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Nestled in the Flats neighborhood near Juneau’s federal building is the city’s oldest and longest running hydropower plant.

For many, the large blue building is just a noisy part of the neighborhood. But for lifelong Juneau residents like Kevin Gullufsen, the building has a fun little Easter egg.

“When I pressed this years ago, and this was about 10 years ago, it would make this really satisfying, like, ‘awooga’, sound, you know, like a Tex Avery cartoon,” he said.

Gullufsen is talking about a small, black button next to the power plant’s door on Capitol Avenue. A sign on the door states that hearing protection is required inside, and there’s a hum of machinery in the air. Gullufsen was one of many people that pressed the button as they walked by, especially in his twenties.

“I lived on the corner over here, coming out of college, and it was like our favorite thing to do coming to and from the bars with my three roommates, was to press this button right here,” he said. “And then sometimes we’d run, like we, you know, we’re little kids playing a prank or something like that.”

But the button’s silent now.

For Curious Juneau, Gullufsen wanted to know what the button is for — and what happened to it.

The answer to what this so-called “awooga button” is, is a simple one.

“A favorite of the Juneau public to push on the way by. I remember it went out from when I was a kid as well,” said Bryan Farrell, the chief power generation operator for AEL&P. “But yeah, it’s a doorbell. It is just a loud industrial doorbell.”

AEL&P owns and operates the power plant. Its office in Lemon Creek is relatively quiet, but over at the power plant, things get loud. Really loud.

“These are just the hydro units running,” Farrell said over the sound of roaring generators. “These are the diesels over here. If these were running, it’d be considerably louder.”

Back in the quieter office, he said that loud noise required a really loud doorbell.

“It used to be that there was someone within that building actually operating those units, and within that building there’s another control room,” he said. “So they’d be inside that control and that had to be loud enough to alert them in that control room.”

But Farrell said they disconnected the doorbell about five years ago, partly because of the noise.

“People do like to push that on the way by, and it is a loud sound. So if you’re in there working on something, and someone pushes that doorbell on their way by, it can be a little bit jarring,” Farrell said. “And then also, we just disconnected it because we don’t want people to be distracted when they’re in there working by them, by those loud noises.”

He says there’s also no need for a doorbell anymore either because of cell phones.

“You would just call someone knowing that there’s an operator in there to get their attention or or we would call our main operations center, and they could radio into that building,” he said.

The building’s small black doorbell is still there now, but it’s just effectively a button.

So what did it sound like? Gullufsen gave his best impression.

“It was like a mix between, like a Tex Avery thing like Wile E. Coyote going, ‘awooga,’” he said. “And then a, like a tsunami siren, because if you would hold this down, it would keep going.”

Farrell declined to give his impression. Instead, he reconnected the doorbell one more time for KTOO to capture the sound that delighted and annoyed Juneau residents for years.

Click here to hear the awooga sound!

But for now, that small, black doorbell will go back to being a defunct relic of the past.

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It’s a question that’s swirled around town for decades, often with some heated debate: Why is the state capital Juneau and not Anchorage? 

Kirk Smith is a volunteer with the Juneau-Douglas City Museum, which works together with the Capitol Building to provide tours during the summer tourism season. He says he often finds himself having to answer the question. 

“The question does come up quite frequently, ‘Why is a city that’s inaccessible by road or rail, why is it the capital?’’ he said.

For this Curious Juneau, a listener asked KTOO to take a look at where the question — and the debate — stand. 

Smith has been giving tours of the Alaska State Capitol since 2018, so he knows the building, its history and its artwork like the back of his hand. He starts each tour in the Senate Finance Committee hearing room, where a painting of Sitka hangs on a wall. 

“Major issues that affect Alaskans are decided in this room,” he said.

He explained that the painting is there because Juneau wasn’t actually the first capital of Alaska — Sitka was. But that changed in 1906.

“Juneau was the largest and wealthiest and most successful city in the territory in 1900 when the Congress actually mandated moving the capital to Juneau,” he said. “Anchorage existed in that time, in a sense, it was a small community.”

But Juneau wasn’t the state capital yet because Alaska wasn’t a state yet; it was a territory.  The Capitol building was built in 1929 and opened in 1931 as a federal building and territorial building.

“I like to refer to the architectural style as ‘early 20th-century American post office,’” Smith said. 

The federal government then gifted the building to the state when Alaska became the 49th state of the Union in 1959. 

In the decades since then, there have been multiple attempts to move the capital to a more populated area. Some of them almost succeeded. In 1974, Alaska voters passed an initiative to move the capital to the road system. But a measure to fund the move failed, as did four other capital move votes in 1960, 1962, 1994 and 2002.

Juneau Democratic Sen. Jesse Kiehl said that, despite the many failed attempts, there’s always going to be a new effort to move the capital onto the road system.

“It’s a little bit like a zombie movie. It’s never all the way dead,” he said. “You can count on it to come back smelly and shambling and still a problem that has to be dealt with.”

When Juneau became the territorial capital in 1906, Anchorage wasn’t the hub that it is today. But now, Anchorage’s population is roughly nine times the size of Juneau’s population.

Over the years, a lot of state jobs have migrated there. So much so that the movement coined the name Capital Creep — the slow trickle of state jobs moving away from Juneau to Anchorage. 

Kiehl said he’s obviously biased because he lives here, but argues there are numerous reasons why Juneau should remain the capital despite the movement away.

“Oh, good Lord in heaven, the price tag,” he said. “I have no idea what that price tag would be  — hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars at least. And that’s probably a low-ball estimate.”

He said that Juneau’s identity as a town is intertwined with being the capital of the state. Other states like California, New York, Texas and Montana all have their capitals in locations that aren’t the most populated areas of their respective states. 

But House Rep. George Rauscher, R-Sutton, said holding the Alaska Legislature at the Alaska State Capitol in Juneau is a disservice to Alaskans because it’s hard to get to Legislators. 

“It costs so very much money for our legislative constituents to come down and see us,” he said. 

Since 2017, Rauscher has introduced a bill each session in the Alaska Legislature seeking to have lawmakers convene in Anchorage instead of Juneau. He argued that Juneau is inconvenient and expensive for everyone who is not local and too far from the state’s big population centers.

“This is the only state on the planet where people have to take a boat or an airplane to go to do the work of the people,” he said. 

His bill didn’t go anywhere last session —  nor has it ever in previous years — but there’s always the chance it could get picked up next session in January. 

But every time the issue springs up, so does the opposition. 

“As long as we remain dedicated and vigilant, I think we can continue to hold this off and keep this smelly old zombie that tries to shamble out of the crypt periodically from threatening the town,” Kiehl said. “But you’ll never stop it from getting reanimated by somebody somewhere.”

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On a sunny morning at the Lemon Creek Landfill, Steve Lewis, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, walks through the wetland toward the line of trees surrounding the dump. Bald eagles are squabbling over a big, salmon-colored plastic bag. 

They congregate here to eat. He counts more than 20 eagles swooping around the trash piles.

“It’s just unfortunate, because it’s basically like an unnatural occurrence that mimics natural occurrence,” Lewis said. “This is pretty similar to what you might see at the Chilkat.” 

He’s talking about the Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve in Haines, where thousands of bald eagles from all over Southeast go in the winter to feast on a late fall run of chum salmon. 

But that’s not where they all go.

For Curious Juneau, KTOO listener Mark Branson asked where Juneau’s bald eagles go in the winter, and what they eat.

“Eagles eat a lot of fish and they eat a lot of waterfowl — those are probably the two big things,” Lewis said. “But, you know, they’ll eat things at the dump here.”

Lewis outfits the birds with little GPS backpacks to track their movements. He said bald eagles go where the food is, including hooligan and salmon runs, areas where waterfowl hang out, places they can scavenge dead animals — and yes — landfills. 

How far they travel for a meal depends on whether they’re going to have eaglets. Those who will be parents don’t go far. 

“We have birds that stay here all year,” he said. “There’s territorial birds that have nests.” 

Hundreds of bald eagles stick around Juneau through the winter, Lewis estimates. They feed on what they can find nearby so they can defend their territory from potential thieves and retain their nest to have eaglets in the spring. 

But Lewis said that not all eagles are interested in breeding. Those birds travel to Haines and even farther.

“There’s adults that are not territorial,” he said. “We call them floaters. They have a little bit less affinity to necessarily staying in one place.”

Since bald eagles can live around 30 years, he reckons the floaters probably don’t feel a sense of urgency about reproducing. Instead, they can wait until the conditions feel right and roam along the coast and up rivers in the meantime. 

Lewis estimates that 30% to 40% of adult bald eagles in Southeast are ‘floating’ in a given year. That’s not including juvenile eagles, which ‘float’ as well while they learn about their environment. 

The young birds can be identified by their splotchy brown feathers. They develop the characteristic white head and tail plumage at around four years old.

Many floaters visit the Chilkat Valley near Haines, where an odd upwelling of warm water at the confluence of the Chilkat and Tsirku Rivers prevents the water from freezing and allows a late fall run of chum salmon to spawn. The salmon provide a feast for thousands of bald eagles starting in November. 

Reba Hylton, the tourism director for Haines, said locals call it the “council grounds” since there are so many white heads poking through the trees like wigged legislators of old. She said the eagles are most active in the morning. 

“They’re still lazy,” she said. “I mean, there’s plenty of food to go around, but they’ll still try and come in and take each other’s food. So you get a lot of squawking that happens.”

But Southeast’s floaters don’t just fly to Haines. Some bald eagles that Lewis tagged in Juneau, Sitka and the Chilkat Valley have traveled as far north as the Peel River in Yukon Territory and as far south as Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

He said their movement patterns look as if he put GPS tags on his friends.

“The church would be important for some, and the bar is important for some and the library is important for some,” Lewis said. “Eagles are kind of that way, I guess.”

For some bald eagles, the dump is important. In Juneau, it’s common to hear people refer to the national bird a trash bird or a “dump buzzard,” Lewis said. But he still finds them impressive, no matter where they like to hang out. 

If you ask longtime Juneau residents what cake they want on their birthday or for special occasions, one answer comes up a lot — North Douglas chocolate cake. 

