The day started in the Super 8. We slept in, not so easy to do when its daylight starting at 4 a.m. I grabbed my quart of milk off the windowsill, and the sky was overcast. The prediction was for at least a chance of showers all week, so we weren’t surprised that it was sprinkling as we walked out into the fresh Alaska air. I had run out of T-shirts and tomorrow is laundry day, so we’re off to explore the Nugget Mall. The bus stops behind the Nugget, so we were familiar with it. The building has two entrances but no windows, and a vast parking lot. I first saw it early one morning and thought it was abandoned. It is not. The parking lot fills during the day, and once inside the doors a whole world of merchandising greets the eye.



Also greeting the eye, but not as welcome, is a huge stuffed bear, possibly 10 feet tall that someone shot. At the other entrance is a stuffed wolf. Back when men were few and animals plentiful this trophy display might have made sense, but now it seems a terrible waste of something scarce and precious.
I got a Carhart T-shirt, tough and odor-resistant, with a very nice pocket for $20. This may seem a strange purchase for a man who has several hundred T-shirts in his barn, left over from the days when I owned Kicking Mule Records, but the secret to success in merchandising is location3, and the Carhart was closer to me than the Kicking Mules.
I changed into it in the store dressing room. Now with a T-shirt under my belt, so to speak, we were ready to catch the bus. The Nugget had a secret passage that lead directly to the bus stop behind the huge building, with a coke machine in it, so I emerged a happy man. There are 3 busses that run on the Juneau line. All converge behind the Nugget at quarter after the hour, and again at quarter to the hour. Either the #3 or the #4 will be outbound. It will take 30 minutes to get you back to the Nugget and ready for the inbound trip, we discovered one day. The other will already be inbound, but local. The 3rd bus will be the inbound Express. That’s the one to ride, but it can be tricky to distinguish. It was a couple of minutes late last time and we ended up on the local by mistake.

The local is better if you want a view of the people of Juneau and their neighborhoods, but that knowledge will cost you time. Since the Express quits running before we come home each evening, we have already made the exchange on a couple of nights, and opt for the express.

On it a young man sitting opposite me sees me taking pictures, and rightly spotting me as a tourist, imparts a secret known only to a few, even among Juneauans. Up on the mountainside behind the high school someone has carved an eye, visible to those who know where to look, from the highway. He shows me the general area but the bus is moving and the window of opportunity is fleeting, and I do not see the eye. But it’s on my list.

People here are extremely open and friendly, and think nothing of striking up conversations with a busmate. A woman came up to us on the street yesterday, filled us in on some local history, and promised to send us a free copy of her book. Southern Humboldters will especially feel at home here because people living in the bush look exactly like people living back in the mountains of the Lost Coast. Lots of camo and long beards.

The Indian/Eskimo population of Alaska is declining as a percentage of the total population: down to 15.6% in the last numbers I saw. But we are in Juneau, in the middle of the Tlingit lands, and it is time for Celebration 2008, the major biannual celebration of all things Northwest Indian. Walking the streets, riding the busses, we are in a majority Indian area with the exception of the tourist blocks around the cruise ship docks. Cruisers here, as in all ports of call, are almost entirely isolated from the local population in area and activity. I mentioned to a couple from a cruise ship that there was an Indian festival going on 1 block from where we were eating. They were not interested.

Internet access is very spotty so pix come later.

Because it takes all day to get there and back, but you only have a few minutes of time at the destination to get anything done.

We were up at 6:15 to catch the 8 am ferry for Sitka, which is located on a bay on the coast. It was overcast and misty,and the scene departing was something like this:



The MV Fairweather is a modern ferry, put into service in 2004, and really luxurous. It is a catamaran, and travels at 35 knots (cf MV Columbia's 22) through the twisting channels between the coastal islands. It had native art on the walls. This Old Woman mask was carved in 1971 for the now extinct Seattle terminal of the ferry line.



At that speed we were able to land at 12:30 pm, and by 12:45 had secured a cab to take us into town and give us the tour - returning us to the dock by 1:15's deadline for the 1:30 departure. If we missed the boat it would be a day or so before we could catch the next one. We had a great, if short, tour.

Here's a home in the suburbs of Sitka (8000 souls) set in a glaciated valley - note the characteristic rounded shape - right by the ferry dock area - say 5 miles from downtown.



Our driver's family lived thru the Sitka fire of 1967 which burned down the Russian Orthodox Church (now restored, and in very active use) and his family's home. His advice,
with apologies to Leadbelly, "If your house catch on fire, and there ain't no water round, throw your dirty clothes out the window, let the doggone shack burn down" because dirty clothes will fit you whereas those nice clothes hanging in the closet for years probably will not, and you'll need clothes in the next few days. We keep our dirty clothes outside the house, so we're all set.

The weather has been overcast and showery, which has made scenic photography difficult. So we went to the Alaska State Museum, which is here in the state capitol, and looked at their exhibits of native art. They have some extraordinary items. Here's a statue - it is not from the ancient tradition but its pretty nice.



The exhibits include quite a bit of Eskimo culture, but we are in Tlingit country so I focused on that part of the galleries. The Tlingits are grouped in clans and the clans have clan houses with impressive door post carvings, and incredible main wall decorations in the big room. This is one, done for the museum I believe, setting out important aspects of the clan's history and spiritual connections.

Sorry to get behind in posting but we've been touristing full time. Our motel is about 10 miles from Juneau central, and to get there we take a city bus ($1.50 each way). Here's a bus window shot. if you're going to be a photo tourist you've got to get bus window shots down because you'll be making a lot of them - or missing a lot of what you go by.



The city is built on some unlikely terrain. Within several blocks of the waterfront there is a very steep moutainside. They've gone up as far as they can go, and some of their streets are staircases. This one allows you to go from the City museum to the State museum.



The area along the waterfront is largely shops to tantalize the more than 1 million tourists who come each year on cruiseships to this town of 30,000. This picture is for those who know Garberville.

We took what in the law we’d call a frolic and detour on our way to Ketchikan, this afternoon, as the ferry veered to the left of a large island to go through a narrow and beautiful strait. We passed a small village. I would say “remote” village but a location like this goes well beyond what we normally consider remote. Here’s a couple of scenes from the frolic. The first is the village lodgehouse, the other is the view north as we passed by.