Don’t set out driving to explore Alaska’s capital city.  Won’t happen.  Air and water approaches only for the 32,000 people living here and their visitors.

Curious to be among Americans who can’t jump in the car and go somewhere.  Everybody I talked to seemed OK with that; eventually I realized I was the only one obsessing about “How do you go away?”

Who needs roads in a world where I walked on a glacier, helicoptered over valleys and waterways carved out by glaciers and floated in waters filling glacial flows.

I flew in to Juneau, but had I tried the Alaska Marine Highway, a car-toting ferry system, it wouldn’t take long to get to the end of the city’s main north-south road.  Really.  The sign declares End, and all you can do is turn around.

Forty miles long that road from downtown, yielding to the mighty Tongass National Forest.

Being short doesn’t mean not interesting.  Totem poles, fishing holes, spectacular gardens, hiking trails, chapels and retreat cabins, more totems, salmon runs and huge panorama views all along this road.

Alaskans make the most of every inch and every splash of sunshine I learned in three days in Juneau before getting on the Island Spirit, a small, personable ship exploring southeast Alaska waters.

So how did I get around since I flew in to this peninsula city? Helicopter to the Juneau Icefield, jeep to “Out The Road” and tramway to the top of Mount Roberts.  Plus my feet.

Good place for sturdy lace-up shoes and warm socks, even in July. Sun didn’t set until 10:00 p.m. and I rose eagerly with it at 5 a.m., astonished with the early light.  Sun was up long hours, but I needed my long sleeved shirts and raincoat every day.

This is a temperate rainforest city with 100 inches of annual rain. Cold air from the Juneau Icefield above meeting up with warmer air from Gastineau Channel alongside the city hands out beautiful dewy complexions along with lots of light showers.

To act like a local, leave the umbrella at home.  These people pull up a hood and shrug it off.

They also use flowers to forecast the winter.  Handsome tall blooms called fireweed. Blossoms start low and move up to the top of slender stalks.

“When they’re blooming on the tip top,” Danith Watts told me, “it means they’re done and winter is next.”  Pretty and sad at the same moment.

She should know because dozens of them bloom around the family home and handsome, secluded guest cottages she and husband Jeff call AK Fireweed House.  

I stayed in the midst of their excellent breakfast cuisine and fine hospitality with fireweed blooms only a few inches from the top, and so did birds bigger than the ones at my backyard feeder. These I learned are Steller Jays. Not stellar as in spectacular even though they are, but spelled with an “e” because Georg Wilhelm Steller named many things after himself when exploring Alaska in the first half of the 1700s.

Perhaps he figured out a size and distance perspective in Alaska but I didn’t.  Hard to tell if you’re near or far living in the midst of the 17 million acre Tongass National Forest or when gazing at glaciers and ice fields.

Mendenhall is the glacier 15 minutes from downtown Juneau with an ice field on top and fresh water lake below.  Living, breathing, melting, moving places each one, including the icebergs.

Kayakers in Mendenhall Lake looked the size of a pinprick.  I didn’t try that but hiked a short trail in the national Forest Service recreation area, rejoicing to be right next to the glacier.

“Not so,” Elizabeth Arnett with the Juneau Convention and Visitor Bureau informed me. “1.1 miles away we are.”

Colors are as curious as depth and distance in Alaska’s icy expanses.  Penetrating blue icebergs and crevasses mean ice is dense, packed and pressed in Juneau by 150 feet of snowfall each year, absorbing all the color of light except blue – and transmits that.

When the ice is white, you know cracks or warming created air pockets and the fractures scatter the light spectrum.

Grayish comes into play too, Arnett taught me, because flowing glaciers grind their ice, creating powder that gives off a dusty look.

Stunning to be in the moment surrounded by the depth of time and color.

Juneau comes with an icefield, not routine in the other places I go, so I felt compelled to spend way more than my normal budget and booked a helicopter ride to the top.  $250.

Looks like ribbon candy from above, dense and frozen, but seemed to me like slender flowing ribbons.