“People love this cake,” said Abigail Sweetman, a Juneau resident originally from Ketchikan. She spends nearly all of her free time coming up with new recipes in her Starr Hill apartment.

“I am a huge sugar person, and I grew up making a lot of desserts because it was something I like, something I couldn’t get much of in Ketchikan,” she said. “Most of my love of food came from baking at a young age.” 

For Curious Juneau, Sweetman asked KTOO about the cake’s origin.

While I started looking around for the people who named it, Sweetman gathered ingredients to make it at home.

“It has butter and oil, which is pretty decadent,” Sweetman said, reading aloud from the recipe. “She says to combine, basically like, most of the wet ingredients in the cocoa and bring it to a boil.” 

The recipe lives in the Fiddlehead Cookbook. The cookbook, which is older than Sweetman, is based on a restaurant that operated in Juneau for nearly 30 years. The Fiddlehead Restaurant closed two decades ago, but the cookbook — and North Douglas chocolate cake — has taken on its own life.

“It was a cake that I had in childhood,” she said. “and I’m like ‘I didn’t realize that they named a cake after North Douglas’ and I was like ‘There’s gotta be a story there.’”

The story is rather simple actually, according to Linda Zagar. She’s the baker the cookbook credits with bringing it to the restaurant. 

“My best friend’s mom made this cake, and it was called choco bake,” she said. “It has a real name. It’s a real recipe. I did not create the recipe. That’s what I always tell people. I just brought it.” 

Zagar moved to Alaska with that same best friend in the 1970s, and followed her now husband to Juneau. They’ve lived in North Douglas for decades.

She worked at the Fiddlehead Restaurant for several years, and worked in just about every role there — waiting tables, washing dishes, prep cooking — before she became the morning baker. Zagar said a lot of staff would bring in favorite recipes they had accumulated over the years. 

“For some reason, this one stuck,” she said.

Zagar added a couple of twists: she made it a layer cake, with more frosting, and added walnuts around the edge — though the nuts didn’t make it into the cookbook version. And, Zagar said, she loves chocolate, so instead of plain cocoa powder, she used dark. 

The name, however, was a savvy act of branding. 

“My boss at the time said, ‘Well, what’s the name?’ And I said, ‘choco bake’. And he goes, ‘Hmm, no.’ He goes, ‘You’re the North Douglas Baker. Let’s call it the North Douglas chocolate cake.’ And I think that’s half of it,” she said. “It has a cool name, yeah? But then it just became a thing.”

Nancy DeCherney was part of the Fiddlehead Restaurant too, as a cook and manager. 

“All of us were getting out of college, and there was money up here, and so we had the blessing of having a staff that was highly educated and full of — you know — it was the 70s,” she said. “Everybody was full of exciting ideas.”

DeCherney remembers what it was like to walk into the Fiddlehead. She described dark wood furniture and ferns, a smoking and non-smoking section.

She wrote the Fiddlehead Cookbook in the 90s and she said she loves hearing people talk about their favorite recipes from the cookbook. She’s glad it’s lived on. 

“I think partly, it’s not real difficult food,” she said. “It’s accessible. Some of it is a little unusual, but I think the average bear can cook it, and it’ll turn out okay.”

Back in her apartment, Sweetman pulled the cake out of the oven and started to assemble it. 

“I always want layer cakes to turn out a little better than they do, and then I usually get to the end of it and I’m like, it’s more important to me that this tastes good,” she said as she started frosting. 

For the record, it also looked good, with some extra decoration that wasn’t in the cookbook – edible eyeballs. 

The cake is rich and moist. You’ll probably want a glass of milk nearby. And Zagar says, it’s always better on the second day. 

KTOO’s Digital Content Director Adelyn Baxter joins Juneau Afternoon Host Bostin Christopher for a look back at the creation of Curious Juneau ahead of its new 2025 season premiering on Friday, May 16. From the very first episode to listener favorites, it’s a deep dive into what makes Curious Juneau one of the most popular features as it answers burning questions, wonderings, and myths from viewer-submitted queries.

Episodes of Curious Juneau featured:

• Where does a gorilla run for mayor? Juneau, of course.
• Juneau’s concrete blocks spark tall tales about their origins 
• What happened to Juneau’s Taco Bell?
• Does Juneau really have the smallest Costco in the world?
• What are the original Lingít names for Juneauʼs mountains?
• Where do the Foodland ravens roost?

For more Curious Juneau, visit Curious Juneau – KTOO https://www.ktoo.org/curiousjuneau/

Join KTOO for the kick-off of the new season of Curious Juneau on Friday, May 16, at 8:00 a.m. in the downstairs studio.

Bostin Christopher hosts the conversation. Juneau Afternoon airs at 3:00 p.m. on KTOO and KAUK with a rebroadcast at 7:00 p.m. Listen online or subscribe to the podcast at ktoo.org/juneauafternoon.

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Juneau Afternoon is a production of the KTOO Arts and Culture Team.
Bostin Christopher produced today’s show with help from Adelyn Baxter.

Alaskans celebrate the Fourth of July in a myriad of ways, whether it’s log-rolling competitions, launching cars off of cliffs, or jumping high in the air in the blanket toss.

In Juneau, we have our fireworks on the third, an old tradition that let miners sleep off their hangovers. But KTOO listener Mary McEwen wrote in to ask about a different July 4 tradition — one her father told stories about.

“It’s kind of been a piece of family lore that, you know, ‘Oh you know I once won a race down Gold Creek on a piece of Styrofoam,’” she said. 

It’s true. Some brave Juneauites used to celebrate Independence Day by racing down Gold Creek on improvised rafts — something akin to the Red Green Regatta, on speed. 

For this Curious Juneau, we talked to some of the people who did it — like Jim Williams.

“There were probably 15 or 20 idiots that attempted it,” he said.

Williams said that when he did the race in the 1960s, dozens of people came to watch the racers from the banks of the creek in downtown Juneau. 

Gold Creek runs in a paved channel, and the water flows fast over the concrete. The race started in Cope Park and wound through downtown, so the racers sped past the Federal Building and Foodland before getting dumped into Gastineau Channel.

People went down the creek one at a time, riding everything from proper inflatable rafts to wooden doors. Williams rode an air mattress.

It didn’t go well.

“I just remember going over something and immediately popped my raft, so I was dead last in the race,” he said. “I had to walk all the way down Gold Creek because the only way to get out of there was to get down by Foodland.”   

Williams competed with his friend Gary Rosenberger, a high school sophomore at the time. Rosenberger said he laid on his air mattress like a surfboard and paddled with his arms. 

“I had to hold on to it going over the falls, and then it was smooth sailing from then,” he said.

Old newspaper stories said the fastest time in 1967 was nearly two-and-a-half minutes. The next year, the currents must have been stronger — the winner came in at a minute and a half.

Gary Rosenberger said he may have won the race once if he hadn’t gotten out of the water too soon.

“But I didn’t know there was an end — where the end was,” he said. “So everybody was yelling at me, but I didn’t know what they were yelling because it had to be six or seven people all yelling the same thing.” 

And Mary McEwen’s dad? Duane McEwen said he won the race on a raft built from Styrofoam with a wooden frame. 

“I think I made a paddle out of a broom handle and a piece of wood — it was strictly homemade,” he said. 

But then he left his raft outside all year, and the foam was heavy and waterlogged by the next July.

“The second year I came in last place,” McEwen said. “I dragged bottom all the way down there.” 

It’s not clear just how enduring this tradition was — the race did not get a lot of news coverage. Williams said it seems like it only happened once or twice more.

“I think they decided there was some liability there. Which, I don’t know why they would have ever thought that,” he said. 

But another listener wrote to say he remembered the race continuing well into the 1980s. And a 1967 story in the Alaska Daily Empire calls that year’s running the “75th annual sluice race down Gold Creek” — though Curious Juneau could not find anything to back that up.

Rosenberger said it would be more dangerous now. Since the 1960s, some large rocks have been placed at the end of the creek.

“You wouldn’t — I don’t think — drown or anything,” he said. “But you’d probably be embarrassed if everybody was watching you.”

Correction: This story has been edited to include new information about what years the race took place.

On a windy day in Juneau, you can see state flags fluttering along Egan Drive or a bald eagle coasting over Gastineau Channel. On the pier behind U.S. Coast Guard Station Juneau, you might catch the blur of a wind turbine’s blades. 

“It really spins in the wind and it makes a neat little whipping sound as it goes,” said energy educator Clay Good. He works for Renewable Energy Project Alaska. “So everybody notices it and wonders, ‘Hmm. Can we do more wind energy here?’”

For this Curious Juneau, a KTOO listener asked just that.

According to Lt. Kyle Hansen, the 60-foot miniature wind turbine at Coast Guard Station Juneau was installed back in 2010, following an executive order that called for more renewable energy at federal facilities. 

The turbine was also used as a teaching tool for high school students to learn about wind energy through a nationwide program called Wind for Schools. The same program brought a twin turbine to Sitka. 

The educational component is defunct now, but the turbine on Juneau’s waterfront is still producing electricity — about 1,500 kilowatt hours per month. 

“Which turns into about 7% of Station Juneau’s needs,” Hansen said. 

A turbine this size could also easily power the average U.S. household, which needs about 900 kilowatt hours of electricity per month. And Hansen said it’s saved the Coast Guard some money, too. 

“It’s produced about $25,000 worth of electricity for the station,” he said. 

This is just a mini-turbine. The ones you might see on a wind farm can usually power almost 1,000 homes, and the cost of wind-generated electricity is dropping. 

So why not build more wind turbines in Juneau?

It turns out, our rugged landscape is not quite right.

“Wind turbines are often seen in areas of more open space around them, where there’s a smooth laminar wind,” Good said. 

Laminar winds are streamlined and consistent — Juneau’s winds are anything but that. When a breeze hits steep mountains and drops into Gastineau Channel, it often becomes turbulent, irregular and chaotic. And like airplanes, wind turbines don’t like turbulence.

In 2005, the Alaska Energy Authority did a study on wind resources for dozens of communities across the state. They rated the feasibility of wind power on a scale of one to seven. At sea level, Juneau scored one — a poor rating. 

