Alaska’s Capitol has a ground floor and a first floor. It’s relatively uncommon in American buildings. (Katie Anastas/KTOO)https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/24capitol.wav When Americans walk into a multi-story building, they’d usually say they’re on the first floor. Not in the lobby of Alaska’s Capitol building. “It has a very European feel to it,” tour guide Kirk Smith said on a recent morning tour. “Right now, you are not on the first floor, you are on the ground floor. And the reason for that is that, as a multi-agency federal building, it was required to have a post office in it.”Kirk Smith leads a tour of Alaska’s Capitol building. (Katie Anastas/KTOO)Smith said visitors often wonder why that is. KTOO listener Sylvan Robb asked us to find out for this installment of Curious Juneau. The Capitol was built in 1931. That was before statehood, so it was built to serve as a federal and territorial building. The post office was on the second of six stories, but Juneau’s steep streets still made it possible to put entrances and loading docks on that floor — on the uphill side, on 5th and Seward Streets. So the architects called that the first floor and called the one below it the ground floor. “In order to meet the post office’s requirements of having a first floor street entrance, they had to call this the ground floor,” Smith said in the lobby. The doorway to Seward Street is still there, though the post office is long gone. When Alaska became a state in 1959, the building became the state Capitol. In the years that followed, the post office and other federal offices moved to the newly constructed Juneau Federal Building. “There’s nothing of it left,” Smith said. “It would be nice if there was an antique post office box or a teller window or something, but there’s really nothing there. It just looks like a hallway. It’s too bad.”This used to be the employee entrance to the post office. Now, it’s just another hallway in the Capitol. (Katie Anastas/KTOO)One lingering sign of the building’s history, though, is its art deco style.  “I like to refer to the architectural style that’s in use here as ‘early 20th century American post office,’” Smith said. Like many other federal buildings and post offices built during that time, the Capitol was designed by the Treasury Department’s Office of the Supervising Architect. That office’s designs have come in handy for local architect Wayne Jensen. He’s been involved in many projects at the Capitol over the years, including renovations of the House and Senate chambers and remodels of committee rooms. Most recently, he oversaw seismic upgrades throughout the building, which took years of work between legislative sessions. That’s when Jensen saw one remnant of the old post office.  “When we did the demolition, we found a door that was kind of closed into one of the walls,” he said. “I don’t remember if it said ‘post office’ on it, but that was the one thing we did find.”This 1930 photo shows a rear view of the Capitol under construction. (M272-2 Alaska State Library Manuscript Collection)Jensen has studied the original architects’ ink-on-linen drawings. He said putting the post office on the first floor makes sense – that floor is bigger than the ground floor, and it has better street access. “The ground floor isn’t as large as the other floors,” Jensen said. “It goes back into the mountain, back into the hill, so it’s truncated a little bit. Plus it has the boiler rooms and all those things that are not really occupiable spaces. But the first floor has access on the back side of the building and on Seward Street.” According to the building’s original floor plans, the door to Seward Street was an employee entrance and the one to 5th Street was the public entrance. The post office lobby and work room took up the entire east wing of the first floor. Postal workers would sort the incoming mail in the workroom and feed it into post office boxes. “I know stories from people who lived here in the ‘50s, ‘60s – they would go there every day to get their mail and it became a social area,” Jensen said.This door, which goes out to Seward Street, was once the employee entrance to the post office. The steep street allows for a street entrance into the second story of the building. (Katie Anastas/KTOO)Jensen said the history of the Capitol building is worth remembering. Before construction started, Congress only allocated enough money to pay for half of the block where the building stands today. Juneau residents raised the rest of the money and then gave the property to the federal government. “The community got together and said, ‘Well, if the feds can’t do it, we can do it ourselves,’” Jensen said. “It’s very Juneauite. Over the years, we’ve done a lot to keep the Capitol here and support the Capitol, and that was one of the first efforts to do that.” The post office may be a nearly-forgotten piece of the building’s history. But it’s why today’s visitors need to pay extra attention to what floor they’re on inside the Capitol.var gform;gform||(document.addEventListener("gform_main_scripts_loaded",function(){gform.scriptsLoaded=!0}),window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",function(){gform.domLoaded=!0}),gform={domLoaded:!1,scriptsLoaded:!1,initializeOnLoaded:function(o){gform.domLoaded&amp;&amp;gform.scriptsLoaded?o():!gform.domLoaded&amp;&amp;gform.scriptsLoaded?window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",o):document.addEventListener("gform_main_scripts_loaded",o)},hooks:{action:{},filter:{}},addAction:function(o,n,r,t){gform.addHook("action",o,n,r,t)},addFilter:function(o,n,r,t){gform.addHook("filter",o,n,r,t)},doAction:function(o){gform.doHook("action",o,arguments)},applyFilters:function(o){return gform.doHook("filter",o,arguments)},removeAction:function(o,n){gform.removeHook("action",o,n)},removeFilter:function(o,n,r){gform.removeHook("filter",o,n,r)},addHook:function(o,n,r,t,i){null==gform.hooks[o][n]&amp;&amp;(gform.hooks[o][n]=[]);var e=gform.hooks[o][n];null==i&amp;&amp;(i=n+"_"+e.length),gform.hooks[o][n].push({tag:i,callable:r,priority:t=null==t?10:t})},doHook:function(n,o,r){var t;if(r=Array.prototype.slice.call(r,1),null!=gform.hooks[n][o]&amp;&amp;((o=gform.hooks[n][o]).sort(function(o,n){return o.priority-n.priority}),o.forEach(function(o){"function"!=typeof(t=o.callable)&amp;&amp;(t=window[t]),"action"==n?t.apply(null,r):r[0]=t.apply(null,r)})),"filter"==n)return r[0]},removeHook:function(o,n,t,i){var r;null!=gform.hooks[o][n]&amp;&amp;(r=(r=gform.hooks[o][n]).filter(function(o,n,r){return!!(null!=i&amp;&amp;i!=o.tag||null!=t&amp;&amp;t!=o.priority)}),gform.hooks[o][n]=r)}});Curious Juneau Are you curious about Juneau, its history, places and people? Or if you just like to ask questions, then ask away! 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Alaska’s Capitol has a ground floor and a first floor. It’s relatively uncommon in American buildings. (Katie Anastas/KTOO) <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/24capitol.wav" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/24capitol.wav</a> When Americans walk into a multi-story building, they’d usually say they’re on the first floor. Not in the lobby of Alaska’s Capitol building. “It has a very European feel to it,” tour guide Kirk Smith said on a recent morning tour. “Right now, you are not on the first floor, you are on the ground floor. And the reason for that is that, as a multi-agency federal building, it was required to have a post office in it.”Kirk Smith leads a tour of Alaska’s Capitol building. (Katie Anastas/KTOO) Smith said visitors often wonder why that is. KTOO listener Sylvan Robb asked us to find out for this installment of <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/category/local-programs/curious/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Curious Juneau</a>. The Capitol was built in 1931. That was before statehood, so it was built to serve as a federal and territorial building. The post office was on the second of six stories, but Juneau’s steep streets still made it possible to put entrances and loading docks on that floor — on the uphill side, on 5th and Seward Streets. So the architects called that the first floor and called the one below it the ground floor. “In order to meet the post office’s requirements of having a first floor street entrance, they had to call this the ground floor,” Smith said in the lobby. The doorway to Seward Street is still there, though the post office is long gone. When Alaska became a state in 1959, the building became the state Capitol. In the years that followed, the post office and other federal offices moved to the newly constructed Juneau Federal Building. “There’s nothing of it left,” Smith said. “It would be nice if there was an antique post office box or a teller window or something, but there’s really nothing there. It just looks like a hallway. It’s too bad.”This used to be the employee entrance to the post office. Now, it’s just another hallway in the Capitol. (Katie Anastas/KTOO) One lingering sign of the building’s history, though, is its art deco style.  “I like to refer to the architectural style that’s in use here as ‘early 20th century American post office,’” Smith said. Like many other federal buildings and post offices built during that time, the Capitol was designed by the Treasury Department’s Office of the Supervising Architect. That office’s designs have come in handy for local architect Wayne Jensen. He’s been involved in many projects at the Capitol over the years, including renovations of the House and Senate chambers and remodels of committee rooms. Most recently, he oversaw <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/2014/11/13/legislature-oks-money-capitol-renovation/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">seismic upgrades throughout the building</a>, which took <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2016/07/IV.-Alaska-State-Capitol-Presentation.pdf" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">years of work</a> between legislative sessions. That’s when Jensen saw one remnant of the old post office.  “When we did the demolition, we found a door that was kind of closed into one of the walls,” he said. “I don’t remember if it said ‘post office’ on it, but that was the one thing we did find.”This 1930 photo shows a rear view of the Capitol under construction. (M272-2 Alaska State Library Manuscript Collection) Jensen has studied the original architects’ ink-on-linen drawings. He said putting the post office on the first floor makes sense – that floor is bigger than the ground floor, and it has better street access. “The ground floor isn’t as large as the other floors,” Jensen said. “It goes back into the mountain, back into the hill, so it’s truncated a little bit. Plus it has the boiler rooms and all those things that are not really occupiable spaces. But the first floor has access on the back side of the building and on Seward Street.” According to the building’s original floor plans, the door to Seward Street was an employee entrance and the one to 5th Street was the public entrance. The post office lobby and work room took up the entire east wing of the first floor. Postal workers would sort the incoming mail in the workroom and feed it into post office boxes. “I know stories from people who lived here in the ‘50s, ‘60s – they would go there every day to get their mail and it became a social area,” Jensen said.This door, which goes out to Seward Street, was once the employee entrance to the post office. The steep street allows for a street entrance into the second story of the building. (Katie Anastas/KTOO) Jensen said the history of the Capitol building is worth remembering. Before construction started, Congress only allocated enough money to pay for half of the block where the building stands today. Juneau residents <a href="https://juneau.org/community-development/hsd-list/entry/41790" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">raised the rest of the money</a> and then gave the property to the federal government. “The community got together and said, ‘Well, if the feds can’t do it, we can do it ourselves,’” Jensen said. “It’s very Juneauite. Over the years, we’ve done a lot to keep the Capitol here and support the Capitol, and that was one of the first efforts to do that.” The post office may be a nearly-forgotten piece of the building’s history. But it’s why today’s visitors need to pay extra attention to what floor they’re on inside the Capitol.var gform;gform||(document.addEventListener("gform_main_scripts_loaded",function(){gform.scriptsLoaded=!0}),window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",function(){gform.domLoaded=!0}),gform={domLoaded:!1,scriptsLoaded:!1,initializeOnLoaded:function(o){gform.domLoaded&amp;&amp;gform.scriptsLoaded?o():!gform.domLoaded&amp;&amp;gform.scriptsLoaded?window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",o):document.addEventListener("gform_main_scripts_loaded",o)},hooks:{action:{},filter:{}},addAction:function(o,n,r,t){gform.addHook("action",o,n,r,t)},addFilter:function(o,n,r,t){gform.addHook("filter",o,n,r,t)},doAction:function(o){gform.doHook("action",o,arguments)},applyFilters:function(o){return gform.doHook("filter",o,arguments)},removeAction:function(o,n){gform.removeHook("action",o,n)},removeFilter:function(o,n,r){gform.removeHook("filter",o,n,r)},addHook:function(o,n,r,t,i){null==gform.hooks[o][n]&amp;&amp;(gform.hooks[o][n]=[]);var e=gform.hooks[o][n];null==i&amp;&amp;(i=n+"_"+e.length),gform.hooks[o][n].push({tag:i,callable:r,priority:t=null==t?10:t})},doHook:function(n,o,r){var t;if(r=Array.prototype.slice.call(r,1),null!=gform.hooks[n][o]&amp;&amp;((o=gform.hooks[n][o]).sort(function(o,n){return o.priority-n.priority}),o.forEach(function(o){"function"!=typeof(t=o.callable)&amp;&amp;(t=window[t]),"action"==n?t.apply(null,r):r[0]=t.apply(null,r)})),"filter"==n)return r[0]},removeHook:function(o,n,t,i){var r;null!=gform.hooks[o][n]&amp;&amp;(r=(r=gform.hooks[o][n]).filter(function(o,n,r){return!!(null!=i&amp;&amp;i!=o.tag||null!=t&amp;&amp;t!=o.priority)}),gform.hooks[o][n]=r)}}); <h3>Curious Juneau</h3> Are you curious about Juneau, its history, places and people? Or if you just like to ask questions, then ask away! <ul><li>What do you want to know about Juneau?</li><li>Name* First Last </li><li>Email* </li><li>Phone</li><li>Zip Code ZIP / Postal Code </li><li>Consent Please don't publish my name.</li></ul> gform.initializeOnLoaded( function() {gformInitSpinner( 64, '<a href="https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif'" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif'</a>, true );jQuery('#gform_ajax_frame_64').on('load',function(){var contents = jQuery(this).contents().find('*').html();var is_postback = contents.indexOf('GF_AJAX_POSTBACK') &gt;= 0;if(!is_postback){return;}var form_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_wrapper_64');var is_confirmation = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_confirmation_wrapper_64').length &gt; 0;var is_redirect = contents.indexOf('gformRedirect(){') &gt;= 0;var is_form = form_content.length &gt; 0 &amp;&amp; ! is_redirect &amp;&amp; ! is_confirmation;var mt = parseInt(jQuery('html').css('margin-top'), 10) + parseInt(jQuery('body').css('margin-top'), 10) + 100;if(is_form){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').html(form_content.html());if(form_content.hasClass('gform_validation_error')){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').addClass('gform_validation_error');} else {jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').removeClass('gform_validation_error');}setTimeout( function() { /* delay the scroll by 50 milliseconds to fix a bug in chrome */ }, 50 );if(window['gformInitDatepicker']) {gformInitDatepicker();}if(window['gformInitPriceFields']) {gformInitPriceFields();}var current_page = jQuery('#gform_source_page_number_64').val();gformInitSpinner( 64, '<a href="https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif'" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif'</a>, true );jQuery(document).trigger('gform_page_loaded', [64, current_page]);window['gf_submitting_64'] = false;}else if(!is_redirect){var confirmation_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('.GF_AJAX_POSTBACK').html();if(!confirmation_content){confirmation_content = contents;}setTimeout(function(){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').replaceWith(confirmation_content);jQuery(document).trigger('gform_confirmation_loaded', [64]);window['gf_submitting_64'] = false;wp.a11y.speak(jQuery('#gform_confirmation_message_64').text());}, 50);}else{jQuery('#gform_64').append(contents);if(window['gformRedirect']) {gformRedirect();}}jQuery(document).trigger('gform_post_render', [64, current_page]);gform.utils.trigger({ event: 'gform/postRender', native: false, data: { formId: 64, currentPage: current_page } });} );} );

