Mount Roberts Trail Self-Guided Audio Tour

About this tour

So you've made it to Juneau, a city that exists mostly out of stubbornness, wedged between a saltwater channel and a mountain that frankly never agreed to any of this. Good news: there's a trail going up that mountain, and we wrote a tour about it that does not sound like a brochure. Mount Roberts is the hike that locals actually do. Mostly under the trees, which means it's the rare Southeast Alaska activity that doesn't get cancelled because it rained for the eleventh straight day. You'll climb through one of the rarest ecosystems on the planet, walk past the bones of one of the wildest gold rushes in North American history, hear how a Russian Orthodox priest in 1840 did something most colonizers refused to — learn the local language first — and meet Father Edward Brown, a parish priest who built a hiking trail mostly out of spite and shovels. Highlights include: a hollow mountain, a tramway secretly more interesting than the view, a film called Seeing Daylight that justifies sitting down for eighteen blissful minutes, and the only hike where the gift shop literally bribes you with a free ride down. Buy enough fudge, ride the tram. We don't make the rules. Sixteen stops. Stories you won't get from a placard. Worth every step. Or every dollar of fudge — your call.

Stops on this tour

1. 1The Power Players
2. 2The Russian Orthodox Pivot
3. 3The Trailhead Transition
4. 4The Vertical Forest
5. 5The Hollow Mountain
6. 6The Clear-Cut History
7. 7The Tramway Disaster
8. 8The Alpine Treeline
9. 9Father Brown's Cross
10. 10The Avalanche Chute
11. 11The Tlingit Harvest
12. 12Into the Canopy
13. 13The Placer Pioneers