On the mountaintops, it might be a different story. 

“That’s a lovely place to capture the wind,” Good said. “But it’s not a lovely place to build a turbine. It’s not a lovely place to maintain one.”

Wind on the ridges is great for wind power on average, but at the extremes — especially in the winter — it’s too strong for a turbine to withstand.  

So Juneau’s wind, though powerful, is not really the right kind of wind. Perhaps more importantly, wind power faces a big renewable power competitor here. 

The same mountains that create turbulent winds also create rushing creeks and streams, making for really reliable hydropower. Deep mountain basins can store that water throughout the rainy season, and it can be used to create energy later on, during drier times. Wind and solar power, on the other hand, require expensive batteries to store energy. 

“We just had that extraordinary good fortune of having these hydro resources,” Good said. “It’s hard to even think about anything else.”

When a community wants to generate large-scale renewable power, there’s often a high start-up cost to build the infrastructure. That’s especially true for hydropower projects. 

But Juneau got a head start with hydro. Back in the late 1890s, water was the easiest way to power a bustling mining industry. 

“It’s not like 125 years ago, a bunch of conservationists and greenies moved to Juneau and said, ‘We’re gonna have green power here,” Good said. “It was just the power that was available.”

The first hydro powerhouse at Gold Creek later evolved into Juneau’s sole utility, Alaska Electric Light and Power. Today, they provide Juneau with 100% renewable electricity for relatively cheap. But that doesn’t mean Juneau is a renewable utopia.

Hydroelectricity only covers about 20% of the total energy used by the city. A lot of transportation and home heating still relies on fossil fuel like heating oil, diesel and gasoline. 

So eventaully, Juneau might need more renewable power to keep cutting down greenhouse gas emissions.  But there’s a lot more hydropower potential to tap into.

“Southeast Alaska was made for hydro,” Good said. “I think rain was invented here.”

Spanning an outside wall of City Hall in downtown Juneau, there’s a 10-and-a-half by 61-foot mural called “Raven discovering mankind in a clamshell.” 

It shows Raven opening a clam and releasing a man. Around it, there are Alaska Native clan symbols like the bear, the frog, the eagle, the orca and the wolf. A vibrant blue and cloudy sky fills the background.

It’s one of the first things cruise ship passengers see, and KTOO listener Shirley Dean said it’s one of her favorite pieces of art in Juneau.  

“It just brings me delight with the colors and the whole image of the beginning. and it just brings me peace and joy,” she said. “Because in the winters, as you know, when it’s really dark, and gray and rainy, those colors just make me happy.”

During the local election last fall, Dean wondered what would happen to the mural if voters approved the city’s plan to build a new City Hall. That ballot measure failed, but the city still plans to move its staff to a new location one day.

Dean asked KTOO to find out what would happen to the building and mural if that happened. 

“I don’t know how they can do it. But if we can put people on the moon, I think we could preserve an art piece,” she said. 

 A familiar face

The mural was painted in 1986 by then-local artist Bill. C Ray. He’s the son of former state senator Bill Ray, who died in 2013. Now, nearly four decades later — it’s showing its age. The paint is chipping and colors are fading. 

When KTOO reached out to talk to him about the mural, he declined an interview. 

But, in an old newspaper article, Ray said the mural was inspired by a carving by the late Bill Reid, a renowned Haida artist from British Columbia. It tells the Haida legend of how man came to be. 

Ray is not Alaska Native, but in the article, he explained the legend like this: Raven was flying around and landed on a beach to dine on some shellfish. He had his fill, and was just about to take off when he saw a giant clam under the sand. He dug it out, popped it open and squirming inside … was man.

Gary Waid was the model for the man. He is Lingít and Haida and has lived in Juneau his whole life. He’s 78 now — so he was in his 30s when Ray painted him. 

Standing next to the mural now, Waid looked different — his hair is short and white instead of black and flowing, and he looked like he’d seen some things since popping out of that clamshell. 

Waid said if he had known back then how iconic the piece would become in Juneau, he would have made a few requests. 

“I should have had residuals in some way or another on this stuff,” he said, laughing. 

Though he frequents downtown and drives past City Hall often enough, Waid has an interesting relationship with the mural  — he doesn’t like to look at it. 

“It’s like being in a movie, or in a play that gets recorded. You don’t really like watching oneself do the thing,” he said. 

But, he said the mural serves an important purpose. When he was young, public art depicting Alaska Native culture wasn’t common like it is today. He said he isn’t attached to the mural itself so much as its ability to share his culture through the story it tells. 

“We got the story from the elders,” he said. “‘Tell the story to as many people as you can and pass it on.’ Any which way that the story gets passed on, I’m all for it.”

Waid said he doesn’t care so much if the mural is preserved or destroyed — as long as something similar takes its place. 

A City Hall without the city?

City Manager Katie Koester said what will happen to City Hall and the mural is still unclear. 

“Where we are going to eventually end up moving downtown employees is a question that’s still up in the air,” she said. 

Koester said she’s in the middle of negotiating a lease for two floors of the Michael J. Burns Building downtown, which houses the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation.

The city has been trying to figure out a long-term office plan for staff after Juneau voters rejected two separate bond proposals for a new City Hall. 

Fewer than half of city employees now work at City Hall, which has issues like cracking walls, leaking ceilings and asbestos in the carpet. The rest of the employees work in rented office space in other buildings. 

If City Hall does get emptied out, the Juneau Assembly will decide what happens to the building.

Koester said the city had a photographer take high-quality photos of the mural in 2011. Potentially, those could help recreate the piece in the future. 

“I do think there’s a real desire to preserve that iconic piece of Juneau. In fact, I was walking over here, and people were taking pictures of that mural,” she said. “So it’s really come to represent Juneau and it’s just a beautiful story and a beautiful piece.”

So for now, the mural will continue to greet visitors of Juneau, and Waid will just keep having to drive past his big face downtown. 

Every other June, canoes — or yaakw — arrive at a beach in Juneau. With carved formline paddles in hand, Southeast Alaska Native people row for days to get there. 

They come for Celebration, the gathering of Lingít, Haida and Tsimshian people honoring the survival of traditional dancing, art, language and community. 

Seikoonie Fran Houston is a spokesperson for the Áak’w Ḵwáan. She spoke in a 2022 Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska video from the landing.

“The first one I saw that occurred — it brought tears to my eyes to witness this. And it also kind of gives you a little vision as to what our ancestors did,” Houston said. 

But yaakw have been landing at this beach for much longer than the 40 years that have passed since the first Celebration. It’s the site of an old Lingít village called Aanchg̱altsóow. That means “the town that moved.” 

A KTOO listener asked about the Áak’w Ḵwaan Village, fish camp, and garden that were once where Auke Recreation Area — or Auke Rec —  is now. 

Aanchg̱altsóow:  ‘It’s a good place, it has plenty of what we need.’

Auke Rec is a park along a beach north of the rest of Juneau, with stone picnic shelters and fire pits. On clear days, the beach is dotted with couples on walks, dogs sniffing around, and families having picnics.

Thereʼs a section of the beach thatʼs sandier and smoother, down an unofficial trail in the middle of the beach. Oral tradition says it was cleared of boulders and large rocks for easier yaakw launches and landings. 

By the time Seikooni Fran Houston was growing up, Áak’w people weren’t living at the village site, but she knows the story of how they first got there. 

“When we migrated, that was the first area — so in other words, we were the first Indigenous people of the area,” she said. 

The oral history has it that the Áak’w people migrated from the south and deeper in the interior. From a distance, the clan leader saw Aanchg̱altsóow and sent scouts to it, Houston said.

“And they came back and they told the leader, ‘It’s a good place, it has plenty of what we need,’” she said. “So that’s the real short story of a long story.”

For hundreds of years, Áakʼw people lived at Aanchg̱altsóow.

The Forest Service takes over

Houston said that around the turn of the 20th century, people had started moving away from the village to Douglas and downtown Juneau to work as miners, and so their children could attend school.

But she said the land at Aanchg̱altsóow was always in use.

“There was a time, too, that there were some people who stated that we abandoned Auke Rec,” she said. “We didn’t. We still use it. Not only do we use it — we take what we need in the area — we use it for ceremonies. We didn’t abandon it.” 

In the 1920s, the United States Forest Service claimed the land was unoccupied. They began to make campsites, trails and other infrastructure in the area. Then, in 1931, the Forest Service claimed full ownership. 

Juneau researcher Peter Metcalfe wrote “A Dangerous Idea: The Alaska Native Brotherhood and the Struggle for Indigenous Rights.” He said settlers claiming that land was “abandoned” was a common land-grab tactic. 

“That has been used in a legal sense against Native Americans from the beginning of contact in the Lower 48, as well as Alaska,” he said. “Most Native Americans would say ‘We never abandoned our land.’ And it’s true, in a moral sense. If we own something, and we haven’t sold it, we still own it. It doesn’t matter if we live there or not.”

During the same year when the Forest Service took control, over a dozen Áak’w Ḵwáan built cabins on the old village site to stake claim to the land. It didn’t work. In January 1932, a federal judge ruled that Lingít people had given up ownership by not occupying the land. 

The judge gave the families a month to remove their cabins. Afterward, the Forest Service expanded their construction at the site, and by the 1940s, it looked much like it does today. 

Metcalfe said the way the federal government claimed Auke Bay wouldn’t hold up today.

“The Forest Service was wrong about Auke Bay. When they thought they had won, they hadn’t really. They just put off a decision that was finally resolved in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971,” he said. 

‘Thereʼs no trace, except for those footprints’

Sitting on the beach on a sunny March day, Saan Jeen Jennifer Quinto was getting ready to lead a traditional ocean dip. After setting an intention and reflecting around a fire, Quinto guided participants into the water a little bit at a time. 

Quinto said that, to her, Aanchg̱altsóow is a direct connection to her identity as Alaska Native. 

“For me, thereʼs different layers of not only sacredness, but all the different emotions of life,” she said. “The way that this was also likely a place of joy for a lot of people, but also the heartache of the fact that weʼre not allowed to be connected in that way any longer to this place.”

She said the word “recreation” in “Auke Recreation Area” can cause people to treat the beach like itʼs a playground.