Curious Juneau: Why does Alaska’s Capitol building have a ground floor?

A jumble of fallen trees at Auke Nu Cove caught the attention of a Curious Juneau listener (Photo by Anna Canny/KTOO)  https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/26microbursts.wav If you look across Auke Nu Cove from the parking lot at the Juneau ferry terminal, there’s a strange patch of fallen trees — about a dozen — that are splayed out in all directions. Jesse Escamilla drives by on his evening commute every day. He’s used to seeing the occasional downed tree around his Lena Point home, but the fallen trees at Auke Nu Cove seemed mysterious and distinct. “It looked odd, like it was isolated,” he said. “I remember it almost looking like someone with a bulldozer went and purposefully flattened that whole area.” Escamilla grew up in Texas, and the pattern reminded him of the mark tornados leave. That became one of his two working theories. “Option one would be Godzilla, and option two would be a tornado,” he said. “Both of those are viable, in my opinion.” National Weather Service Meteorologist Rick Fritsch says the fan of fallen trees could be evidence of one of Juneau’s weirdest wind phenomena. “To me, that sounds a whole lot like a microburst,” Fristch said. The Southeast Alaska Land Trust manages the wetlands by the trees. Their conservation staff said the trees came down during a major wind storm that happened in October 2021. That storm blew down dozens of trees across town. They hit houses and crushed cars, and in some neighborhoods they caused days-long power outages. It took days to clean up the mess of scattered trunks and branches. The strong winds spread across all of Juneau. But in the small area around Auke Nu Cove, the wind may have generated a microburst, which can cause distinctive damage. Fritsch says a microburst starts with a really strong gust of wind that blows straight down from the sky. “And it comes down on the ground and it hits and goes out in every direction,” Fristch said. As the winds gush outwards, they can exceed 100 mph — typically causing a lot of damage in a very small area. Just like what Escamilla noticed at Auke Nu Cove. Elsewhere, microbursts are often associated with thunderstorms. When a thunderstorm forms, a swell of warm air rises to create clouds, which get heavy as they fill with rain or hail. If they get too heavy, they can release a strong gust of air that speeds toward the ground. That’s a microburst. But thunderstorms are rare in Juneau, and that’s not what happened in the October storm. The alternative is even more interesting. It has to do with how wind interacts with Juneau’s coastal mountains. “We in the business talk about straight-line winds, microburst winds and cyclonic winds, which are more associated with tornadoes. Basically circular,” Fritsch said. Wind has basic, somewhat predictable directions, too. During a high pressure system — the kind that’s associated with clear skies — winds spiral clockwise and outwards to form gentle breezes. When a stormy, low-pressure system forms, winds spiral counterclockwise and inwards, building speed as they turn. Those are the basics, but they’re not enough to predict exactly how the wind will behave. “How do you get these winds flowing the way they do?” Fritsch said. “The topography on the inside is everything.” Wind — like all weather in Southeast Alaska — is heavily influenced by topography. Take straight-line winds. They’re strong storm winds that blow in just one direction. In stormy weather, they race down Gastineau Channel. “So there’s sea level there. And then we got 3,000 feet on this side and 2,500 feet on this side,” Fristch said, pointing to downtown Juneau and Douglas on a map. “And that just acts like a natural funnel.” That funnel directs strong gusts across Mendenhall Peninsula and up the runway at Juneau International Airport — in the case of that October storm, for nearly 24 hours. It kept planes on the ground, and it pushed many of the trees at the end of the runway to their breaking point. Straight-line winds caused most of the tree falls during the storm, but the mystery treefall at Auke Nue Cove can probably be linked to what’s called the mountain wave phenomenon. When wind hits a mountain, it’s forced upward. Then it hits a mass of stable air high in the sky, which pushes it back down. Those opposing forces make the wind move in an up-and-down wave motion. When there are really strong winds and a stable air mass around Gastineau Channel, that wave action creates the famed Taku Winds in downtown Juneau. But mountain waves can also cause microbursts. In some cases, clouds form under the mountain waves. When the windy waves pass over the top of a cloud, the friction can cause the cloud to start turning. “You can’t necessarily see it spinning, like a sideways tornado,” Fritsch said. “But it is rotating. That’s the rotor cloud.” On the side of the rotor cloud by the mountain, there are strong updrafts; on the far side, strong downdrafts. As gusts come over the mountains, they can get caught in those rotor clouds, spiraling and speeding up into the downdraft side of the cloud. And that downdraft can break away and come down as a microburst. When that happens, it has the potential to cause Godzilla-sized damage. Fritsch isn’t sure that’s what took down the trees at Auke Nu Cove, but he says it’s the natural explanation. “It may have been that you had this air that hit the Mendenhall Peninsula, and it rose, and it got trapped in a rotor,” Fritsch said. “And on the far side of the rotor, it went straight down.” Fritsch said the wind is leaving its mark on Alaska’s landscape every day. “Somewhere, there will be some kind of wind anomaly in the great, huge, awesome state of Alaska that will probably go unnoticed,” he said. “Because there’s nobody there to see it.” Curious Juneau Are you curious about Juneau, its history, places and people? Or if you just like to ask questions, then ask away! 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A jumble of fallen trees at Auke Nu Cove caught the attention of a Curious Juneau listener (Photo by Anna Canny/KTOO) <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/26microbursts.wav" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/26microbursts.wav</a> If you look across Auke Nu Cove from the parking lot at the Juneau ferry terminal, there’s a strange patch of fallen trees — about a dozen — that are splayed out in all directions. Jesse Escamilla drives by on his evening commute every day. He’s used to seeing the occasional downed tree around his Lena Point home, but the fallen trees at Auke Nu Cove seemed mysterious and distinct. “It looked odd, like it was isolated,” he said. “I remember it almost looking like someone with a bulldozer went and purposefully flattened that whole area.” Escamilla grew up in Texas, and the pattern reminded him of the mark tornados leave. That became one of his two working theories. “Option one would be Godzilla, and option two would be a tornado,” he said. “Both of those are viable, in my opinion.” National Weather Service Meteorologist Rick Fritsch says the fan of fallen trees could be evidence of one of Juneau’s weirdest wind phenomena. “To me, that sounds a whole lot like a microburst,” Fristch said. The Southeast Alaska Land Trust manages the wetlands by the trees. Their conservation staff said the trees came down during a major wind storm that happened in October 2021. That storm blew down dozens of trees across town. They hit houses and crushed cars, and in some neighborhoods they caused <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/2021/10/04/storm-in-juneau-causes-power-outages/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">days-long power outages.</a> It took days to clean up the mess of scattered trunks and branches. The strong winds spread across all of Juneau. But in the small area around Auke Nu Cove, the wind may have generated a microburst, which can cause distinctive damage. Fritsch says a microburst starts with a really strong gust of wind that blows straight down from the sky. “And it comes down on the ground and it hits and goes out in every direction,” Fristch said. As the winds gush outwards, they can exceed 100 mph — typically causing a lot of damage in a very small area. Just like what Escamilla noticed at Auke Nu Cove. Elsewhere, microbursts are often associated with thunderstorms. When a thunderstorm forms, a swell of warm air rises to create clouds, which get heavy as they fill with rain or hail. If they get too heavy, they can release a strong gust of air that speeds toward the ground. That’s a microburst. But thunderstorms are rare in Juneau, and that’s not what happened in the October storm. The alternative is even more interesting. It has to do with how wind interacts with Juneau’s coastal mountains. “We in the business talk about straight-line winds, microburst winds and cyclonic winds, which are more associated with tornadoes. Basically circular,” Fritsch said. Wind has basic, somewhat predictable directions, too. During a high pressure system — the kind that’s associated with clear skies — winds spiral clockwise and outwards to form gentle breezes. When a stormy, low-pressure system forms, winds spiral counterclockwise and inwards, building speed as they turn. Those are the basics, but they’re not enough to predict exactly how the wind will behave. “How do you get these winds flowing the way they do?” Fritsch said. “The topography on the inside is everything.” Wind — like <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/2023/03/10/the-challenges-of-forecasting-in-southeast-alaska/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">all weather</a> in Southeast Alaska — is heavily influenced by topography. Take straight-line winds. They’re strong storm winds that blow in just one direction. In stormy weather, they race down Gastineau Channel. “So there’s sea level there. And then we got 3,000 feet on this side and 2,500 feet on this side,” Fristch said, pointing to downtown Juneau and Douglas on a map. “And that just acts like a natural funnel.” That funnel directs strong gusts across Mendenhall Peninsula and up the runway at Juneau International Airport — in the case of that October storm, for nearly 24 hours. It kept planes on the ground, and it pushed many of the trees at the end of the runway to their breaking point. Straight-line winds caused most of the tree falls during the storm, but the mystery treefall at Auke Nue Cove can probably be linked to what’s called the mountain wave phenomenon. When wind hits a mountain, it’s forced upward. Then it hits a mass of stable air high in the sky, which pushes it back down. Those opposing forces make the wind move in an up-and-down wave motion. When there are really strong winds and a stable air mass around Gastineau Channel, that wave action creates the famed <a href="https://www.weather.gov/media/ajk/brochures/Taku_Winds.pdf" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Taku Winds</a> in downtown Juneau. But mountain waves can also cause microbursts. In some cases, clouds form under the mountain waves. When the windy waves pass over the top of a cloud, the friction can cause the cloud to start turning. “You can’t necessarily see it spinning, like a sideways tornado,” Fritsch said. “But it is rotating. That’s the rotor cloud.” On the side of the rotor cloud by the mountain, there are strong updrafts; on the far side, strong downdrafts. As gusts come over the mountains, they can get caught in those rotor clouds, spiraling and speeding up into the downdraft side of the cloud. And that downdraft can break away and come down as a microburst. When that happens, it has the potential to cause Godzilla-sized damage. Fritsch isn’t sure that’s what took down the trees at Auke Nu Cove, but he says it’s the natural explanation. “It may have been that you had this air that hit the Mendenhall Peninsula, and it rose, and it got trapped in a rotor,” Fritsch said. “And on the far side of the rotor, it went straight down.” Fritsch said the wind is leaving its mark on Alaska’s landscape every day. “Somewhere, there will be some kind of wind anomaly in the great, huge, awesome state of Alaska that will probably go unnoticed,” he said. “Because there’s nobody there to see it.” <h3>Curious Juneau</h3> Are you curious about Juneau, its history, places and people? Or if you just like to ask questions, then ask away! <ul><li>What do you want to know about Juneau?</li><li>Name* First Last </li><li>Email* </li><li>Phone</li><li>Zip Code ZIP / Postal Code </li><li>Consent Please don't publish my name.</li></ul> gform.initializeOnLoaded( function() {gformInitSpinner( 64, '<a href="https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif'" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif'</a>, true );jQuery('#gform_ajax_frame_64').on('load',function(){var contents = jQuery(this).contents().find('*').html();var is_postback = contents.indexOf('GF_AJAX_POSTBACK') &gt;= 0;if(!is_postback){return;}var form_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_wrapper_64');var is_confirmation = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_confirmation_wrapper_64').length &gt; 0;var is_redirect = contents.indexOf('gformRedirect(){') &gt;= 0;var is_form = form_content.length &gt; 0 &amp;&amp; ! is_redirect &amp;&amp; ! is_confirmation;var mt = parseInt(jQuery('html').css('margin-top'), 10) + parseInt(jQuery('body').css('margin-top'), 10) + 100;if(is_form){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').html(form_content.html());if(form_content.hasClass('gform_validation_error')){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').addClass('gform_validation_error');} else {jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').removeClass('gform_validation_error');}setTimeout( function() { /* delay the scroll by 50 milliseconds to fix a bug in chrome */ }, 50 );if(window['gformInitDatepicker']) {gformInitDatepicker();}if(window['gformInitPriceFields']) {gformInitPriceFields();}var current_page = jQuery('#gform_source_page_number_64').val();gformInitSpinner( 64, '<a href="https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif'" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif'</a>, true );jQuery(document).trigger('gform_page_loaded', [64, current_page]);window['gf_submitting_64'] = false;}else if(!is_redirect){var confirmation_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('.GF_AJAX_POSTBACK').html();if(!confirmation_content){confirmation_content = contents;}setTimeout(function(){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').replaceWith(confirmation_content);jQuery(document).trigger('gform_confirmation_loaded', [64]);window['gf_submitting_64'] = false;wp.a11y.speak(jQuery('#gform_confirmation_message_64').text());}, 50);}else{jQuery('#gform_64').append(contents);if(window['gformRedirect']) {gformRedirect();}}jQuery(document).trigger('gform_post_render', [64, current_page]);gform.utils.trigger({ event: 'gform/postRender', native: false, data: { formId: 64, currentPage: current_page } });} );} );

