(click to enlarge photos)

Through our now thirty-four years of “weekly repeating,” the farthest we have strayed from Seattle’s Pioneer Square and/or the PacificNW offices has been to Spokane.  But this Sunday we have stepped as far as Juneau, Alaska’s capital. Jean Sherrard, this feature’s regular “repeater” for nearly a decade, has found it exhilarating.   Here’s Jean.

“Karen and I flew up to Juneau, a two-hour flight, on MLK Jr. weekend to visit our friends Robin Walz and Carol Prentice. Now we highly recommend Juneau in winter. It’s a small town of 30,000 people, nestled in the sea-level valley between impassible mountains (note: a little local ribbing at the expense of summer tourists, who stepping off the big ships and seeing snow, ask, “What’s the elevation of Juneau?”). During the chilly off-season the landscape is gorgeous and tourist-free. On Sunday morning we headed downtown to take this repeat of Frank LaRoche’s Gold Rush Seward Street. Robin and Carol, Karen, and some friendly locals crossed the street to enliven the photo, and then we adjourned to a table in the locally owned Heritage Coffee Company on the left – not too long ago a McDonald’s franchise.”

Actually, the only snow we can find in Jean’s January repeat is high above where Seward Street is stopped at the steep foot of Mt. Juneau. The snow this Sunday is mostly hidden in the forest.  In LaRoche’s “then,” (below the video at the top)  photographed sometime in the late 1890s, the corner for Jean’s coffee retreat on the left is occupied in part by The New York Store, where any anxious argonaut heading for the gold fields was assured by a mural-sized sign that he could get “cheap . . .the best men’s heavy clothing, underwear, rubber boots, etc.” 

Other outfitters, tobacco stores, bars, chop and oyster houses, and cheap lodgings covered most of the commerce done on Seward Street during the Rush.  Now jewelers, galleries, and souvenir shops waiting on what Robin Walz figures are the “up to fifteen- thousand passengers and crew who are set ashore from four-to-five cruise ships every day from April into October.”  Alaskan Heritage is an alternative to pricey knick-knacks on Seward Street.  The blue and pink banner hanging from the corner light standard on the right lists some of the attractions north of here at Front Street on Seward: “Governor’s House, Juneau City Museum, State Capital (and) St. Nicholas Church.”

WEB EXTRAS

Anything to add, pardners?  Sure Jean, and please mix with what you have written just above a few of the other shots from your visit to Juneau and its surrounds, although I suspect that some of those will be in the video at the top.  (What a labor it must have been to cut back Robbin and my dialogue from forty-plus minutes to twenty-something.)

Hi Paul, Jean here, with a few shots from Juneau and surrounds:

Immediately below are ten Edge-Links connected by Ron Edge to former blog features that are more-or-less relevant to this week’s subject.  Under these  links we will attach the several Alaska photos – most of them by LaRoche, one of the gold rush photographers from Seattle – that appear in the video at the top.  The bottom will round-out  – so to speak – with a few more by now nearly ancient now-and-then features that relate to the allures of Alaska.

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ALASKA GOLD RUSH ERA PHOTOS (seen and described in the video at the top)

 

FOUR FROM SITKA (as described in the Video at the Top.)

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To ENLARGE the above, Click it – twice.

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