“I don’t think the way that itʼs currently used or represented just doesnʼt — people donʼt understand all of those layers that are happening here for those of us from the Native community,” Quinto said

Quinto said sheʼs often picking up trash from the sites of old longhouses. Indentations are still present in the trees along the shore. 

“It always crosses my mind that people are respectful of gravesites, and in a lot of ways this area has that same sort of sacredness,” she said. 

And Aanchg̱altsóow is a gravesite. In a 1987 Alaska Department of Natural Resources cultural resources survey, archeologists reported finding at least one set of human remains there.

Quinto said that if people could only see what it looked like when it was a lived-in village, they might treat it differently. 

“You would have seen the house fronts, you would have seen the kootéeyaa, you would have seen our people out here. And now thereʼs no trace, except for those footprints,” she said.

She said that erasure was the start of a long history of reducing the footprints of Lingít people in Juneau — including the gradual shrinking of Juneau Indian Village downtown in the middle of the last century and the burning of Douglas Indian Village in 1962.

But events like traditional dips in the ocean and the canoe landings at Celebration bring Lingít traditions back to the land, and back to life, Quinto said. 

“For Lingít people, we believe that everything has its own spirit, and has its own life,” she said. “And so, to me, when weʼre able to gather here for cultural events, those are moments that we get to restore that life to this area, and I donʼt think it happens enough.” 

Seikoonie Fran Houston said that when she stands on the beach now, it fills her with gratitude for her ancestors. 

“I go out there and I talk to my ancestors and I thank them every time I go out there,” she said. “Saying thank you for choosing this area, because it’s so pretty and so peaceful.” 

Next week, paddlers will once again ask the Áak’w Ḵwáan for permission to come ashore, in recognition for the history and life of this piece of land.

Marc Wheeler lives in downtown Juneau, close to the Foodland grocery store. He often stops there for lunch. That’s when he sees the parking lot’s resident ravens.

“I’ll be like walking while I eat it, and they’ll literally follow you like a gang of thugs,” Wheeler said. “Cause they’re just counting on you dropping something.”

Like many Juneauites, Wheeler has had a lot of fun watching the curious corvids that wander around town, but he noticed that most of them disappear at sundown. 

“Where’s the roost?,” Wheeler asked for this installment of Curious Juneau. It took some nighttime detective work to find out. 

The first lead came from Bob Armstrong, a naturalist and wildlife photographer who has been working in Juneau for more than 60 years. 

He’s photographed hundreds of ravens. One of his favorite shots from Foodland shows a bird with a bright red cup of Raven’s Brew coffee. The picture was carefully staged.

“I came into the parking lot and just put some latte in it and just set it up 20 feet away from the car and just sat there and waited,” Armstrong said.

Within a few minutes, a half dozen birds started circling it. Eventually, one took the lid in its beak and lifted the cup to show off an illustrated raven with its wings outstretched.

“But then what surprised me is it opened the lid of the cup – it had to snap it off – and then drank the latte that was in there,” he said. 

Ravens are scavengers, meaning they spend their days looking for something — anything — to eat. Insects, berries, eggs paired with trash from the landfill and lattes.  

That explains why they hang out near Foodland looking for scraps. But their roosting habits are more mysterious. Despite decades of observation, Armstrong couldn’t tell me where ravens go at bedtime. Tracking them precisely would probably require tagging them.

Scientists in Fairbanks have used radio-transmitter tags to track urban ravens on a forty mile commute to their roosts in spruce trees outside the city.

KTOO doesn’t have the budget for radio transmitters. At least, not that kind of radio transmitter. So this study would need to be more low-tech. 

Armstrong did have one idea. He suggested the spruce trees on Willoughby Avenue. 

“Because if I go to Bullwinkle’s for pizza at night or something and come out at night, and then walk along that sidewalk there, I hear a lot of ravens talking from the trees in total darkness,” he said. 

A rainy Tuesday night stake-out revealed no ravens in the trees. But there was some evidence in the echoey, dimly lit parking garage of the State Office Building. 

The first sign of ravens were spikes along the railing, installed by people to keep birds out. Clearly, they didn’t work well, because the concrete railing on the garage’s third floor was covered in white bird poop, and there were a few black feathers left behind in the parking spaces. 

The most significant clue was a nest, about a foot across, that was nestled in a few U-shaped pipes in a corner of the garage. It appeared empty, but it was a sure sign of raven residency. 

To find a raven roost, one must get inside the mind of the bird. John Marzluff, a retired professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington, has spent his career doing just that. He’s a corvid expert who has studied crows, jays and ravens.

“There are kind of two strategies in a raven society,” Marzluff said. 

The first is for the older breeding pairs. Mates roost together.

“Those birds typically roost in a pretty consistent place on their territory, night after night after night,” Marzluff. 

They’re fiercely protective of that territory, especially when they’re tending to a nest like the one in the parking garage. 

“The rest of raven world are what we call vagrant non-breeders,” Marzluff said.

Those ravens are the most low-ranking in the bunch. They aren’t tied to a particular spot that they’re defending or returning to every day. 

“They may aggregate at rich food sources like Foodland,” Marzluff said. “But it’s not the same birds every day, you know, day in and day out. To say that there’s a flock or a group that’s the “Foodland ravens” — probably not the case.”

They’re just ravens that happen to be at Foodland. 

And that makes sense because ravens move around a lot to follow food. Marzluff’s research has shown that they travel thousands of square miles for their next meal. They’re flexible based on the changing seasons and the surprise delicacies that might appear. 

“If all sudden there’s a big spill of a bag of dog food at Foodland, that word is gonna get out,” Marzluff. “Because the birds that are there will be very active and other birds will hear or see them and come in.”

Marzluff research has revealed that ravens, especially the vagrant non-breeders, use their roost as an “information center.” They’ll meet up with dozens or even hundreds of ravens to “talk” about food sources or predator threats that they encountered during the day.

These roosts are typically found in tree stands or on cliffs, but in an urban environment that might change. A parking garage, for instance, is usually close to easy food. 

“It’s also warm, and it’s also sheltered from the elements, and maybe even a little bit lighter so they can see any oncoming potential predator,” Marzluff said. “It might just be the perfect place.”

While the State Office Building’s parking garage was empty, the parking garage of the downtown library turned out to be a jackpot just past 10 p.m. on a Thursday night.

One the top level, 13 ravens – a superstitious grouping – perched on the lamps, pipes and crevices in the ceiling. 

They declined an interview, which makes sense. It’s pretty rude for a reporter to break into their home while they’re sleeping.

On a sunny Saturday at the Fisherman’s Bend gas station back in February, Juneau resident Joyce Sepel was filling up her tank. She said the Auke Bay gas station is her favorite.

“I’ve been going to Fred Meyer because it was cheaper,” she said. “But now I’ll just watch. I like coming here. It’s convenient, and I love watching the water here while I do it. But they’ve been the most competitive during the winter.”

On Valentine’s Day, prices at Auke Bay stations were cheaper than elsewhere in Juneau — as much as 40 cents cheaper. De Hart’s charged $3.50 per gallon, and the Fisherman’s Bend station charged $3.51. 

Meanwhile, Mike’s Airport Express was charging $3.70 per gallon. Petro One was charging $3.58 at its Lemon Creek station. Downtown, the Delta Western station was charging $3.90.

Some listeners have asked us why gas tends to be cheaper in Auke Bay. For her last Curious Juneau, erstwhile KTOO reporter Katie Anastas decided to find out. And as a bonus, she took on another reader question: Why does it cost more to fly to Ketchikan than to fly all the way to Seattle?

Catching drivers before they head south

Matthew Lewis is an economics professor at Clemson University. He studies how gas stations compete with each other, and how consumers respond to that competition.

“If consumers are driving or commuting a fair distance, they’re probably passing more gas station options along the way,” he said. “So that gives much more flexibility in where consumers might purchase.”

If someone lives in Auke Bay and drives to Lemon Creek or downtown for work every day, that driver passes by a lot of gas stations. Lewis said the Auke Bay stations need to keep prices low to try to catch those drivers before they go south.

“It is on the outskirts of where people are,” he said. “It’s not a convenient location for a lot of people, and so they need to have a relatively low price to stay competitive. Stations on a prominent, convenient part of a heavily traveled road or downtown can charge a high price and many consumers will still go.”

But gas stations do compete within neighborhoods

More broadly, four things affect the cost of gas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The biggest is the cost of crude oil, which makes up more than half of the retail price of gasoline. Lower oil production drives up crude oil’s cost per barrel. 

Taxes and the costs of refining and distribution make up the rest.

As those costs change, so do the prices at the pump. But ultimately, Lewis said, stations decide how much they think they can charge.

When the crude oil and refined gasoline prices go up, the stations have to raise their prices and they do so fairly rapidly,” he said. “But when oil and wholesale costs go down, the stations tend to be a little bit slower to lower their price.”

Lewis said competition drives stations’ prices, even within the same neighborhood. Back in October, the Juneau Empire reported an 80-cent per gallon difference between the two Auke Bay stations.

“Prices do change regularly, so consumers really often aren’t all that well informed about what different stations are charging at different points in time,” Lewis said.

So next time you need to fill up, call around to a few stations. The lowest price could be closer than you think.

Along those same lines…

Have you ever wondered why it’s sometimes cheaper to fly from Juneau to Seattle than to Ketchikan? Some of our listeners have.

Alaska Travelgram writer Scott McMurren answered us with a question: “How many airlines fly between Juneau and Seattle?”

There are two.

“So Alaska and Delta compete on that route, particularly in the summer,” McMurren said. “The next question is, how many airlines offer jet service between Juneau and Ketchikan?”

For jet service, there’s just one.

Like gas prices, it comes down to competition. Multiple airlines will compete for customers. But if one airline has a monopoly on a route, like Alaska Airlines does from Juneau to Ketchikan, it’s up to them to set the price. 

Editor’s Note: After we finished this story, a power outage forced the city’s recycling center to close for repairs. The city’s public works department says the recycling facility is full right now and won’t be able to receive any new materials for at least a few days.

It’s a nearly universal experience in Juneau. 