Curious Juneau: What caused the jumble of fallen trees near the ferry terminal?

A sign at the airport tells drivers to go no faster than 19 1/2 mph. (Katie Anastas/KTOO)https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/05sign.wav On a rainy afternoon at the Airport Dike Trail, Laura Minne is walking her dog, Bodhi. Over on the airport side of the fence, a speed limit sign tells drivers to go no faster than 19 ½ miles per hour. When asked if she has a theory for why it’s such a specific number, Minne laughs. “I can only imagine,” she says. “Whoever did it has to be pretty wonderful to have that humor.” Airport Manager Patty Wahto says that person was a member of the airfield crew several years ago. The idea was to get the attention of the many workers who were driving faster than the actual speed limit of 20 mph. “When the 20 mph signs were posted, you could ask people what the speed limit was,” Wahto wrote in an email. “They would either answer that they didn’t know, or that they didn’t think there was a speed limit posted.” Studies show drivers remember fewer details about routes they’re more familiar with. Dwight Hennessy is a professor at Buffalo State University who studies traffic psychology.  “The reality is, we can’t pay 100% perfect, focused attention on everything all the time,” Hennessy said. “If you have a monotonous environment, where everything is the same, breaking it up grabs our attention. We’re more likely to process things once we’ve paid attention to them.” That’s why the 19 ½ sign works, he said. It stands out, which makes drivers think about the speed limit more. The explanation gave Minne, the trail goer, an idea. “So let’s just try that on Egan, right?” she said. In fact, the Alaska Department of Transportation will try out a slower speed limit on Egan Drive this winter, though not quite as low as 19 ½ mph. From Nov. 1 to Jan. 31, the speed limit will be 45 mph from Mendenhall Loop Road to the Sunny Point interchange — a reduction of 10 mph. New radar speed signs will let drivers know how fast they’re going. Nathan Purves, a traffic and safety engineer for the department, said the goal is to reduce winter crashes near Fred Meyer. “That was where the majority of crashes were happening,” he said. “When it was icy out, people were trying to make that turn through traffic. The goal is by slowing people down, we’ll have bigger gaps in the traffic, and it’ll be easier to make the crossing.” But a reduction much bigger than 10 mph could do more harm than good, he said. Drivers make assumptions about the correct speed limit based on the characteristics of a road, like its width and what kinds of buildings surround it. If DOT suddenly changed Egan’s speed limit to 25 mph, Purves said, most drivers would probably feel more comfortable driving faster. “There would be the outliers that are like, ‘It says we’re supposed to go 25 on Egan, I’m going 24 because I’m not going to speed,’ and then here comes somebody going like, ‘Well I’m comfortable at 65,’” he said. “This person that’s following the law is being endangered.” Like the airport, some cities are trying to make all of their speed limit signs more noticeable. In Seattle, transportation officials have added signs at more frequent intervals. They also lowered speed limits on arterial and residential streets by 5 miles per hour. The city reported a 22% decrease in crashes. Time will tell whether the temporary speed limit and radar signs will reduce wintertime crashes on Egan. But, at the airport, the 19 ½ sign seems to be doing the trick. Curious Juneau Are you curious about Juneau, its history, places and people? Or if you just like to ask questions, then ask away! What do you want to know about Juneau?Name*FirstLastEmail*                                                    PhoneZip Code    ZIP / Postal CodeConsent Please don't publish my name.          gform.initializeOnLoaded( function() {gformInitSpinner( 64, 'https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif', true );jQuery('#gform_ajax_frame_64').on('load',function(){var contents = jQuery(this).contents().find('*').html();var is_postback = contents.indexOf('GF_AJAX_POSTBACK') &gt;= 0;if(!is_postback){return;}var form_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_wrapper_64');var is_confirmation = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_confirmation_wrapper_64').length &gt; 0;var is_redirect = contents.indexOf('gformRedirect(){') &gt;= 0;var is_form = form_content.length &gt; 0 &amp;&amp; ! is_redirect &amp;&amp; ! is_confirmation;var mt = parseInt(jQuery('html').css('margin-top'), 10) + parseInt(jQuery('body').css('margin-top'), 10) + 100;if(is_form){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').html(form_content.html());if(form_content.hasClass('gform_validation_error')){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').addClass('gform_validation_error');} else {jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').removeClass('gform_validation_error');}setTimeout( function() { /* delay the scroll by 50 milliseconds to fix a bug in chrome */  }, 50 );if(window['gformInitDatepicker']) {gformInitDatepicker();}if(window['gformInitPriceFields']) {gformInitPriceFields();}var current_page = jQuery('#gform_source_page_number_64').val();gformInitSpinner( 64, 'https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif', true );jQuery(document).trigger('gform_page_loaded', [64, current_page]);window['gf_submitting_64'] = false;}else if(!is_redirect){var confirmation_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('.GF_AJAX_POSTBACK').html();if(!confirmation_content){confirmation_content = contents;}setTimeout(function(){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').replaceWith(confirmation_content);jQuery(document).trigger('gform_confirmation_loaded', [64]);window['gf_submitting_64'] = false;wp.a11y.speak(jQuery('#gform_confirmation_message_64').text());}, 50);}else{jQuery('#gform_64').append(contents);if(window['gformRedirect']) {gformRedirect();}}jQuery(document).trigger('gform_post_render', [64, current_page]);gform.utils.trigger({ event: 'gform/postRender', native: false, data: { formId: 64, currentPage: current_page } });} );} );

