I delivered a friend's car to him in Juneau in 1975. Took the ferry up the coast, stayed for a week..(until I had eaten ALL the salmon). I have about 500 slides of that trip...ferry, islands, mist, bears, old fishing villages & logging camps, Juneau and it's highway system (at that time, couple of miles of freeway to the Mendenhall glacier), lots of old churches and other building.....and, a climb up the mountain trail above Juneau where you get amazing overviews of the town and its situation. Then on up to snowy patches above the tree line....
   However, this was August, and sunny, and humid...and I was soaking with persperation by the time I got up there.....so..*sly grin*...I have a slide of me, happily drying my clothes on a rock in the sun while I stand naked surrounded with snowy peaks! Very liberating, I must say! At the end of our stay, we put our hosts (stuffed them in their car)on a ferry for their new job in Sitka.

Then we (my ex-wife and a friend who had helped drive) flew back to Seattle from Juneau, stopping at Ketchikan International airport for 20 minutes....Now that was interesting! We are cruising along in this jetliner, above the billowing clouds with mountain peaks poking thru them, when suddenly we dive (only word that fits) into the clouds and emerge a few thousand feet above this teeny little strip of asphalt cut into the side of an island, with the great metropolis of Ketchikan huddled on the other side of a channel across from the 'airport'....we zoom down, landing on one end of the strip with all of 27 ft. to spare, screech to a stop at the OTHER end...and are towed backwards to where we touched down, as there is no room to turn a plane around....we are parked with the tail of the plane extending out over the giant rocks that we would have met if the pilot had misjudged that 27 ft., and we watch the tiny ferries bring people and cars (2 or 3 at a time!) over to the airport...then we are ready to go, and the engines rev up to HIGH, and we hurtle down the the other end of that postage stamp of a runway and ZOOM! straight up...(well...almost) and head for this totally dull landing at Seattle.

and the most amazing thing about the trip? (besides all the salmon, I mean) While browsing in a store in downtown Juneau, someone called my name, and there was a guy I had met in at an environmental conference in Iowa 5 years earlier....small world.

A week in Juneau is not exactly roughing it, or seeing the grandeur of the rest of the state, but I got 'some' feeling for history and and a notion of why folks would want to live 'up there'...