It’s Saturday. You pull up to the city recycling center in Lemon Creek and methodically separate the Number 1 and 2 plastics, tin, glass, aluminum and cardboard you’ve used over the past week into their separate piles. Then you get back in your car to finish your weekend errands, which probably include Costco. 

But do you ever stop to wonder what happens to all of that material after you drop it off?

 Over the years, several Curious Juneau listeners have asked where Juneau’s recycling ends up. A few even wonder if it’s really getting reused, or if some of it ends up in a landfill. 

And what about contamination – can incorrectly separating recyclables cause Juneau’s shipments to be rejected?

“Our stuff is considered the gold standard,” said Juneau Recycleworks Operations Manager Stuart Ashton. “They will actually take it and if they’ve got a tour coming up, they’ll bring that stuff out and for observation because it’s so good. It’s that good.”

Where does it all go?

Ashton is talking about the staff of a big recycling facility in Tacoma, Washington. That’s the short answer. Your recycling goes to Tacoma.

Separated recycling gets condensed into cubes by a baler, then it’s shipped by barge to Waste Management’s JMK Fibers recycling facility. 

They process about 180,000 tons of material per year. Ashton said Juneau makes up about 1,400 tons of that. 

Jackie Lang with Waste Management’s Northwest region said while there’s always room for improvement, Juneau’s reputation for good recycling outshines many of the other communities they serve. 

“They are pretty darn good at it,” Lang said. “We see that in the material that we receive from Juneau. We see that residents and businesses are working hard to put the right material in the right container.”

In Tacoma, industrial-scale machines sort Juneau’s recycling before it gets shipped to end markets. 

“Plastics sorted at this particular recycling facility end up in fleece-type clothing and backpacks,” Lang said. “Some plastics are made into rigid plastic products like plastic buckets or maybe laundry baskets or storage bins. Tin cans are recycled into rebar, aluminum cans become new aluminum cans. And cardboard boxes become new boxes, water bottles become new water bottles.”

Does recycling make a difference?

National headlines in recent years have bemoaned the unsavory realities of recycling, like the fact that only a tiny portion of what gets put in recycling bins worldwide actually ends up being reused. 

Lang said the commodity market for recycled materials fluctuates constantly based on global supply and demand. She acknowledged that the market had dipped in recent months, but said that Waste Management has recently invested millions into improving equipment at its Tacoma facility to make sure more of what they receive does get recycled. 

“Recyclables that arrive at our recycling center are sorted and shipped to manufacturers who are waiting for that material,” she said. “So the demand is reliable and steady for the products that we recycle every day.”

More and more, headlines and studies warn us about the threat of microplastics in our environment, even here in Alaska. 

Recycling has long been touted as the way to avoid plastics pollution. But a recent report from the Center for Climate Integrity investigates how the oil and plastics industries used recycling as a public relations tool for decades, despite privately acknowledging that recycling often costs more than producing new plastics. 

The report accuses corporations of suppressing this information, leading to the rise in global plastic pollution. 

How can Juneau residents be better recyclers?

Back in Juneau, there’s still the question of what to do with those pesky items that don’t have a proper bin. 

Juneau’s curbside recycling program is done through Alaska Waste, which accepts plastics 1 through 7. 

Ashton says the city’s recycling facility only accepts #1 and #2 plastics. He noted that #5 has become more valuable on the market, but it’s not as simple as suddenly deciding to accept it. 

“It really is more about sustainable practices,” he said. “Trying to retrain an entire population of 30,000 people, you can only take number one and two plastics for two decades and then switch. If it gets more expensive, we have to stop it in a couple of years.”

Another thing to keep in mind is that if the plastic caps and lids don’t have a recycling stamp with a 1 or 2 on them, they’re not allowed. And plastic bags? They’re never recyclable, although Fred Meyer sometimes collects used bags. 

Nearly all of the recycling collected curbside and at the city facility eventually leaves town. But not all of it. Waste Management actually grinds up glass at the dump. Ashton says the landfill uses it in place of gravel.

“It is our best reuse material in this town, from my perspective,” Ashton said. 

So where could Juneauites improve their recycling habits? Ashton says the curbside recycling program sees the most contamination. That’s probably because there’s less oversight — and less social pressure to get it right. 

Fast-food restaurants have come and gone from Juneau for decades — but very few stick around for long. 

Beyond Subway, McDonald’s, Domino’s, Papa John’s and Papa Murphy’s, you won’t find any other national chains in the capital city. Sure, there are restaurants like Pel’meni’s or Crepe Escape downtown where you can get food fast, but that’s not what we’re talking about.

Some residents, like Ken Judson, who was grabbing a Subway sandwich during a recent lunch hour, wish they had more choices. 

“Oh you know, Taco Bell or Burger King. Arby’s,” he said. “We see the commercials, but we’re always stuck with the one McDonalds, and there used to be other stuff. I think there’s still room for more.”

He’s right — partly. Juneau once had popular chains like Taco Bell, Burger King and Wendy’s. Some even had multiple locations. But they came and went. Several Curious Juneau listeners asked KTOO why that is.

Any day of the week you can pull up to McDonald’s in Juneau and grab a Big Mac and fries. It’s right by the McNugget intersection. When it opened in 1982, corporate officials said it sold more hamburgers and fries in its first week than any other store in the company’s history. 

And at one point there were two McDonald’s in Juneau. A second one opened downtown, four years after the first one, where Heritage Coffee is now. That one closed in 2010.

There’s no Taco Bell in Juneau today, but once there were two of those, too. Wendy’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Time, Burger King and Baskin Robbins — they all came and went by the mid-90s. Burger King even had a food truck, but that shut down, too. 

Bruce Denton opened the Senate Building on South Franklin Street downtown in 1982 and still owns it today. Wendy’s and Burger King had locations there in the 80s. 

“It’s interesting when you look historically at Juneau,” he said. “I mean, we had a Kentucky Fried Chicken for years that isn’t here anymore. We had Taco Time and a Taco Bell. McDonald’s is kind of the sole success story.”

Denton said the downtown area is tough for restaurants in general — but especially fast food —  because you can’t put in a drive-thru, and there’s not enough foot traffic. 

“They clearly weren’t getting enough traffic,” he said. “Particularly in the winter. And you think about the cruise ship passengers, one thing about the cruise is that they’re royally fed. So there’s not a lot of tourists that are scrambling in to eat.”

One of the few fast-food restaurants in Juneau that has passed the test of time is Subway. Its owner is Assembly member Wade Bryson.

He said owning any business in Juneau is tough, but trying to make money in fast food here is like walking a razor-thin wire. 

“What do you call a business without profit? You call it closed,” he said. “So, once a business doesn’t cross a profit threshold, it can’t continue to operate. It is hands-down one of the most challenging locations in the United States to operate a business.” 

Bryson took over the two existing Subway restaurants in Juneau in 2004, one in the valley and one downtown. The downtown location burned down less than a year later. He opened another one in Lemon Creek in 2010, but that closed in 2015. Then he opened yet another one downtown, but closed it in 2020. 

Like many businesses in Juneau, he said that fast-food restaurants deal with three big issues: inflated prices, lack of housing and a struggle to find workers. To make a profit, he said he typically needs to charge about 30% more than what a Subway sandwich would cost in the Lower 48.

“The cost of food is just escalating literally on a daily basis,” he said. “And in Alaska, the housing crisis, which led to the employment crisis, which led to the wage crisis, which has now compounded the housing crisis — I mean, it’s all just circling together.”

None of this is new. Even back in 1995, former McDonald’s owner and operator Mike White told the Juneau Empire that finding employees in Juneau was tough. Dale Martens, the former vice president of the Anchorage Taco Bell of Alaska was quoted in the story saying that staffing in Juneau “has always been a challenge.” 

Bryson said the demand for fast food in Juneau hasn’t gone away, but running a restaurant in Juneau often just doesn’t pencil out. 

“I wish I had a dollar for every time someone asked me to open a Taco Bell here in town — I would have had enough money to do it,” he said.

Dick Wood wrestled white garbage bags and cardboard boxes from the backseat of his beat up red car.

There were children’s books, toys and clothes that once belonged to Wood’s son, who is 35 now with a brand new baby.

“We were saving it for his kid, and they don’t want it,” Wood said. “His generation, they don’t want clutter.”

Wood pulled out a yellow, plastic hobby horse mounted on a rusted blue frame, then a crib with a sun-faded orange cover.

“Vintage,” Wood said. “Vintage is hot!”

When Juneau residents want to get rid of their vintage wares — or their junk — they can line up for Saturday donation days at the Salvation Army Family Store. Behind Wood, there are dozens of cars waiting. They spill over into the parking lot across the road.

Everything that’s dropped off gets packed into a shipping container in the store’s back parking lot. Once that fills up, anyone left waiting in line is turned away. Sometimes, the store gets so full that they have to stop taking donations altogether.

That’s left people like KTOO listener Mary McEwen with would-be donations piling up in their attic or the trunk of their car.

“I mean, a lot of us have a bag somewhere that’s like, ‘Oh man, next time I have time on a Saturday morning for that one window where you can drop things off at Salvation Army,” McEwen said.

For this installment of Curious Juneau, McEwen asked KTOO to find out why it’s so hard to get rid of things in town — and what alternatives are there when the thrift stores fill up.

Everything — including the kitchen sink

On a sunny Saturday in February, Salvation Army store manager Christina Austin was all bundled up. But the weather hinted of spring. That usually leads to a spike in donations.

Juneau’s many seasonal residents also contribute to the ebb and flow. Austin said there’s more people trying to get rid of things at the ends of the legislative session and the tourist season.

“They just get stuff, just for the season, and then they fill their apartment or their studio just temporarily,” Austin said. “People always say that they’re just borrowing it, and it’s coming back to the store.”

The store’s capacity to accept those donations is mostly limited by staffing, Austin said. She’s one of two full-time employees, but all of the sorting and pricing is done by volunteers.

Those volunteers ebb and flow with the seasons too. Folks drop off during the holidays or over the summer. Also, a lot of volunteer groups disbanded during the pandemic. It’s taken a while to rebuild them.