A sign at the airport tells drivers to go no faster than 19 1/2 mph. (Katie Anastas/KTOO) <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/05sign.wav" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/05sign.wav</a> On a rainy afternoon at the Airport Dike Trail, Laura Minne is walking her dog, Bodhi. Over on the airport side of the fence, a speed limit sign tells drivers to go no faster than 19 ½ miles per hour. When asked if she has a theory for why it’s such a specific number, Minne laughs. “I can only imagine,” she says. “Whoever did it has to be pretty wonderful to have that humor.” Airport Manager Patty Wahto says that person was a member of the airfield crew several years ago. The idea was to get the attention of the many workers who were driving faster than the actual speed limit of 20 mph. “When the 20 mph signs were posted, you could ask people what the speed limit was,” Wahto wrote in an email. “They would either answer that they didn’t know, or that they didn’t think there was a speed limit posted.” Studies show drivers <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1369847817301341?via%3Dihub" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">remember fewer details</a> about routes they’re more familiar with. Dwight Hennessy is a professor at Buffalo State University who studies traffic psychology.  “The reality is, we can’t pay 100% perfect, focused attention on everything all the time,” Hennessy said. “If you have a monotonous environment, where everything is the same, breaking it up grabs our attention. We’re more likely to process things once we’ve paid attention to them.” That’s why the 19 ½ sign works, he said. It stands out, which makes drivers think about the speed limit more. The explanation gave Minne, the trail goer, an idea. “So let’s just try that on Egan, right?” she said. In fact, the Alaska Department of Transportation will try out a slower speed limit on Egan Drive this winter, though not quite as low as 19 ½ mph. From Nov. 1 to Jan. 31, the speed limit will be 45 mph from Mendenhall Loop Road to the Sunny Point interchange — a reduction of 10 mph. New radar speed signs will let drivers know how fast they’re going. Nathan Purves, a traffic and safety engineer for the department, said the goal is to reduce winter crashes near Fred Meyer. “That was where the majority of crashes were happening,” he said. “When it was icy out, people were trying to make that turn through traffic. The goal is by slowing people down, we’ll have bigger gaps in the traffic, and it’ll be easier to make the crossing.” But a reduction much bigger than 10 mph could do more harm than good, he said. <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0001457517303251?via%3Dihub" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Drivers make assumptions</a> about the correct speed limit based on the characteristics of a road, like its width and what kinds of buildings surround it. If DOT suddenly changed Egan’s speed limit to 25 mph, Purves said, most drivers would probably feel more comfortable driving faster. “There would be the outliers that are like, ‘It says we’re supposed to go 25 on Egan, I’m going 24 because I’m not going to speed,’ and then here comes somebody going like, ‘Well I’m comfortable at 65,’” he said. “This person that’s following the law is being endangered.” Like the airport, some cities are trying to make all of their speed limit signs more noticeable. In Seattle, <a href="https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs/safety-first/vision-zero/speedlimits" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">transportation officials have added</a> signs at more frequent intervals. They also <a href="https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/lowering-speed-limits-makes-seattle-streets-safer" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">lowered speed limits</a> on arterial and residential streets by 5 miles per hour. The city <a href="https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/SDOT/VisionZero/SpeedLimit_CaseStudies_Report.pdf" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">reported a 22% decrease</a> in crashes. Time will tell whether the temporary speed limit and radar signs will reduce wintertime crashes on Egan. But, at the airport, the 19 ½ sign seems to be doing the trick. <h3>Curious Juneau</h3> Are you curious about Juneau, its history, places and people? Or if you just like to ask questions, then ask away! <ul><li>What do you want to know about Juneau?</li><li>Name* First Last </li><li>Email* </li><li>Phone</li><li>Zip Code ZIP / Postal Code </li><li>Consent Please don't publish my name.</li></ul> gform.initializeOnLoaded( function() {gformInitSpinner( 64, '<a href="https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif'" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif'</a>, true );jQuery('#gform_ajax_frame_64').on('load',function(){var contents = jQuery(this).contents().find('*').html();var is_postback = contents.indexOf('GF_AJAX_POSTBACK') &gt;= 0;if(!is_postback){return;}var form_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_wrapper_64');var is_confirmation = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_confirmation_wrapper_64').length &gt; 0;var is_redirect = contents.indexOf('gformRedirect(){') &gt;= 0;var is_form = form_content.length &gt; 0 &amp;&amp; ! is_redirect &amp;&amp; ! is_confirmation;var mt = parseInt(jQuery('html').css('margin-top'), 10) + parseInt(jQuery('body').css('margin-top'), 10) + 100;if(is_form){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').html(form_content.html());if(form_content.hasClass('gform_validation_error')){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').addClass('gform_validation_error');} else {jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').removeClass('gform_validation_error');}setTimeout( function() { /* delay the scroll by 50 milliseconds to fix a bug in chrome */ }, 50 );if(window['gformInitDatepicker']) {gformInitDatepicker();}if(window['gformInitPriceFields']) {gformInitPriceFields();}var current_page = jQuery('#gform_source_page_number_64').val();gformInitSpinner( 64, '<a href="https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif'" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif'</a>, true );jQuery(document).trigger('gform_page_loaded', [64, current_page]);window['gf_submitting_64'] = false;}else if(!is_redirect){var confirmation_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('.GF_AJAX_POSTBACK').html();if(!confirmation_content){confirmation_content = contents;}setTimeout(function(){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').replaceWith(confirmation_content);jQuery(document).trigger('gform_confirmation_loaded', [64]);window['gf_submitting_64'] = false;wp.a11y.speak(jQuery('#gform_confirmation_message_64').text());}, 50);}else{jQuery('#gform_64').append(contents);if(window['gformRedirect']) {gformRedirect();}}jQuery(document).trigger('gform_post_render', [64, current_page]);gform.utils.trigger({ event: 'gform/postRender', native: false, data: { formId: 64, currentPage: current_page } });} );} );

Curious Juneau: Why does that speed limit sign say 19 ½ mph?

Charles McKenry poses in front of the menu at Juneau’s downtown Taco Bell in 1999. (Photo courtesy of Charles McKenry)https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/03TacoBell.mp3 In the late ’90s, Juneau had two Taco Bells. But by the early 2000s, they were both gone. Juneau has a history of fast food franchises coming and going, but the disappearance of the Taco Bells left a lot of rumors in its wake, from “employees were selling drugs” to “wasn’t it hepatitis?” “Every business is gonna have drama and rumors and this and that,” said Jennifer Solano, who used to work at the Taco Bell in Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley. “To be honest, Taco Bell was a good, wholesome place to work. They taught me enough that I’ve been able to raise a family, continuing my career managing fast food restaurants.” Solano runs a Subway in Anchorage now, but she started working for Taco Bell in Juneau as a teenager. In the mid-nineties, it sat where the Asiana Garden restaurant is now, across from Super Bear.  “We were having repeated problems with the [produce] shipments,” Solano said.  “We would have to throw away sour cream, cheeses, lettuce, tomatoes. They were coming in continuously frozen when they were only supposed to be refrigerated, and we were having to waste a lot of money.” Solano eventually became an assistant manager. She said getting quality produce from the Lower 48 was just one of many problems. “Everything in the building was just kind of crumbling and falling apart,” Solano said. “There were so many times that the grease trap had to be re-done because the pipes underneath all the flooring were so old and brittle that they were actually collapsing.”A smaller, Taco Bell Express restaurant shared a space with Subway in downtown Juneau before closing in 1999. (Photo courtesy of Charles McKenry)Plumbers were called in to try to fix the issue at night, which meant workers the next morning were walking on temporary floorboards. “It’s not an overnight project,” she said. “So then we tried to keep staffing minimal so nobody was running into each other or getting hurt.” The maintenance turned into a cycle. A pipe would be fixed, the flooring would be replaced, and another pipe would collapse somewhere else.  The Valley Taco Bell also went through several different managers. Solano said she often picked up the slack when one of them was attending meetings in Anchorage. At one point, it became a combination Taco Bell and Baskin Robbins. “They would expect somebody that’s making burritos to go over and make a frappuccino,” Solano said. “You know, you gotta make cakes out of ice cream and you have to be able to decorate them and trying to run a Taco Bell side and trying to make cakes was pretty rough for me.” Repairs became so expensive that the owners started looking for a new building to move to. “But there was no good place in Juneau 18-20 years ago to put a fast food restaurant with a drive-thru in it,” Solano said. “So they decided they were gonna cut their losses and just go ahead and close the doors.” Some workers didn’t even have advance notice that the restaurant was closing. They showed up the next day to a note on the door and were told to pick up their compensation checks. The Valley location was the last Taco Bell to exist in Juneau, but at one point, the city had two — there was a smaller Taco Bell Express downtown. It shared a space with a Subway in a building where Sealaska Heritage is now.In 1997, Juneau’s downtown Taco Bell won a Golden Bell award. It was named seventh in the nation for quality and service out of 1500 franchise stores. (Photo courtesy of Charles McKenry) Charles McKenry started there in 1987 and worked his way up to general manager. “Taco Bell was doing a competition called the Golden Bell,” McKenry said. “We managed to take that store to number seven in the nation for quality and service out of 1,500 franchise stores.” But the downtown restaurant wasn’t very profitable. It closed in the summer of 1999 when the corporate office decided to focus its efforts on the Valley location. McKenry was transferred there as a shift manager to try to improve the service. “The gentleman running the store insisted that no one listen to me because it was his store and he would teach them his way, not necessarily the Taco Bell way,” McKenry said. “He didn’t care about quality or service. It was all about his bottom line, even if it meant not being honest about some of the numbers.” Eventually McKenry quit because of that manager, but his experience wasn’t all bad. “We had great people,” McKenry said. “It was a fantastic product. I mean I thoroughly enjoyed working for Taco Bell itself, but you can only take so much.” Now if you’re craving a Crunchwrap Supreme, the Lunch Crunch Wrap at the Lemon Creek Breeze In is pretty similar. Curious Juneau Are you curious about Juneau, its history, places and people? Or if you just like to ask questions, then ask away! What do you want to know about Juneau?Name*FirstLastEmail*                                                    PhoneZip Code    ZIP / Postal CodeConsent Please don't publish my name.          gform.initializeOnLoaded( function() {gformInitSpinner( 64, 'https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif', true );jQuery('#gform_ajax_frame_64').on('load',function(){var contents = jQuery(this).contents().find('*').html();var is_postback = contents.indexOf('GF_AJAX_POSTBACK') &gt;= 0;if(!is_postback){return;}var form_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_wrapper_64');var is_confirmation = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_confirmation_wrapper_64').length &gt; 0;var is_redirect = contents.indexOf('gformRedirect(){') &gt;= 0;var is_form = form_content.length &gt; 0 &amp;&amp; ! is_redirect &amp;&amp; ! is_confirmation;var mt = parseInt(jQuery('html').css('margin-top'), 10) + parseInt(jQuery('body').css('margin-top'), 10) + 100;if(is_form){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').html(form_content.html());if(form_content.hasClass('gform_validation_error')){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').addClass('gform_validation_error');} else {jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').removeClass('gform_validation_error');}setTimeout( function() { /* delay the scroll by 50 milliseconds to fix a bug in chrome */  }, 50 );if(window['gformInitDatepicker']) {gformInitDatepicker();}if(window['gformInitPriceFields']) {gformInitPriceFields();}var current_page = jQuery('#gform_source_page_number_64').val();gformInitSpinner( 64, 'https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif', true );jQuery(document).trigger('gform_page_loaded', [64, current_page]);window['gf_submitting_64'] = false;}else if(!is_redirect){var confirmation_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('.GF_AJAX_POSTBACK').html();if(!confirmation_content){confirmation_content = contents;}setTimeout(function(){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').replaceWith(confirmation_content);jQuery(document).trigger('gform_confirmation_loaded', [64]);window['gf_submitting_64'] = false;wp.a11y.speak(jQuery('#gform_confirmation_message_64').text());}, 50);}else{jQuery('#gform_64').append(contents);if(window['gformRedirect']) {gformRedirect();}}jQuery(document).trigger('gform_post_render', [64, current_page]);gform.utils.trigger({ event: 'gform/postRender', native: false, data: { formId: 64, currentPage: current_page } });} );} );

