Curious Juneau

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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. 

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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. 

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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:

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.

https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/cj_race-2.mp3

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.

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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.”

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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. 

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. 

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. 

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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.

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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.