Mary Ellen Frank stuck around. She spends every third Saturday in the store’s back room, stationed in front of a giant sorting table, which has everything — a box of dented water bottles, a teasing comb in its original packaging from the 1960s, a vintage dissection kit in an alligator leather carrying case. And not one, but two kitchen sinks.

“I don’t know why the kitchen sink has to be there. I don’t even think I could pick that up,” Frank said. “That’s unusual. There’s always something new.”

Frank’s job is to decide what’s sellable. She’s an avid second-hand shopper herself — it’s how she sources materials as the curator of Juneau’s doll museum — so she approaches the table with an open mind.

“We’ve got a good balance of people that are kind of like, ‘Ehhh, get rid of it,’ Frank said. “And me like, ‘Ahhh, that has so much potential!’”

Still, Frank estimates they throw out about 20% of what gets dropped off. So far, she’s discarded some cloth face masks, a tote bag with torn handles and a scorched, stained potholder.

It’s not unheard of for people to donate straight up trash. Austin worries that could become more common because of rate hikes at the landfill. 

Junk items can clog up operations at the St. Vincent De Paul thrift in the Mendenhall Valley, too, according to store manager Sharon Mallet. And at both stores, things that don’t sell within a few weeks have to be cleared to make more space on the store floor —  which means some things might head to the landfill later.

Mallet said she does her best to prevent that, because she learned to make the most of secondhand materials while growing up in the Caribbean.

“I grew up on an island, so this to me — I think I just fit right in,” Mallet said. “I remember as a kid, you made everything last or you reused it a different way.”

Items that are beat-up but usable go to the Dan Austin Center Free Store. Shrunken wool sweaters get put aside for a local artist who makes mittens for people experiencing homelessness. And ripped cotton t-shirts become rags, which the store sells to boat owners or contractors.

Though the garbage collectors come once a week, Mallet said she can’t remember the last time the store’s dumpster was full.

Still, Juneau’s thrift stores say they can barely keep up, even for perfectly sellable items. Unlike the Salvation Army store, the St. Vincent De Paul store is open four days a week instead of just one. And they have more full-time staff.

Even so, Mallet says they have to put a cap on how much stuff they can take.

“Because once we take it we also have to sort it, price it, hang it,” she said. “There’s a lot involved with it after we get it.”

In February alone they took more than 500 donations. By March, St. Vincent De Paul’s had posted a sign that said “No More Clothes” in the window by their donation drop-off.

“Clothing we have an abundance of,” Mallet said. “We never lack for clothing cause we get so many donated.”

Both stores say they receive an abundance of women’s clothes, especially shoes and accessories.

Some community organizers have started to hold occasional clothing swaps, to provide an alternative to thrift stores. Community Clothing Swap Juneau and the Southeast Alaska Gay Lesbian Alliance each hold one quarterly.

An old-timey solution

After local artist Mary McEwen submitted her Curious Juneau question, she found herself dreaming up her own ways to reuse old clothing that she and her friends had piling up.

“I was thinking about it in the context of Juneau, where like, if you can’t donate clothes, what do you do with them?” McEwen said. “And so that got me thinking about reuse. And that got me thinking about weaving.”

Though she had never woven before, McEwen bought a vintage loom on Craigslist. Now, three years later, her downtown weaving studio houses three wooden looms and a huge variety of used textiles. There’s a bag of worn-out pajama pants in one corner, a stack of misprinted t-shirts on the floor, and a big garbage bag full of socks.

There are a half-dozen multi-colored rugs around, and on every loom there’s a work-in-progress. One small rug incorporates strips of plastic bags. Another has alternating stripes of old jeans and a pink cotton sweatshirt.

McEwen uses the local thrift stores herself.

“I mean, everything I’m wearing, except for my socks and underwear, was thrifted,” McEwen said. “At this point in my life, I don’t buy any clothing firsthand.”

But she found herself frustrated when they couldn’t take donations. More than that, she found herself wondering what to do about clothes that don’t last long enough to make it to the second hand market. 

“We have more like, fast fashion throwaway kind of stuff that doesn’t survive long enough, without falling apart to become something in a thrift store,” McEwen. “So I was thinking, you know, what if what if we use this kind of old-timey solution to this current problem?”

Rag rugs, which people have woven from scrap fabric for hundreds of years, became her answer. McEwen has been able to source most of her materials from friends and family — stuff they had a hard time donating but couldn’t bring themselves to throw out.

Though she advocates for reducing clothing purchases and mending or repairing garments when possible, McEwen said that using rugs to keep stuff out of the landfill has been a great challenge for her as an artist.

“I think, what color combinations am I going to use, and what other ways can I think of to elevate the aesthetics of it?” McEwen said. “Even though it is garbage, and even though we are going to step on it on the floor.”

Anywhere you go in Juneau, there are mountains shooting up all around. Mt. Juneau and Mt. Roberts loom over downtown. Across the channel, Mt. Bradley – better known as Mt. Jumbo – notoriously blocks South Douglas from getting much sun. And in the valley, there’s Thunder Mountain — supposedly named for avalanches rumbling down its slopes.

A listener asked KTOO what the local mountains’ original Lingít names are. For this installment of Curious Juneau, Yvonne Krumrey spoke with Lingít educators to find out. 

Like most of Juneau, Kristen Rankin likes to hike. On some of those hikes, she started wondering what some of her favorite peaks were called, before they were named after settlers.

“I love to be up on all of the mountains around us,” she said. “And I think it’s really important to know those names, and I want to. I want to feel connected with the land and the history.”

When she was thinking about that history, she couldn’t help but see how names like Mt. Juneau have only been around for a short time.

“We have these names that have been in existence for places for what — 150 years tops,” Rankin said. “And then there are the names for places, that these names have been around for thousands of years.”

University of Alaska Southeast Lingít Language Professor X̱’unei Lance Twitchell says, from a Lingít perspective, the newer names don’t make much sense. 

“Imagine if your grandmother was 98 years old, and her name was Nora, and I met her and I started calling her Sally. And then you say, ‘Hey, my grandma’s name is actually Nora.’ And if my response is, ‘I’ve been calling her Sally for like a week now.’ And if that’s my response, to just keep calling her by a different name, then it sounds kind of silly,” Twitchell said. “But from a colonial perspective, people say ‘It’s been called that for, like 100 years.’ And so 100 years compared to 18,000 is not a very significant amount of time.”

And the staying power of these men’s names isn’t just a coincidence, he said.

“What you have behind that is erasure of Indigenous peoples,” Twitchell said.

A Lingít tour of Juneauʼs peaks

(Click on words in gray boxes to hear their pronunciation)

Twitchell said there are much older names for these mountains. Let’s take a tour, starting with the one the tram goes up. That one has mostly been called Mt. Roberts over the last century or so.

“Starting a little towards Thane there’s a place called Wooshkeenax̱ Deiyí,” he said. “And Wooshkeenax̱ Deiyí is ‘trails going up together.’”

And the one that now shares Juneau’s name?

“Coming over this way, Yadaa.at Kalé,” Twitchell said. “If you’re standing kind of right outside these studios and looking up towards the mountains that are kind of to the left of downtown, that’s Yadaa.at Kalé.”

You might recognize Yadaa.at Kalé as the name of the high school, which makes sense, since it faces the school. That name means “beautifully adorned face.” But that’s just the name of the face of Mt. Juneau — the top has a different name. 

“Then if you look up from the high school, there is a mountain with a bit of a rounded top,” Twitchell said. “And that is Shaa Tlaax̱, and Shaa Tlaax̱ is a moldy head.”

And in the Mendenhall Valley, there’s the one that most of us call Thunder Mountain.

“Tleix̱satanjín is the one in between Costco, and the Valley over there,” he said. “And so Tleix̱satanjín is ‘hands at rest.’”

Then on South Douglas, there’s Mt. Bradley – though it’s mostly known as Mt. Jumbo.

“If you were standing here, downtown you look across, then there’s a mountain on the other side, on the big island over there,” Twitchell said. “It’s called Sayéik.”

Sayéik means “spirit helper,” and it’s also part of the name for the elementary school in Douglas.  Twitchell said he knows the language is a learning curve.

“As we sort of use these names more, we shouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes,” he said. “And so some people are gonna say Sah-YEEK, as opposed to Sayéik. And that’s not a big deal.”

He said with gentle corrections, the right pronunciations will come with time. 

‘You should always be working to learn to be an Indigenous person of the world.’

If you want to learn, there are classes you can take. Neelaatugha Anna Clock is a local Lingít language teacher. She’s Koyukon Athabascan and Eyak, so she learned the language as a visitor on Lingít land. 

“Indigenous place names often describe the landscape or how to survive on it, how it can be useful to you, what to watch out for there — whereas colonial place names are often named after a person of power or wealth in a faraway land, because settlers wanted to honor that person if they funded their trip or whatever,” she said. 

Clock said the Lingít language community is full of resources that can help people who live in Juneau to learn more about the land through language. She said she sees it as a vital part of getting to know this place. 

“Having traditional stories, to read and listen to, and then having the language community was a big part for me of understanding and feeling like I belong there — even though I’m not of Lingit heritage, but I belonged there as a student,” she said.

One of Clock’s mentors, Marie Olson, an Áak’w Ḵwáan elder, gave Clock some advice that informed how she thinks of her language journey and her role in the world around her.

“One of the things she told me was, ‘You should always be working to learn to be an Indigenous person of the world,’” Clock said.

‘Now it’s time to do this with the land itself.’

Twitchell said that for most of these place names, it’s not a matter of changing a name to a Lingít one, but changing it back to what it was called before settlers came. 

“When we look at place name restoration, we’re not looking at changing things so much as saying it never should have changed in the first place,” he said. “We were here, we belong. The land belongs to us, we belong to the land. And this relationship is not something that anyone had a right to remove.”

Language learners are scrambling to record as many place names as possible, he said. It’s a race against time because the number of elders who hold that knowledge dwindle each year. There are just seven master speakers now.

 But, he said, there’s room for new place names too. 

“It’s a living language,” Twitchell said. “And we could make new names as new things emerge, or as we find places where we couldn’t document those names in time. But we can make some names based on the knowledge that we have of this area.”

And, Twitchell said, mountains and valleys are a great place to start.