Charles McKenry poses in front of the menu at Juneau’s downtown Taco Bell in 1999. (Photo courtesy of Charles McKenry) <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/03TacoBell.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/03TacoBell.mp3</a> In the late ’90s, Juneau had two Taco Bells. But by the early 2000s, they were both gone. Juneau has a history of fast food franchises coming and going, but the disappearance of the Taco Bells left a lot of rumors in its wake, from “employees were selling drugs” to “wasn’t it hepatitis?” “Every business is gonna have drama and rumors and this and that,” said Jennifer Solano, who used to work at the Taco Bell in Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley. “To be honest, Taco Bell was a good, wholesome place to work. They taught me enough that I’ve been able to raise a family, continuing my career managing fast food restaurants.” Solano runs a Subway in Anchorage now, but she started working for Taco Bell in Juneau as a teenager. In the mid-nineties, it sat where the Asiana Garden restaurant is now, across from Super Bear.  “We were having repeated problems with the [produce] shipments,” Solano said.  “We would have to throw away sour cream, cheeses, lettuce, tomatoes. They were coming in continuously frozen when they were only supposed to be refrigerated, and we were having to waste a lot of money.” Solano eventually became an assistant manager. She said getting quality produce from the Lower 48 was just one of many problems. “Everything in the building was just kind of crumbling and falling apart,” Solano said. “There were so many times that the grease trap had to be re-done because the pipes underneath all the flooring were so old and brittle that they were actually collapsing.”A smaller, Taco Bell Express restaurant shared a space with Subway in downtown Juneau before closing in 1999. (Photo courtesy of Charles McKenry) Plumbers were called in to try to fix the issue at night, which meant workers the next morning were walking on temporary floorboards. “It’s not an overnight project,” she said. “So then we tried to keep staffing minimal so nobody was running into each other or getting hurt.” The maintenance turned into a cycle. A pipe would be fixed, the flooring would be replaced, and another pipe would collapse somewhere else.  The Valley Taco Bell also went through several different managers. Solano said she often picked up the slack when one of them was attending meetings in Anchorage. At one point, it became a combination Taco Bell and Baskin Robbins. “They would expect somebody that’s making burritos to go over and make a frappuccino,” Solano said. “You know, you gotta make cakes out of ice cream and you have to be able to decorate them and trying to run a Taco Bell side and trying to make cakes was pretty rough for me.” Repairs became so expensive that the owners started looking for a new building to move to. “But there was no good place in Juneau 18-20 years ago to put a fast food restaurant with a drive-thru in it,” Solano said. “So they decided they were gonna cut their losses and just go ahead and close the doors.” Some workers didn’t even have advance notice that the restaurant was closing. They showed up the next day to a note on the door and were told to pick up their compensation checks. The Valley location was the last Taco Bell to exist in Juneau, but at one point, the city had two — there was a smaller Taco Bell Express downtown. It shared a space with a Subway in a building where Sealaska Heritage is now.In 1997, Juneau’s downtown Taco Bell won a Golden Bell award. It was named seventh in the nation for quality and service out of 1500 franchise stores. (Photo courtesy of Charles McKenry) Charles McKenry started there in 1987 and worked his way up to general manager. “Taco Bell was doing a competition called the Golden Bell,” McKenry said. “We managed to take that store to number seven in the nation for quality and service out of 1,500 franchise stores.” But the downtown restaurant wasn’t very profitable. It closed in the summer of 1999 when the corporate office decided to focus its efforts on the Valley location. McKenry was transferred there as a shift manager to try to improve the service. “The gentleman running the store insisted that no one listen to me because it was his store and he would teach them his way, not necessarily the Taco Bell way,” McKenry said. “He didn’t care about quality or service. It was all about his bottom line, even if it meant not being honest about some of the numbers.” Eventually McKenry quit because of that manager, but his experience wasn’t all bad. “We had great people,” McKenry said. “It was a fantastic product. I mean I thoroughly enjoyed working for Taco Bell itself, but you can only take so much.” Now if you’re craving a <a href="https://www.tacobell.com/food/specialties/crunchwrap-supreme" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Crunchwrap Supreme</a>, the <a href="https://breezein.revelup.online/store/1/category/236/subcategory/1646/product/40466" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Lunch Crunch Wrap</a> at the Lemon Creek Breeze In is pretty similar. <h3>Curious Juneau</h3> Are you curious about Juneau, its history, places and people? 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What happened to Juneau’s Taco Bell?

A street light near the Juneau Public Library glows purple on Sunday, Jan. 23, 2022. (Photo by Bridget Dowd/KTOO)https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/24PurpleLights.mp3 On a foggy Sunday night in Juneau, the corner of Ferry Way and Marine Way is made eerie by a violet glow coming from a nearby street light. It’s just one of several lights around town that have changed colors. A Curious Juneau listener saw these lights around the city and asked KTOO why the lights have a dark purple hue. As it turns out, the color is a mistake and the state is working to fix it.    Juneau resident Max Stanley said he and his girlfriend noticed the lights in October when they were driving toward Thane. “At first we wondered if it’s something for Halloween,” Stanley said. “As we continued to drive, we realized it’s just — all the street lights have this hue.” Stanley said over the next few weeks, they noticed the same purple hue coming from several other street lights all over town. “It’s pretty noticeable sometimes when there’s one of the purple ones and then right after an older white one,” Stanley said. “So we just were wondering why there are these new purple-hued lights around town.” The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities maintains a lot of Juneau’s street lights. Spokesperson Sam Dapcevich said the lights actually aren’t new at all and the purple hue isn’t intentional. “The purple hue in the LED lights is caused by a computer chip issue, possibly a defect,” Dapcevich said. The department is working with the manufacturer, American Electric Lighting, to get the lights fixed and Juneau isn’t the only place where the issue has been reported. “It was occurring in quite a few places around the country,” Dapcevich said. “It appears that most of the LED street lights have three colors. They have yellow, red and blue and the yellow color is failing.” Of course, when red and blue mix, the resulting color is purple. Dapcevich said most of the lights are less than 5 years old. They’re still under warranty, so the manufacturer should cover the cost of fixing them as well – though he didn’t have an answer as to when that would happen. 

A street light near the Juneau Public Library glows purple on Sunday, Jan. 23, 2022. (Photo by Bridget Dowd/KTOO) <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/24PurpleLights.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/24PurpleLights.mp3</a> On a foggy Sunday night in Juneau, the corner of Ferry Way and Marine Way is made eerie by a violet glow coming from a nearby street light. It’s just one of several lights around town that have changed colors. A <a href="https://ktoo.org/curiousjuneau" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Curious Juneau</a> listener saw these lights around the city and asked KTOO why the lights have a dark purple hue. As it turns out, the color is a mistake and the state is working to fix it.   Juneau resident Max Stanley said he and his girlfriend noticed the lights in October when they were driving toward Thane. “At first we wondered if it’s something for Halloween,” Stanley said. “As we continued to drive, we realized it’s just — all the street lights have this hue.” Stanley said over the next few weeks, they noticed the same purple hue coming from several other street lights all over town. “It’s pretty noticeable sometimes when there’s one of the purple ones and then right after an older white one,” Stanley said. “So we just were wondering why there are these new purple-hued lights around town.” The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities maintains a lot of Juneau’s street lights. Spokesperson Sam Dapcevich said the lights actually aren’t new at all and the purple hue isn’t intentional. “The purple hue in the LED lights is caused by a computer chip issue, possibly a defect,” Dapcevich said. The department is working with the manufacturer, American Electric Lighting, to get the lights fixed and <a href="https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2021/07/06/why-streetlights-milwaukee-interstates-highways-purple-led-wisconsin/7797131002/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Juneau isn’t the only place where the issue has been reported.</a> “It was occurring in quite a few places around the country,” Dapcevich said. “It appears that most of the LED street lights have three colors. They have yellow, red and blue and the yellow color is failing.” Of course, when red and blue mix, the resulting color is purple. Dapcevich said most of the lights are less than 5 years old. They’re still under warranty, so the manufacturer should cover the cost of fixing them as well – though he didn’t have an answer as to when that would happen.

Why are some of Juneau’s street lights glowing purple?

A Maloja Snake or naagáas’ cloud formation over downtown Juneau at dawn on Aug. 26, 2021. (Image captured from SnowCloud Services webcam)In the 2014 film “Clouds of Sils Maria,” the climax of the story features a scene in the Swiss Alps where the two lead actresses, Kristen Stewart and Juliette Binoche, hike up high in the mountains to witness an early-morning cloud formation called the Maloja Snake — a mist that flows like water along the valley floor. A Curious Juneau listener wrote in saying they’d witnessed something similar along the Gastineau Channel, and they wondered if there are any Lingít stories or a Lingít name for this cloud feature. https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/27clouds.mp3 Wes Adkins with the National Weather Service office in Juneau had never heard of the movie or the Maloja Snake, but once he saw clips from the film, he knew exactly what it was. “I think there is not a meteorologist in town who doesn’t observe this with awe every time they go hiking, every time they commute down Egan Drive,” he said. “We see it all the time here.” In Juneau you’ll see these clouds crawling down Perseverance Trail or along Treadwell Ditch on Douglas Island. They’re very snake-like and cling to the sides of the mountains, close to the ground. Sometimes a fat snake as wide as the channel rolls into town. Adkins says that the changes in temperature, pressure and moisture that cause the snake to form are always there but not always visible. But sometimes, when conditions are right, you can actually see the boundary between cloud and no cloud. “So what’s really cool is when you start to see … these Maloja Snakes when they start to do flips or cartwheels,” he said. “And people can witness this, you know, just above them in downtown just over Gastineau Channel.” There’s not a lot of cloud watching in Juneau. We don’t get white puffy clouds that appear in the shapes of animals while we lie in a field on our backs. So these moving fog banks — these snakes — are some of the most dynamic clouds we have. But we don’t have snakes in Alaska, so what should we call them? X̱’unei Lance Twitchell is an Associate Professor of Alaska Native Languages at the University of Alaska Southeast. “I started looking through some resources,” he said. “And I found this verb, which is naagáas’: ‘Clouds are moving along.'” Naagáas’ is a Lingít word. It also means migration. “‘Gáas’ is a house post,” he said. “So this is the verb. There’s a version of it to say, ‘aadé haa wligáas’:  ‘We migrated there.’ Which would be sort of like saying, ‘We picked up our house post, and we brought it over there.'” So naagáas’ would be migrating clouds. But X̱’unei found a metaphor where maybe there is just a cloud. For instance, Lingít has a whole bunch of readily available phrases to describe sunlight. “Sometimes the Lingít language is just so matter of fact,” he said. “And I think what I’ve heard seems to be that way about clouds. Because we have clouds like 300 days a year, it figures you’d have this whole stack of metaphors for sunlight.” X̱’unei says he doesn’t know if naagáas’ has been used to describe these clouds before. From multiple elders the consensus seemed to be that if there were another Lingít word for these cloud snakes, it might have been lost with the loss of language speakers. “One of the great tragedies of colonialism — and there are many — is that nobody really took the time to figure out what the people knew about the land around them, the weather, the water,” he said. You can see naagáas’ any time of year and any time of day in Juneau, but if you really want to be intentional about it, Wes Adkins at the National Weather Service says dawn or dusk are good bets, when the temperature is changing. Or just before or after a rainy spell. The weather service doesn’t include these cloud snakes in their forecasts because they don’t really impact the weather. They don’t bring rain. They aren’t harbingers of storms. But Adkins says we should still be on the lookout for them. “I’m originally from Alabama. We were really flat there, for the most part,” he said. “There’s nothing like this. So I think we can all relish this chance to see something special.” And X̱’unei says the weather service and the rest of us should start practicing how to talk about it in Lingít.

