Exploring Juneau Alaska

Alaska. The last great frontier that inspires millions of visitors from around the globe annually. For so many years our family enjoyed road trips all across America. We happily embarked on 6000 mile road adventures with our camping supplies in tow and our hearts and minds open to adventure. Alaska, however, was always this aloof thing...off in the distance. Something we knew we wanted to experience, but was just out of reach. When we imagined Alaska, we thought of lots of big bears, salmon fishing, hiking, mountains, rugged terrain, and a land that’s half the size of the continental United States that we needed to figure out how to explore! It’s always been too much to consume. Most of the state has no highways, you have to get around by plane or boat. Of all the wild American frontier that we have tamed in our adventures over the past decade, Alaska remained a thing we just weren’t sure how to do in our Heath style.

We love to hike and camp and get off the beaten path. We like to experience places like the locals do it. However, with Alaska being so vast and wild, we had no idea how to spend a couple of weeks there and get a good sampling of what it has to offer. And the internet was no help, so research was very difficult.

After many hours of research about every place that is possible to travel to in Alaska, we narrowed it down to the Juneau area, because of the variety of hikes, glaciers, fishing, wildlife, and outdoor experiences available there, which fit into our travel style nicely.

We loved the town of Juneau itself. Even though it can get crowded at times with as many as 5 massive cruise ships parked there at once, the little quaint downtown is very fun to explore and offers so much great music, food, art, and culture. It looks just like it did 150 years ago when it was a frontier mining town. Nothing much changes around these parts and Juneau is a great example of that. You feel like you’re walking through history, and all the locals are lovely and welcoming.

One of our other goals in the Juneau area was to fish! We have rented fishing charters in the past and only one of them turned out to produce any actual fish, but all of them had made half our family sea sick, so we weren’t working on a very good track record for these sorts of things. When it came to our Alaska trip, we knew we needed some sort of boat excursion to get us on the local fish. Rebecca decided to call the local Chamber of Commerce and luckily, the lady Rebecca spoke to knew Captain Grant at Moore Charters. As it turned out, that boat trip was probably one of the most amazing excursions our family has ever taken! Captain Matt and Claire were the most incredible hosts we could have dreamed of and they put us on all the Halibut the state allowed us to keep. We also got to see Humpback whales along the way, wow! It was so amazing, we will never forget this wonderful trip! Our right arms were exhausted from doing the "halibut hustle" and reeling in these fish from 300 feet below. We never knew how hard it would be to reel them in, but we were all so excited to be getting so much action that we didn’t worry about the fatigue at all. So worth it! FYI, Jacob caught the 1st fish AND the biggest fish on this trip :)

After a hard day on the boat or exploring the glacier, nothing serves a visitor better then settling down at the Red Dog Saloon for a few "Duck Fart" shots, some actually great food (surprising for a bar), and amazing live music that reminds us Texans of back home! We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves as a family at the Red Dog Saloon. It is just like a transplanted Dixie Chicken in Alaska, for those of you Texas Aggies who are reading this. Brian, the live entertainment, was amazing and sang all our favorite country tunes. We all got souvenirs from this place, because it was just that fun! The waitress told us when she served us our duck farts that their local saying is "No sipping, no sharing, no stirring. Quack, quack! Knock that shit back!" So we did.