“We’ve done this with some schools, and that’s been effective. Now it’s time to do this with the land itself,” he said.

He said he believes in a future where everyone living here won’t think twice about saying they’re going for a hike up Wooshkeenax̱ Deiyí, or that their kid goes to school at Kax̱dig̱oowu Héen.

When Americans walk into a multi-story building, they’d usually say they’re on the first floor. Not in the lobby of Alaska’s Capitol building.

“It has a very European feel to it,” tour guide Kirk Smith said on a recent morning tour. “Right now, you are not on the first floor, you are on the ground floor. And the reason for that is that, as a multi-agency federal building, it was required to have a post office in it.”

Smith said visitors often wonder why that is. KTOO listener Sylvan Robb asked us to find out for this installment of Curious Juneau.

The Capitol was built in 1931. That was before statehood, so it was built to serve as a federal and territorial building. The post office was on the second of six stories, but Juneau’s steep streets still made it possible to put entrances and loading docks on that floor — on the uphill side, on 5th and Seward Streets. So the architects called that the first floor and called the one below it the ground floor.

“In order to meet the post office’s requirements of having a first floor street entrance, they had to call this the ground floor,” Smith said in the lobby.

The doorway to Seward Street is still there, though the post office is long gone. When Alaska became a state in 1959, the building became the state Capitol. In the years that followed, the post office and other federal offices moved to the newly constructed Juneau Federal Building.

“There’s nothing of it left,” Smith said. “It would be nice if there was an antique post office box or a teller window or something, but there’s really nothing there. It just looks like a hallway. It’s too bad.”

One lingering sign of the building’s history, though, is its art deco style. 

“I like to refer to the architectural style that’s in use here as ‘early 20th century American post office,’” Smith said.

Like many other federal buildings and post offices built during that time, the Capitol was designed by the Treasury Department’s Office of the Supervising Architect.

That office’s designs have come in handy for local architect Wayne Jensen. He’s been involved in many projects at the Capitol over the years, including renovations of the House and Senate chambers and remodels of committee rooms. Most recently, he oversaw seismic upgrades throughout the building, which took years of work between legislative sessions.

That’s when Jensen saw one remnant of the old post office. 

“When we did the demolition, we found a door that was kind of closed into one of the walls,” he said. “I don’t remember if it said ‘post office’ on it, but that was the one thing we did find.”

Jensen has studied the original architects’ ink-on-linen drawings. He said putting the post office on the first floor makes sense – that floor is bigger than the ground floor, and it has better street access.

“The ground floor isn’t as large as the other floors,” Jensen said. “It goes back into the mountain, back into the hill, so it’s truncated a little bit. Plus it has the boiler rooms and all those things that are not really occupiable spaces. But the first floor has access on the back side of the building and on Seward Street.”

According to the building’s original floor plans, the door to Seward Street was an employee entrance and the one to 5th Street was the public entrance. The post office lobby and work room took up the entire east wing of the first floor. Postal workers would sort the incoming mail in the workroom and feed it into post office boxes.

“I know stories from people who lived here in the ‘50s, ‘60s – they would go there every day to get their mail and it became a social area,” Jensen said.

Jensen said the history of the Capitol building is worth remembering. Before construction started, Congress only allocated enough money to pay for half of the block where the building stands today. Juneau residents raised the rest of the money and then gave the property to the federal government.

“The community got together and said, ‘Well, if the feds can’t do it, we can do it ourselves,’” Jensen said. “It’s very Juneauite. Over the years, we’ve done a lot to keep the Capitol here and support the Capitol, and that was one of the first efforts to do that.”

The post office may be a nearly-forgotten piece of the building’s history. But it’s why today’s visitors need to pay extra attention to what floor they’re on inside the Capitol.

If you look across Auke Nu Cove from the parking lot at the Juneau ferry terminal, there’s a strange patch of fallen trees — about a dozen — that are splayed out in all directions.

Jesse Escamilla drives by on his evening commute every day. He’s used to seeing the occasional downed tree around his Lena Point home, but the fallen trees at Auke Nu Cove seemed mysterious and distinct.

“It looked odd, like it was isolated,” he said. “I remember it almost looking like someone with a bulldozer went and purposefully flattened that whole area.”

Escamilla grew up in Texas, and the pattern reminded him of the mark tornados leave. That became one of his two working theories.

“Option one would be Godzilla, and option two would be a tornado,” he said. “Both of those are viable, in my opinion.”

National Weather Service Meteorologist Rick Fritsch says the fan of fallen trees could be evidence of one of Juneau’s weirdest wind phenomena.

“To me, that sounds a whole lot like a microburst,” Fristch said.

The Southeast Alaska Land Trust manages the wetlands by the trees. Their conservation staff said the trees came down during a major wind storm that happened in October 2021.

That storm blew down dozens of trees across town. They hit houses and crushed cars, and in some neighborhoods they caused days-long power outages. It took days to clean up the mess of scattered trunks and branches.

The strong winds spread across all of Juneau. But in the small area around Auke Nu Cove, the wind may have generated a microburst, which can cause distinctive damage.

Fritsch says a microburst starts with a really strong gust of wind that blows straight down from the sky.

“And it comes down on the ground and it hits and goes out in every direction,” Fristch said.

As the winds gush outwards, they can exceed 100 mph — typically causing a lot of damage in a very small area. Just like what Escamilla noticed at Auke Nu Cove.

Elsewhere, microbursts are often associated with thunderstorms. When a thunderstorm forms, a swell of warm air rises to create clouds, which get heavy as they fill with rain or hail. If they get too heavy, they can release a strong gust of air that speeds toward the ground. That’s a microburst.

But thunderstorms are rare in Juneau, and that’s not what happened in the October storm. The alternative is even more interesting. It has to do with how wind interacts with Juneau’s coastal mountains.

“We in the business talk about straight-line winds, microburst winds and cyclonic winds, which are more associated with tornadoes. Basically circular,” Fritsch said.

Wind has basic, somewhat predictable directions, too. During a high pressure system — the kind that’s associated with clear skies — winds spiral clockwise and outwards to form gentle breezes. When a stormy, low-pressure system forms, winds spiral counterclockwise and inwards, building speed as they turn.

Those are the basics, but they’re not enough to predict exactly how the wind will behave.

“How do you get these winds flowing the way they do?” Fritsch said. “The topography on the inside is everything.”

Wind — like all weather in Southeast Alaska — is heavily influenced by topography.

Take straight-line winds. They’re strong storm winds that blow in just one direction. In stormy weather, they race down Gastineau Channel.

“So there’s sea level there. And then we got 3,000 feet on this side and 2,500 feet on this side,” Fristch said, pointing to downtown Juneau and Douglas on a map. “And that just acts like a natural funnel.”

That funnel directs strong gusts across Mendenhall Peninsula and up the runway at Juneau International Airport — in the case of that October storm, for nearly 24 hours. It kept planes on the ground, and it pushed many of the trees at the end of the runway to their breaking point.

Straight-line winds caused most of the tree falls during the storm, but the mystery treefall at Auke Nue Cove can probably be linked to what’s called the mountain wave phenomenon.

When wind hits a mountain, it’s forced upward. Then it hits a mass of stable air high in the sky, which pushes it back down. Those opposing forces make the wind move in an up-and-down wave motion.

When there are really strong winds and a stable air mass around Gastineau Channel, that wave action creates the famed Taku Winds in downtown Juneau.

But mountain waves can also cause microbursts. In some cases, clouds form under the mountain waves. When the windy waves pass over the top of a cloud, the friction can cause the cloud to start turning.

“You can’t necessarily see it spinning, like a sideways tornado,” Fritsch said. “But it is rotating. That’s the rotor cloud.”

On the side of the rotor cloud by the mountain, there are strong updrafts; on the far side, strong downdrafts. As gusts come over the mountains, they can get caught in those rotor clouds, spiraling and speeding up into the downdraft side of the cloud. And that downdraft can break away and come down as a microburst.

When that happens, it has the potential to cause Godzilla-sized damage. Fritsch isn’t sure that’s what took down the trees at Auke Nu Cove, but he says it’s the natural explanation.

“It may have been that you had this air that hit the Mendenhall Peninsula, and it rose, and it got trapped in a rotor,” Fritsch said. “And on the far side of the rotor, it went straight down.”

Fritsch said the wind is leaving its mark on Alaska’s landscape every day.

“Somewhere, there will be some kind of wind anomaly in the great, huge, awesome state of Alaska that will probably go unnoticed,” he said. “Because there’s nobody there to see it.”

At a Coast Guard change-of-command ceremony on Thursday, about 30 active-duty Coast Guardsmen gathered with some retirees, friends, and family under a tent at the Juneau docks. Young service members, wearing light blue uniforms and white caps, stood at attention while officers sent one officer off and welcomed another to town. 

Senior Chief Boatswain’s Mate Sean Crocker, the officer in charge for Station Juneau, said he didn’t want to come to Alaska when he was younger. But now he’s going to miss it. 

“It’s a little more bitter than sweet. And it’s not because I’m going to miss all the amazing fishing, hunting, boating,” he said. “For me, it’s going to be the people.”

The ceremony marked a passing of the torch from Crocker to Chief Boatswain’s Mate Nicholas Sedberry, who will now direct the 25-person Station Juneau. 

Capt. Darwin Jensen, commander of Sector Juneau, said that in Crocker’s two years of service, his unit conducted 90 search-and-rescue operations. Still, Crocker’s wife couldn’t make the ceremony. Their daughter graduated from kindergarten that morning. 

“Even more important,” Jensen said. 

That’s how the Coast Guard is in Juneau – part of the community. 

“You don’t see a huge Coast Guard base down here. There’s Coast Guard here, there’s Coast Guard there,” said former Coast Guard captain Ed Page, who founded the Marine Exchange after he retired. “We’re more integrated in the community.”

While the Coast Guard is not as visible a presence in Juneau as some other Alaska military communities, it is large. A Curious Juneau reader wanted to know just how large — and how much the Coast Guard contributes to Juneau’s economy.

‘A major footprint’

Coast Guard members in Juneau might serve in the local unit — Station Juneau — or they might be involved or in regional or statewide management. Sector Juneau manages activities in Southeast, and District 17 runs the Coast Guard for all of Alaska. Both have their administrative offices in Juneau’s federal building.

