at Macaulay Hatchery, the cycle that makes Southeast Alaska work. Ride past wetlands that double as nursery and dining room for everything that swims, walks, or flies. Find out why the tide reserves the right to amend the channel twice a day. About forty-five minutes of narration across the corridor, GPS-triggered to play along the route.

Stops on this tour

1. 1The Ground We Drive On
2. 2The Tongass
3. 3Salmon Creek (the world's first of its kind)
4. 4Field of ?
5. 5Turn toward the Glacier
6. 6Dairy in the Valley
7. 7The Invisible River of Air
8. 8The Little Ice Age
9. 9The Meltwater
10. 10The Buried Forest
11. 11The Valley is Younger Than it Looks
12. 12Brotherhood Bridge
13. 13The Bush Pilots
14. 14The Wetlands (Food Web)
15. 15Right Turn Ahead
16. 16Macaulay Hatchery
17. 17Salmon Creek Powerhouse
18. 18The Tides of Gastineau
19. 19The Return

Route map