Remarkable contrast from the helicopter windows. Pilot Wayne Whitlock popped in an Enya tape to calm anxieties and pointed out the blue/brown water of the Gastineau and Taku rivers different from the aqua of the ocean, green bog-like marshes next to startling blue glacial ice, white air-pocket glacier ice and the gray/brown powders of the grinding sliding ice.

That entire expanse I could see at once.  View changed when we landed on Norris Glacier, climbed out and I promptly fell down.

Slippery on that Juneau Icefield.  

Waterfalls in every direction and when I gazed into the stretching-forever horizon, a profound sense of isolation and belonging were mine all at the same time.

Time and eternity match up on an Alaska ice field.

In the streams and rivers, eons of time repeating themselves were as astonishing as glaciers since I was there as the annual salmon runs began.

Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? Couldn’t count those returning fish any better than I could gage my distance from Mendenhall Glacier on the shores of its lake.

Saw king salmon fight their way up a short but fast-rushing waterfall near Amalga Harbor on a turn off the Juneau road that ends 40 miles from downtown.  They knew the way to their birthplace and that’s where they intended to their offspring to start life.

Five to seven years later, that’s when king salmon come back.  Silver return in three years and chum salmon in two.

Salmon swam thick in the water of Sheep Creek, visible from the shoulder of the main road.

Imprinting birthplace waters this phenomenon is called, and at Juneau’s Macaulay Salmon Hatchery I learned why scientists say with confidence salmon return to their starting places.

Coding the ears of the newly born salmon fry by raising the water temperature, or lowering, is the hatchery process.  Just a bit creates a specific marking, checked when salmon return.

Tour guides and exhibits at the hatchery say that marking shows the salmon memorized the smell and chemical composition of their original waters.

Plenty of salmon-eating options abound in Juneau, along with fish pizza and halibut burgers at Twisted Fish, plus crab. Tracy’s King Crab Shack is a walk-up kind of place downtown with a few tables under a tent.

Her king crab bisque won third place in the Newport, Rhode Island Great Chowder Cook-off.  I added a cup to my platter of king crab legs and crab cakes, with an Alaska Amber beer, and then headed up Mount Roberts for some time with native Tlingit people and art.

Klink-it is the way you pronounce the name of these First People from Southeast Alaska who continue to honor and express 11,000 years of traditions with their Raven and Eagle clans.

I’d like to put together a return trip designed around those traditions.

I stood up in the tramcar named Raven to ride 1,800 feet to the top of Mount Roberts.  Dinner is available but I hiked, admired Tlingit art and watched the 18-minute docudrama “Seeing Daylight,” a Tlingit tale about the source of light.

Wheelchair accessible and one-mile loop trails are available at the top too.     

Down below, Juneau has normal city kind of experiences: fine history museums with displays and stories specific to this place, state capitol tours including interesting historical Alaska photography, restaurants, shops, art galleries and heritage centers.  Walking tours with good detailed brochure guides.

Different from other city centers are the number of totem poles, houses reached only by climbing tall, steep stairways from the road and deep inset handles on trash cans.  Foils the bears.

Glacier Gardens, seven miles from downtown and reached by city bus or taxi, is a fine way to experience more of the Tongass National Forest.

A personally narrated two-mile journey in a covered cart goes deep in the rainforest, topping at 580 feet for a walk on a cedar boardwalk in the midst of the hemlock and spruce trees, Grandfather’s beard hanging on some, lush ferns and many birds.

Family run, Glacier Gardens provides secure accessible options for people with mobility challenges.  They also pamper local residents offering big greenhouse spaces to winter their plants and flowers.

Many Juneau adventures I could access on my own but I’d recommend the special bonus of a half-day exploring “Out The Road” with juneau jeep adventures.

Jackie Schulz took traveling partner G. W. Tibbetts and me on a quick downtown spin and then into valleys, fields of fireweed, salmon runs where local people were seining and back roads with birds and waterfowl and remarkable buildings and views.

These are the kind of places unlikely to be discovered by us, or most travelers, moving about solo.  Sit and stare places for their serenity, and walk around places in the hemlock and spruce trees of the Tongass, off the main path.

Much more to enjoy here than possible with a brief cruise ship port of call. My three-day stay before embarking on the Island Spirit small ship turned out to be a grand plan.