Lt. Catherine Cavender works in waterways management for Sector Juneau. She says there are about 150 Coast Guard members in Juneau altogether and 270 throughout Southeast.

Like Page, she points to the lack of a base in Juneau, Coast Guard members live in houses and apartments all over town — they get their cars fixed, hair cut, and buy groceries at the same places everyone else does.

And they face the same challenges finding housing as the rest of the community.

“I lived in a hotel for four months before I was able to move into my rental,” Cavender said.

Meilani Schijvens of the research firm Rain Coast Data says that as of 2019, Coast Guard members had more than 400 dependents living in Juneau, too.

“It’s a major footprint. And then we also have people who work for the Coast Guard who are not active duty,” she said. “It does end up being a significant economic driver in the community.”

The Storis years

Damon Stuebner works at the state library. He made a documentary about the Coast Guard cutter Storis, which was based in Juneau in the 1940s and 50s.

He says that in the past, the Coast Guard’s presence was a lot more visible.

“If the ship had to leave for an emergency situation, the first officer of the ship — the executive officer — would call around to the Imperial and the Red Dog and say ‘Is my crew there? Get them out,’” he said. 

Stuebner says the movie theater even used to have a red light that would start flashing to tell Coast Guardsmen to report for duty, right away.

The work was different then, too.

“When the Storis was based here in Juneau, she did a lot of the normal things as what you would expect from the Coast Guard to do,” Stuebner said. “But what they also did was what was known as the Bering Sea Patrol. This was a series of duties of transporting teachers to rural villages along the coast.”

Stuebner said the Coast Guard also delivered mail, groceries and supplies to coastal villages. 

“When statehood came around, then those duties dramatically shifted, and a lot of that burden went to the state,” he said.

Stuebner says that the Storis – which was stationed in Juneau from 1948 to 1957 before moving to Kodiak — even had a pitbull mascot named Red Dog — rumored to have been “acquired by suspicious means from the Red Dog Saloon.”

A Swiss Army knife

What does the Coast Guard do now? A lot of things, says Page.

The Coast Guard served in certain combat situations like Vietnam and Bahrain, said Page, but typically, those serving don’t face violence of that sort. 

“It’s a different type of service. It’s not just ‘Well, there’s a war, fight it.’ There’s a war all the time,” he said. “The war is in protecting the environment, the war is saving lives when the vessel sinks.”

Joe Geldhof, a maritime lawyer, said the Coast Guard rises to its many roles in Juneau.

“It’s kind of like a Swiss army knife — it’s got a lot of tools,” he said. “And they do extremely well.” 

Sector Juneau has a huge area of responsibility — from Dixon Entrance to Icy Bay. Geldhof says that between the size and the amount of work, it’s a lot for one group to take on. 

“I would say the Coast Guard is a reflection of all the disparate activities that they’re required by law to undertake,” he said. “Fisheries enforcement, drug interdiction at some point — you might conclude if you really study it, that they have too many tasks.”

They keep coming back 

Cavender has served one year in town so far, with two more to go. One of her favorite parts of being stationed here? Fishing. 

“I did catch a king salmon from the beach, which I’m very proud about,” she said.

It’s a new hobby that she started here. She says Juneau is a nice place to be stationed.

“People definitely come back here for their last tour, or come back here and know that they want to retire here,” she said. “It’s really rare to see people retour so heavily in one spot.”

She said the town can feel like home to a lot of servicemembers, who integrate more into the community than they would elsewhere. 

Jensen, who commands Sector Juneau, says servicemembers look for opportunities to come back once they’ve been stationed here. He’s on his third tour in Juneau.

On a rainy afternoon at the Airport Dike Trail, Laura Minne is walking her dog, Bodhi. Over on the airport side of the fence, a speed limit sign tells drivers to go no faster than 19 ½ miles per hour.

When asked if she has a theory for why it’s such a specific number, Minne laughs.

“I can only imagine,” she says. “Whoever did it has to be pretty wonderful to have that humor.”

Airport Manager Patty Wahto says that person was a member of the airfield crew several years ago. The idea was to get the attention of the many workers who were driving faster than the actual speed limit of 20 mph.

“When the 20 mph signs were posted, you could ask people what the speed limit was,” Wahto wrote in an email. “They would either answer that they didn’t know, or that they didn’t think there was a speed limit posted.”

Studies show drivers remember fewer details about routes they’re more familiar with. Dwight Hennessy is a professor at Buffalo State University who studies traffic psychology. 

“The reality is, we can’t pay 100% perfect, focused attention on everything all the time,” Hennessy said. “If you have a monotonous environment, where everything is the same, breaking it up grabs our attention. We’re more likely to process things once we’ve paid attention to them.”

That’s why the 19 ½ sign works, he said. It stands out, which makes drivers think about the speed limit more.

The explanation gave Minne, the trail goer, an idea.

“So let’s just try that on Egan, right?” she said.

In fact, the Alaska Department of Transportation will try out a slower speed limit on Egan Drive this winter, though not quite as low as 19 ½ mph. From Nov. 1 to Jan. 31, the speed limit will be 45 mph from Mendenhall Loop Road to the Sunny Point interchange — a reduction of 10 mph. New radar speed signs will let drivers know how fast they’re going.

Nathan Purves, a traffic and safety engineer for the department, said the goal is to reduce winter crashes near Fred Meyer.

“That was where the majority of crashes were happening,” he said. “When it was icy out, people were trying to make that turn through traffic. The goal is by slowing people down, we’ll have bigger gaps in the traffic, and it’ll be easier to make the crossing.”

But a reduction much bigger than 10 mph could do more harm than good, he said. Drivers make assumptions about the correct speed limit based on the characteristics of a road, like its width and what kinds of buildings surround it. If DOT suddenly changed Egan’s speed limit to 25 mph, Purves said, most drivers would probably feel more comfortable driving faster.

“There would be the outliers that are like, ‘It says we’re supposed to go 25 on Egan, I’m going 24 because I’m not going to speed,’ and then here comes somebody going like, ‘Well I’m comfortable at 65,’” he said. “This person that’s following the law is being endangered.”

Like the airport, some cities are trying to make all of their speed limit signs more noticeable. In Seattle, transportation officials have added signs at more frequent intervals. They also lowered speed limits on arterial and residential streets by 5 miles per hour. The city reported a 22% decrease in crashes.

Time will tell whether the temporary speed limit and radar signs will reduce wintertime crashes on Egan. But, at the airport, the 19 ½ sign seems to be doing the trick.

In the late ’90s, Juneau had two Taco Bells. But by the early 2000s, they were both gone. Juneau has a history of fast food franchises coming and going, but the disappearance of the Taco Bells left a lot of rumors in its wake, from “employees were selling drugs” to “wasn’t it hepatitis?”

“Every business is gonna have drama and rumors and this and that,” said Jennifer Solano, who used to work at the Taco Bell in Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley. “To be honest, Taco Bell was a good, wholesome place to work. They taught me enough that I’ve been able to raise a family, continuing my career managing fast food restaurants.”

Solano runs a Subway in Anchorage now, but she started working for Taco Bell in Juneau as a teenager. In the mid-nineties, it sat where the Asiana Garden restaurant is now, across from Super Bear. 

“We were having repeated problems with the [produce] shipments,” Solano said.  “We would have to throw away sour cream, cheeses, lettuce, tomatoes. They were coming in continuously frozen when they were only supposed to be refrigerated, and we were having to waste a lot of money.”

Solano eventually became an assistant manager. She said getting quality produce from the Lower 48 was just one of many problems.

“Everything in the building was just kind of crumbling and falling apart,” Solano said. “There were so many times that the grease trap had to be re-done because the pipes underneath all the flooring were so old and brittle that they were actually collapsing.”

Plumbers were called in to try to fix the issue at night, which meant workers the next morning were walking on temporary floorboards.

“It’s not an overnight project,” she said. “So then we tried to keep staffing minimal so nobody was running into each other or getting hurt.”

The maintenance turned into a cycle. A pipe would be fixed, the flooring would be replaced, and another pipe would collapse somewhere else. 

The Valley Taco Bell also went through several different managers. Solano said she often picked up the slack when one of them was attending meetings in Anchorage. At one point, it became a combination Taco Bell and Baskin Robbins.

“They would expect somebody that’s making burritos to go over and make a frappuccino,” Solano said. “You know, you gotta make cakes out of ice cream and you have to be able to decorate them and trying to run a Taco Bell side and trying to make cakes was pretty rough for me.”

Repairs became so expensive that the owners started looking for a new building to move to.

“But there was no good place in Juneau 18-20 years ago to put a fast food restaurant with a drive-thru in it,” Solano said. “So they decided they were gonna cut their losses and just go ahead and close the doors.”

Some workers didn’t even have advance notice that the restaurant was closing. They showed up the next day to a note on the door and were told to pick up their compensation checks.

The Valley location was the last Taco Bell to exist in Juneau, but at one point, the city had two — there was a smaller Taco Bell Express downtown. It shared a space with a Subway in a building where Sealaska Heritage is now.

Charles McKenry started there in 1987 and worked his way up to general manager.

“Taco Bell was doing a competition called the Golden Bell,” McKenry said. “We managed to take that store to number seven in the nation for quality and service out of 1,500 franchise stores.”

But the downtown restaurant wasn’t very profitable. It closed in the summer of 1999 when the corporate office decided to focus its efforts on the Valley location. McKenry was transferred there as a shift manager to try to improve the service.

“The gentleman running the store insisted that no one listen to me because it was his store and he would teach them his way, not necessarily the Taco Bell way,” McKenry said. “He didn’t care about quality or service. It was all about his bottom line, even if it meant not being honest about some of the numbers.”

Eventually McKenry quit because of that manager, but his experience wasn’t all bad.

“We had great people,” McKenry said. “It was a fantastic product. I mean I thoroughly enjoyed working for Taco Bell itself, but you can only take so much.”

Now if you’re craving a Crunchwrap Supreme, the Lunch Crunch Wrap at the Lemon Creek Breeze In is pretty similar.