A Maloja Snake or naagáas’ cloud formation over downtown Juneau at dawn on Aug. 26, 2021. (Image captured from SnowCloud Services webcam) In the 2014 film “Clouds of Sils Maria,” the climax of the story features a scene in the Swiss Alps where the two lead actresses, Kristen Stewart and Juliette Binoche, hike up high in the mountains to witness an early-morning cloud formation called <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQqPCgxQ1c0&amp;t=245s" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">the Maloja Snake</a> — a mist that flows like water along the valley floor. A Curious Juneau listener wrote in saying they’d witnessed something similar along the Gastineau Channel, and they wondered if there are any Lingít stories or a Lingít name for this cloud feature. <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/27clouds.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/27clouds.mp3</a> Wes Adkins with the National Weather Service office in Juneau had never heard of the movie or the Maloja Snake, but once he saw clips from the film, he knew exactly what it was. “I think there is not a meteorologist in town who doesn’t observe this with awe every time they go hiking, every time they commute down Egan Drive,” he said. “We see it all the time here.” In Juneau you’ll see these clouds crawling down Perseverance Trail or along Treadwell Ditch on Douglas Island. They’re very snake-like and cling to the sides of the mountains, close to the ground. Sometimes a fat snake as wide as the channel rolls into town. Adkins says that the changes in temperature, pressure and moisture that cause the snake to form are always there but not always visible. But sometimes, when conditions are right, you can actually see the boundary between cloud and no cloud. “So what’s really cool is when you start to see … these Maloja Snakes when they start to do flips or cartwheels,” he said. “And people can witness this, you know, just above them in downtown just over Gastineau Channel.” There’s not a lot of cloud watching in Juneau. We don’t get white puffy clouds that appear in the shapes of animals while we lie in a field on our backs. So these moving fog banks — these snakes — are some of the most dynamic clouds we have. But we don’t have snakes in Alaska, so what should we call them? X̱’unei Lance Twitchell is an Associate Professor of Alaska Native Languages at the University of Alaska Southeast. “I started looking through some resources,” he said. “And I found this verb, which is naagáas’: ‘Clouds are moving along.'” Naagáas’ is a Lingít word. It also means migration. “‘Gáas’ is a house post,” he said. “So this is the verb. There’s a version of it to say, ‘aadé haa wligáas’:  ‘We migrated there.’ Which would be sort of like saying, ‘We picked up our house post, and we brought it over there.'” So naagáas’ would be migrating clouds. But X̱’unei found a metaphor where maybe there is just a cloud. For instance, Lingít has a whole bunch of readily available phrases to describe sunlight. “Sometimes the Lingít language is just so matter of fact,” he said. “And I think what I’ve heard seems to be that way about clouds. Because we have clouds like 300 days a year, it figures you’d have this whole stack of metaphors for sunlight.” X̱’unei says he doesn’t know if naagáas’ has been used to describe these clouds before. From multiple elders the consensus seemed to be that if there were another Lingít word for these cloud snakes, it might have been lost with the loss of language speakers. “One of the great tragedies of colonialism — and there are many — is that nobody really took the time to figure out what the people knew about the land around them, the weather, the water,” he said. You can see naagáas’ any time of year and any time of day in Juneau, but if you really want to be intentional about it, Wes Adkins at the National Weather Service says dawn or dusk are good bets, when the temperature is changing. Or just before or after a rainy spell. The weather service doesn’t include these cloud snakes in their forecasts because they don’t really impact the weather. They don’t bring rain. They aren’t harbingers of storms. But Adkins says we should still be on the lookout for them. “I’m originally from Alabama. We were really flat there, for the most part,” he said. “There’s nothing like this. So I think we can all relish this chance to see something special.” And X̱’unei says the weather service and the rest of us should start practicing how to talk about it in Lingít.

Is there an Indigenous name for this cloud formation in Juneau?

The 1958-1959 girls’ high school rifle club poses for a yearbook photo in the basement of Harborview. (Courtesy of Karleen Grummett)As part of KTOO’s Curious Juneau project, a listener asked: “Was there really a gun range in the basement of Harborview Elementary School?” The short answer is yes. It was there for decades, and there are plenty of people still around in Juneau who remember it. https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/05GunRange.mp3 Flipping through decades of Juneau’s high school yearbooks, you’ll find some dated extracurriculars, like candy stripers and the Future Homemakers of America. You’ll also find the rifle club, which was founded in 1934. Karleen Grummett is a former member.  “Rifle club was one of the more common groups to join in high school, and it sounded like fun to me,” she said. “They had both boys’ and girls’ rifle clubs, and they were both very well attended.” Grummett participated in the club from 1958 until 1960, when she graduated from what was then Juneau High School (not yet Juneau-Douglas High School).  “It was just assumed that that’s where you went to learn how to shoot a rifle,” she said. “It was in the basement of the Harborview school.” She joined the group hoping that if she could properly handle a gun, her father would take her hunting. The 1974-1975 high school rifle club as pictured in the yearbook. (Bridget Dowd/ KTOO)“That didn’t happen, but we still had a lot of fun,” Grummett said. “It was really noisy down there in that basement, with all the guns going off. I have nothing but fond memories of it.” The girls would start in the prone position and work up to sitting, kneeling and standing. “There were certain goals for each of those positions,” she said. “At the end of the year, you were awarded some brass bars that you put on a pin on your high school sweater.” Club members could work their way up to “expert” or “distinguished” levels, and Grummett was proud to achieve the expert title.Karleen Grummett (then Karleen Alstead) saved this certificate from her time in the Juneau High School rifle club in the late 1950s. (Courtesy of Karleen Grummett)“But I was a little disappointed when I found out later that the way to get your ‘distinguished’ was to get special time at the gun range, and that wasn’t readily available to women at that time,” she said. But the high school rifle club wasn’t the only organization to use the Harborview gun range. James Cartmill wasn’t yet 10 years old when he started taking gun safety classes through Territorial Sportsmen in the early 1970s.  “There was an open area down there [in the Harborview basement] right next to the rifle range that we would go in and play around until our names were called,” he said. Courses were held for several weeks each year, and Cartmill’s family was heavily involved.  “My mom would be the one that would take down the names at the front door,” he said. “You would check in with her, and then they would have movies on shooting safety and hunting. My dad would run the movie projectors in the library area.” At one point, Cartmill remembers there being about 50 kids involved in the program. “There was, I believe, five different stations, and each one of the stations had a coach or an adult there to tell you how to use the gun, your breathing, your sight alignment, your trigger squeeze,” he said. At the end of each day, the kids took their targets home to show off and later received certificates of completion. A few years later, in 1986, Ryan Scott took a hunter education class in the Harborview basement. Now he teaches the course through Alaska’s Department of Fish &amp; Game, but a lot has changed since he first learned to shoot. “Many of us, when we were older, especially in high school when we were able to drive, would hunt in the mornings before school started or in the afternoons as soon as it got done,” Scott said. “Certainly, I had shotguns in my vehicle because that’s what I was doing after school.”The 1946-’47 high school rifle club as pictured in the yearbook. (Photo by Bridget Dowd/ KTOO)Nowadays, taking a gun to school would land you in a lot of trouble. Debates over American gun laws heated up over the years as mass shootings became more frequent.  Scott said his courses aren’t just for hunters, and being familiar with a gun could help dispel some of the fear people associate with them. “That does give an individual more comfort, just understanding what the firearm really is and what it will do,” Scott said. “And then also knowing, well, this is the type of ammunition. You know, it’s not a shotgun shell, it’s a cartridge, and this is a revolver, this is a semi-automatic pistol, things like that.” Scott said that education could come in handy even if you don’t have a gun in your home because it’s not uncommon to come across one in someone else’s, especially in Alaska.  Continuing through those high school yearbooks, the number of rifle club members gets much smaller in the late ’70s, then the club disappears completely.The 1976-1977 high school rifle club as pictured in the yearbook. The club practiced in the basement of Harborview. (Photo by Bridget Dowd/ KTOO)As for the rifle range at Harborview, it’s long gone. The school was renovated in the early 2000s and didn’t include a range. Around that time, a new gun range was built in Montana Creek. But for James Cartmill, when it comes to gun safety, some things haven’t changed. He and his two grown children still go hunting, employing the lessons he learned in Harborview’s basement more than 40 years ago. “You know, it’s not a toy, it’s a weapon,” he said. “That’s something that I’ve instilled in my kids.” Are you curious about Juneau, its history, places and people? Or if you just like to ask questions, then ask away! What do you want to know about Juneau?Name*FirstLastEmail*                                                    PhoneZip Code    ZIP / Postal CodeConsent Please don't publish my name.          gform.initializeOnLoaded( function() {gformInitSpinner( 64, 'https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif', true );jQuery('#gform_ajax_frame_64').on('load',function(){var contents = jQuery(this).contents().find('*').html();var is_postback = contents.indexOf('GF_AJAX_POSTBACK') &gt;= 0;if(!is_postback){return;}var form_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_wrapper_64');var is_confirmation = jQuery(this).contents().find('#gform_confirmation_wrapper_64').length &gt; 0;var is_redirect = contents.indexOf('gformRedirect(){') &gt;= 0;var is_form = form_content.length &gt; 0 &amp;&amp; ! is_redirect &amp;&amp; ! is_confirmation;var mt = parseInt(jQuery('html').css('margin-top'), 10) + parseInt(jQuery('body').css('margin-top'), 10) + 100;if(is_form){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').html(form_content.html());if(form_content.hasClass('gform_validation_error')){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').addClass('gform_validation_error');} else {jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').removeClass('gform_validation_error');}setTimeout( function() { /* delay the scroll by 50 milliseconds to fix a bug in chrome */  }, 50 );if(window['gformInitDatepicker']) {gformInitDatepicker();}if(window['gformInitPriceFields']) {gformInitPriceFields();}var current_page = jQuery('#gform_source_page_number_64').val();gformInitSpinner( 64, 'https://www.ktoo.org/wp-content/themes/ktoo/includes/35.gif', true );jQuery(document).trigger('gform_page_loaded', [64, current_page]);window['gf_submitting_64'] = false;}else if(!is_redirect){var confirmation_content = jQuery(this).contents().find('.GF_AJAX_POSTBACK').html();if(!confirmation_content){confirmation_content = contents;}setTimeout(function(){jQuery('#gform_wrapper_64').replaceWith(confirmation_content);jQuery(document).trigger('gform_confirmation_loaded', [64]);window['gf_submitting_64'] = false;wp.a11y.speak(jQuery('#gform_confirmation_message_64').text());}, 50);}else{jQuery('#gform_64').append(contents);if(window['gformRedirect']) {gformRedirect();}}jQuery(document).trigger('gform_post_render', [64, current_page]);gform.utils.trigger({ event: 'gform/postRender', native: false, data: { formId: 64, currentPage: current_page } });} );} );

The 1958-1959 girls’ high school rifle club poses for a yearbook photo in the basement of Harborview. (Courtesy of Karleen Grummett) As part of KTOO’s Curious Juneau project, a listener asked: “Was there really a gun range in the basement of Harborview Elementary School?” The short answer is yes. It was there for decades, and there are plenty of people still around in Juneau who remember it. <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/05GunRange.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/05GunRange.mp3</a> Flipping through decades of Juneau’s high school yearbooks, you’ll find some dated extracurriculars, like candy stripers and the Future Homemakers of America. You’ll also find the rifle club, which was founded in 1934. Karleen Grummett is a former member.  “Rifle club was one of the more common groups to join in high school, and it sounded like fun to me,” she said. “They had both boys’ and girls’ rifle clubs, and they were both very well attended.” Grummett participated in the club from 1958 until 1960, when she graduated from what was then Juneau High School (not yet Juneau-Douglas High School). “It was just assumed that that’s where you went to learn how to shoot a rifle,” she said. “It was in the basement of the Harborview school.” She joined the group hoping that if she could properly handle a gun, her father would take her hunting. The 1974-1975 high school rifle club as pictured in the yearbook. (Bridget Dowd/ KTOO) “That didn’t happen, but we still had a lot of fun,” Grummett said. “It was really noisy down there in that basement, with all the guns going off. I have nothing but fond memories of it.” The girls would start in the prone position and work up to sitting, kneeling and standing. “There were certain goals for each of those positions,” she said. “At the end of the year, you were awarded some brass bars that you put on a pin on your high school sweater.” Club members could work their way up to “expert” or “distinguished” levels, and Grummett was proud to achieve the expert title.Karleen Grummett (then Karleen Alstead) saved this certificate from her time in the Juneau High School rifle club in the late 1950s. (Courtesy of Karleen Grummett) “But I was a little disappointed when I found out later that the way to get your ‘distinguished’ was to get special time at the gun range, and that wasn’t readily available to women at that time,” she said. But the high school rifle club wasn’t the only organization to use the Harborview gun range. James Cartmill wasn’t yet 10 years old when he started taking gun safety classes through Territorial Sportsmen in the early 1970s. “There was an open area down there [in the Harborview basement] right next to the rifle range that we would go in and play around until our names were called,” he said. Courses were held for several weeks each year, and Cartmill’s family was heavily involved.  “My mom would be the one that would take down the names at the front door,” he said. “You would check in with her, and then they would have movies on shooting safety and hunting. My dad would run the movie projectors in the library area.” At one point, Cartmill remembers there being about 50 kids involved in the program. “There was, I believe, five different stations, and each one of the stations had a coach or an adult there to tell you how to use the gun, your breathing, your sight alignment, your trigger squeeze,” he said. At the end of each day, the kids took their targets home to show off and later received certificates of completion. A few years later, in 1986, Ryan Scott took a hunter education class in the Harborview basement. Now he teaches the course through Alaska’s Department of Fish &amp; Game, but a lot has changed since he first learned to shoot. “Many of us, when we were older, especially in high school when we were able to drive, would hunt in the mornings before school started or in the afternoons as soon as it got done,” Scott said. “Certainly, I had shotguns in my vehicle because that’s what I was doing after school.”The 1946-’47 high school rifle club as pictured in the yearbook. (Photo by Bridget Dowd/ KTOO) Nowadays, taking a gun to school would land you in a lot of trouble. Debates over American gun laws heated up over the years as mass shootings became more frequent.  Scott said his courses aren’t just for hunters, and being familiar with a gun could help dispel some of the fear people associate with them. “That does give an individual more comfort, just understanding what the firearm really is and what it will do,” Scott said. “And then also knowing, well, this is the type of ammunition. You know, it’s not a shotgun shell, it’s a cartridge, and this is a revolver, this is a semi-automatic pistol, things like that.” Scott said that education could come in handy even if you don’t have a gun in your home because it’s not uncommon to come across one in someone else’s, especially in Alaska.  Continuing through those high school yearbooks, the number of rifle club members gets much smaller in the late ’70s, then the club disappears completely.The 1976-1977 high school rifle club as pictured in the yearbook. The club practiced in the basement of Harborview. (Photo by Bridget Dowd/ KTOO) As for the rifle range at Harborview, it’s long gone. The school was renovated in the early 2000s and didn’t include a range. Around that time, a new gun range was built in Montana Creek. But for James Cartmill, when it comes to gun safety, some things haven’t changed. He and his two grown children still go hunting, employing the lessons he learned in Harborview’s basement more than 40 years ago. “You know, it’s not a toy, it’s a weapon,” he said. “That’s something that I’ve instilled in my kids.” Are you curious about Juneau, its history, places and people? 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Was there really a gun range in the basement of Harborview Elementary School?

https://media.ktoo.org/2019/05/28GOLDDREDGE-CJ-NPR1.mp3It’s after work, and the summer sun and the tide are out at John Wright’s go-to fishing spot in Juneau: the wide, sandy beach where Sheep Creek meets Gastineau Channel.“I’ve been fly fishing in Alaska — Juneau specifically — for seven years. I’ve been fly fishing for 20 years. I’m 32, so that’s a good chunk of my life. … This is probably one of the first places I fished when I moved here, and the first place I broke a rod, here as well.”He caught something too big.“Yeah, the chum salmon. FEROCIOUS.”A few years back, he says he started noticing someone showing up on the beach with a different hobby.“If I recall correctly, my first years here, there were no dredgers here. And then one day, there was maybe one? And it just seems like, within a couple years there were many. And you know, I’ve just always been curious.”They’re dredging — for gold.On this day, we count seven different rafts on the beach with motors, pumps, hoses, ropes, wheeled sluice boxes and plastic tubs. It’s weekend warriors’ gear for recreational gold dredging.Nathan Brooks tidies up his raft at the beach near Sheep Creek in Juneau on May 15, 2019. He and other recreational gold dredgers leave their gear out there. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO)The rafts themselves are made of pallets, wood and big foam blocks lashed together, about the size of a big mattress. The combination of improvised, DIY stuff and special gold-sifting gear probably ordered off the internet looks real janky, like something out of “Mad Max” or “Waterworld.” The beach itself is pockmarked with unnatural pits about as deep as a bathtub. “They’ve been pretty busy,” Wright says. The rafts are tied up to old pilings and big rocks that’ll be underwater when the tide comes in. They’re unattended, except for one. We head over so Wright can ask one of these DIY dredgers about what they’re doing. “What if they don’t want to share their secrets?” Wright wonders aloud. A pitbull named King is keeping watch around a fresh pit in the sand. His owner is in hip waders, spraying seawater from a hose into the pit. His name is Nathan Brooks, and he’s game to answer Wright’s questions over King’s protest. Nathan Brooks sprays seawater into the sand at the beach near Sheep Creek in Juneau on May 15, 2019, while his pitbull King watches. The slurry gets pumped to the top of his sluice box. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO)“How much time do you think you spend out here, and is there a season?” Wright asks. “Depends on the tides, really,” Brooks says. “The season is more when it’s warm, not so much the frozen ground. Other than that, it’s when the tides let us. You know, the best times is when the tide’s going out.” Brooks’ raft is about 50 feet away in the water. One hose is running seawater up the beach to the pit. Another hose in the pit is sucking the slurry out and up to the top of his sluice box. He’s got it propped up on a float and some buckets. We can’t see through the slurry, but the bottom of the box is lined with special mats with a bunch of little ridges. They’re supposed to trap tiny bits of gold and let the less-dense sand and pebbles run off. Brooks has been out here all afternoon. He won’t know if he’s had a good day until the end. Nathan Brooks sprays seawater into sand on the beach near Sheep Creek in Juneau on May 15, 2019. It’s part of his recreational gold dredging operation. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO)“On a good shift, we can run an ounce a day, you know, if we catch both tides. We can pull an ounce out of the ground,” Brooks says. “I’ve pulled over 40 ounces out of here.” Spot gold prices have spiked above $1,300 an ounce a few times this year. When the math catches up with our brains, all that comes out of our mouths is “Whoa!” and “Wow!” and some goofy chuckles. “When I see this, I just see this big, kind fan of sand,” Wright says, looking across the beach. “What do you see when you look at this landscape?” Nathan Brooks tidies up his gold-dredging gear at the beach near Sheep Creek on May 15, 2019. He and other recreational gold dredgers leave their gear out there on makeshift rafts. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO)“I see money! That’s what I see when I look around,” Brooks says. “There is a payout, but it’s nice just being able to let my dog run out on the beach, and hang out here and just kind of do my own thing.” He got into this hobby with his dad three or four years ago. King helps out too, pulling gear up the beach. “He really does, actually. I hook him up to the end of it, he helps me pull the heavy thing back up, in and out.” There are a lot of different rules around recreational mining. Some kinds require state permits, some don’t. Brooks says this spot is special, because if you follow the rules, you don’t need a permit, and unlike other spots, you’re not jumping on anyone else’s claim. The sand is special, too: It’s the pulverized tailings of a nearby mine that closed long ago, so there’s leftover gold. Nathan Brooks checks his sluice box after shutting down his gold-dredging operation for the day on the beach near Sheep Creek in Juneau on May 15, 2019. He spent all afternoon out there. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO)Eventually, Brooks shuts off his pumps and wraps up for the day. He points out some sand spotted with yellow flecks in his mats. “Not too bad,” he says. “There’s some of it. It’s in that real fine area, you can see it up in that corner.” Recreational gold dredger Nathan Brooks says there’s gold and pyrite in his sluice box at the end of his day on May 15, 2019, at the beach near Sheep Creek in Juneau. The ridges in these mats are designed to trap gold. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO)It isn’t very shiny. “Nope, that’s a mistake,” Brooks says. “People always think it’s real shiny, and that’s that pyrite. Which, there is pyrite in there, also.” John Wright had a good day, too. He caught two Dolly Varden trout. But he doesn’t think he’ll be switching hobbies. “No,” Wright says. “I think I’ll just stick with mine. Mine’s much more peaceful.” For a profile of an especially colorful gold dredger, check out filmmaker Beau Sylte’s short film about Ray Rusaw from a few years ago.  Have your own Curious Juneau question? Submit it here. You can also subscribe to the Curious Juneau podcast and catch up on past curiosities at ktoo.org/curious.

<a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/05/28GOLDDREDGE-CJ-NPR1.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/2019/05/28GOLDDREDGE-CJ-NPR1.mp3</a>It’s after work, and the summer sun and the tide are out at John Wright’s go-to fishing spot in Juneau: the wide, sandy beach where Sheep Creek meets Gastineau Channel.“I’ve been fly fishing in Alaska — Juneau specifically — for seven years. I’ve been fly fishing for 20 years. I’m 32, so that’s a good chunk of my life. … This is probably one of the first places I fished when I moved here, and the first place I broke a rod, here as well.”He caught something too big.“Yeah, the chum salmon. FEROCIOUS.”A few years back, he says he started noticing someone showing up on the beach with a different hobby.“If I recall correctly, my first years here, there were no dredgers here. And then one day, there was maybe one? And it just seems like, within a couple years there were many. And you know, I’ve just always been curious.”They’re dredging — <a href="https://youtu.be/vCrDyOKPB2c?t=6" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">for gold</a>.On this day, we count seven different rafts on the beach with motors, pumps, hoses, ropes, wheeled sluice boxes and plastic tubs. It’s weekend warriors’ gear for recreational gold dredging.<a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/05/Nathan-Brooks-gold-dredge-rafts-20190515.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Nathan Brooks tidies up his raft at the beach near Sheep Creek in Juneau on May 15, 2019. He and other recreational gold dredgers leave their gear out there. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO) The rafts themselves are made of pallets, wood and big foam blocks lashed together, about the size of a big mattress. The combination of improvised, DIY stuff and special gold-sifting gear probably ordered off the internet looks real janky, like something out of “Mad Max” or “Waterworld.” The beach itself is pockmarked with unnatural pits about as deep as a bathtub. “They’ve been pretty busy,” Wright says. The rafts are tied up to old pilings and big rocks that’ll be underwater when the tide comes in. They’re unattended, except for one. We head over so Wright can ask one of these DIY dredgers about what they’re doing. “What if they don’t want to share their secrets?” Wright wonders aloud. A pitbull named King is keeping watch around a fresh pit in the sand. His owner is in hip waders, spraying seawater from a hose into the pit. His name is Nathan Brooks, and he’s game to answer Wright’s questions over King’s protest. <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/05/sluice-box-Nathan-Brooks-and-pitbull-King-20190515.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Nathan Brooks sprays seawater into the sand at the beach near Sheep Creek in Juneau on May 15, 2019, while his pitbull King watches. The slurry gets pumped to the top of his sluice box. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO) “How much time do you think you spend out here, and is there a season?” Wright asks. “Depends on the tides, really,” Brooks says. “The season is more when it’s warm, not so much the frozen ground. Other than that, it’s when the tides let us. You know, the best times is when the tide’s going out.” Brooks’ raft is about 50 feet away in the water. One hose is running seawater up the beach to the pit. Another hose in the pit is sucking the slurry out and up to the top of his sluice box. He’s got it propped up on a float and some buckets. We can’t see through the slurry, but the bottom of the box is lined with special mats with a bunch of little ridges. They’re supposed to trap tiny bits of gold and let the less-dense sand and pebbles run off. Brooks has been out here all afternoon. He won’t know if he’s had a good day until the end. <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/05/Nathan-Brooks-20190515-closeup.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Nathan Brooks sprays seawater into sand on the beach near Sheep Creek in Juneau on May 15, 2019. It’s part of his recreational gold dredging operation. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO) “On a good shift, we can run an ounce a day, you know, if we catch both tides. We can pull an ounce out of the ground,” Brooks says. “I’ve pulled over 40 ounces out of here.” <a href="https://www.apmex.com/spotprices/gold-price" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Spot gold prices</a> have spiked above $1,300 an ounce a few times this year. When the math catches up with our brains, all that comes out of our mouths is “Whoa!” and “Wow!” and some goofy chuckles. “When I see this, I just see this big, kind fan of sand,” Wright says, looking across the beach. “What do you see when you look at this landscape?” <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/05/Sheep-Creek-Beach-Nathan-Brooks-20190515-extra-wide-2.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Nathan Brooks tidies up his gold-dredging gear at the beach near Sheep Creek on May 15, 2019. He and other recreational gold dredgers leave their gear out there on makeshift rafts. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO) “I see money! That’s what I see when I look around,” Brooks says. “There is a payout, but it’s nice just being able to let my dog run out on the beach, and hang out here and just kind of do my own thing.” He got into this hobby with his dad three or four years ago. King helps out too, pulling gear up the beach. “He really does, actually. I hook him up to the end of it, he helps me pull the heavy thing back up, in and out.” There are a lot of different rules around <a href="http://dnr.alaska.gov/mlw/factsht/mine_fs/suctiond.pdf" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">recreational mining</a>. Some kinds <a href="http://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=uselicense.mining_ssm_permits" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">require state permits</a>, some don’t. Brooks says this spot is special, because if you follow the rules, you don’t need a permit, and unlike other spots, you’re not jumping on <a href="http://akmining.info/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">anyone else’s claim</a>. The sand is special, too: It’s the pulverized tailings of a nearby mine that closed long ago, so there’s leftover gold. <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/05/Nathan-Brooks-checks-mats-20190515.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Nathan Brooks checks his sluice box after shutting down his gold-dredging operation for the day on the beach near Sheep Creek in Juneau on May 15, 2019. He spent all afternoon out there. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO) Eventually, Brooks shuts off his pumps and wraps up for the day. He points out some sand spotted with yellow flecks in his mats. “Not too bad,” he says. “There’s some of it. It’s in that real fine area, you can see it up in that corner.” <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/05/gold-mat-close-up-20190515.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Recreational gold dredger Nathan Brooks says there’s gold and pyrite in his sluice box at the end of his day on May 15, 2019, at the beach near Sheep Creek in Juneau. The ridges in these mats are designed to trap gold. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO) It isn’t very shiny. “Nope, that’s a mistake,” Brooks says. “People always think it’s real shiny, and that’s that pyrite. Which, there is pyrite in there, also.” John Wright had a good day, too. He caught two Dolly Varden trout. But he doesn’t think he’ll be switching hobbies. “No,” Wright says. “I think I’ll just stick with mine. Mine’s much more peaceful.” For a profile of an especially colorful gold dredger, check out filmmaker Beau Sylte’s <a href="https://vimeo.com/215551469" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">short film</a> about Ray Rusaw from a few years ago. <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2017/01/Curious-Juneau_Social_Light_02.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Have your own Curious Juneau question? Submit it here. You can also subscribe to the Curious Juneau podcast and catch up on past curiosities at <a href="http://www.KTOO.org/curious" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">ktoo.org/curious</a>.

Is there gold in them thar beaches?

Even in the middle of the workday on Tuesday, there’s steady traffic at Costco in Juneau. The city assessor’s records put its total square footage at 76,696. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO)https://media.ktoo.org/2019/03/28COSTCO-CJ.mp3 The other day, Phil Fleming was loading up a car in the parking lot of the Costco in Juneau. He said a salty version of something you may have heard before. “Just now on the phone, actually, a woman was saying, ‘Yeah, that’s the smallest damn Costco I’ve ever seen,’” he said. “She’s comparing it to the Seattle and Anchorage ones. … It’s one of the smallest, from what I’ve heard.” But is it the smallest Costco in the world? “As far as I can tell, that is true, yes,” said Costco Wholesale Assistant Vice President Kevin Green. He oversees the warehouse club chain’s northwest regional operations. He said that’s out of 770 Costco locations on four continents. There was some wiggle room in his initial answer, so I pressed him. “Are there other ones that are close that leave you some doubt?” I asked. “No. Absolutely not,” Green said. Green said the Juneau Costco, built in 1993, was a prototype, one of only a few that small. There was also one in Sequim, Washington. A full-sized Costco eventually replaced that one. “And yeah, at the time, it was a test to see if that kind of smaller-market format would work. We’ve since decided that it probably doesn’t,” Green said. “But it does work in Juneau.” Juneau’s Costco is about half the size of a typical store, which is around 160,000 square feet. Like the one that opened in Fairbanks in November.  And it’s only a third the size of the world’s biggest in Salt Lake City, Utah, which was also a test build, Green said. It opened in 2015. Size comparison by area of the largest and smallest Costco stores in Salt Lake City and Juneau. (Graphic by David Purdy/KTOO)In Juneau, Green said the geography limits growth and makes shipping challenging. But it is a profitable store, with 2-to-3 percent growth per year and 100-plus employees. Back in the parking lot, customer Steve Houlihan ventured a guess about why Juneau’s store can cut it. “I think, ’cause of the villages and all the stuff that comes remotely here, this seems like this gets a lot of use,” Houlihan said. “But it doesn’t seem like the parking lots are as full as down south. You can’t get in and out of them down south.” ToshCo is a hardware and grocery store in Gustavus, pictured here on June 2, 2018. Many of its products come directly from Costco in Juneau. (Photo by David Purdy/KTOO)There is one patron, about 70 miles away by boat, who’s about as transparent as can be about his dependence on Costco: Toshua Parker, founder of ToshCo. He said the hardware and grocery store in Gustavus is about eight years old now. When he started it, it was named Icy Strait Wholesale. But the community promptly rebranded it. “Everyone calls it ToshCo,” Parker said. “Before the doors opened, people started calling it that because my name’s Tosh and most of the products in the beginning all came from Costco in Juneau.” Parker said Costco’s store-brand products are pretty ubiquitous in Gustavus, which has a year-round population of about 450. But Caroline Malseed in Juneau thinks she’s missing out. “We would like it to be bigger,” she said. “More stuff.” Juneau’s not actually missing out on that much. Green said there are about 3,200 products in Juneau’s warehouse. A typical Costco warehouse has about 3,800 products at a time. That’s a small fraction of the selection at a typical big-box everything store — and part of Costco’s strategy for controlling costs. The company did explore a 12,000-square-foot expansion in 2006, though it never happened. Green said it’s still a possibility, but there are no current plans. Fleming is OK with that. “I can’t say — maybe if I saw a bigger one, then I’d be, ‘Oh yeah! We gotta have a bigger one!’ Right now I’m pretty, pretty gruntled with it,” Fleming said. I asked Green to weigh in on one more Costco controversy: Within the store, do you shop clockwise, or counterclockwise? “Um, I always go counterclockwise, yeah,” Green said. “Although, there’s some — like where we work in Issaquah, if you go into that building, you do go clockwise, because that’s the way it’s laid out. So there are some. Yeah.” Have your own Curious Juneau question? Submit it, subscribe to the Curious Juneau podcast, and catch up on past curiosities at ktoo.org/curious.

Even in the middle of the workday on Tuesday, there’s steady traffic at Costco in Juneau. The city assessor’s records put its total square footage at 76,696. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO) <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/03/28COSTCO-CJ.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/2019/03/28COSTCO-CJ.mp3</a> The other day, Phil Fleming was loading up a car in the parking lot of the Costco in Juneau. He said a salty version of something you may have heard before. “Just now on the phone, actually, a woman was saying, ‘Yeah, that’s the smallest damn Costco I’ve ever seen,’” he said. “She’s comparing it to the Seattle and Anchorage ones. … It’s one of the smallest, from what I’ve heard.” But is it the smallest Costco in the world? “As far as I can tell, that is true, yes,” said Costco Wholesale Assistant Vice President Kevin Green. He oversees the warehouse club chain’s northwest regional operations. He said that’s out of 770 Costco locations on four continents. There was some wiggle room in his initial answer, so I pressed him. “Are there other ones that are close that leave you some doubt?” I asked. “No. Absolutely not,” Green said. Green said the Juneau Costco, built in 1993, was a prototype, one of only a few that small. There was also one in Sequim, Washington. A full-sized Costco eventually replaced that one. “And yeah, at the time, it was a test to see if that kind of smaller-market format would work. We’ve since decided that it probably doesn’t,” Green said. “But it does work in Juneau.” Juneau’s Costco is about half the size of a typical store, which is around 160,000 square feet. Like <a href="http://www.newsminer.com/news/local_news/costco-set-to-open-fairbanks-store-on-schedule-in-november/article_60dd7640-cf83-11e8-827b-0f3febf89cae.html" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">the one that opened in Fairbanks in November</a>. And it’s only a third the size of <a href="https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865640337/Salt-Lake-Costco-becomes-largest-in-the-world.html" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">the world’s biggest</a> in Salt Lake City, Utah, which was also a test build, Green said. It opened in 2015. <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/03/TwoCostcos_horizontal.png" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Size comparison by area of the largest and smallest Costco stores in Salt Lake City and Juneau. (Graphic by David Purdy/KTOO) In Juneau, Green said the geography limits growth and makes shipping challenging. But it is a profitable store, with 2-to-3 percent growth per year and 100-plus employees. Back in the parking lot, customer Steve Houlihan ventured a guess about why Juneau’s store can cut it. “I think, ’cause of the villages and all the stuff that comes remotely here, this seems like this gets a lot of use,” Houlihan said. “But it doesn’t seem like the parking lots are as full as down south. You can’t get in and out of them down south.” <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/03/IMG_6929.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>ToshCo is a hardware and grocery store in Gustavus, pictured here on June 2, 2018. Many of its products come directly from Costco in Juneau. (Photo by David Purdy/KTOO) There is one patron, about 70 miles away by boat, who’s about as transparent as can be about his dependence on Costco: Toshua Parker, founder of ToshCo. He said the hardware and grocery store in Gustavus is about eight years old now. When he started it, it was named Icy Strait Wholesale. But the community promptly rebranded it. “Everyone calls it ToshCo,” Parker said. “Before the doors opened, people started calling it that because my name’s Tosh and most of the products in the beginning all came from Costco in Juneau.” Parker said Costco’s store-brand products are pretty ubiquitous in Gustavus, which has a year-round population of about 450. But Caroline Malseed in Juneau thinks she’s missing out. “We would like it to be bigger,” she said. “More stuff.” Juneau’s not actually missing out on that much. Green said there are about 3,200 products in Juneau’s warehouse. A typical Costco warehouse has about 3,800 products at a time. That’s a small fraction of the selection at a typical big-box everything store — and part of <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/09/25/443519599/episode-653-the-anti-store" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Costco’s strategy</a> for controlling costs. The company did <a href="http://www.alaskajournal.com/community/2006-12-03/costco-looks-grow-expanding-juneau-retail-market#.XJryl5hKgYC" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">explore a 12,000-square-foot expansion in 2006</a>, though it never happened. Green said it’s still a possibility, but there are no current plans. Fleming is OK with that. “I can’t say — maybe if I saw a bigger one, then I’d be, ‘Oh yeah! We gotta have a bigger one!’ Right now I’m pretty, pretty gruntled with it,” Fleming said. I asked Green to weigh in on one more Costco controversy: Within the store, do you shop clockwise, or counterclockwise? “Um, I always go counterclockwise, yeah,” Green said. “Although, there’s some — like where we work in Issaquah, if you go into that building, you do go clockwise, because that’s the way it’s laid out. So there are some. Yeah.” <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2017/01/Curious-Juneau_HeaderGraphic_fullbackground011.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Have your own Curious Juneau question? Submit it, subscribe to the Curious Juneau podcast, and catch up on past curiosities at <a href="http://www.KTOO.org/curious" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">ktoo.org/curious</a>.

Does Juneau really have the smallest Costco in the world?

The alder trees — and the peace sign among them — at the end of Commercial Boulevard in Juneau are about 10 years old, pictured here on Jan. 8, 2019. The Juneau Urban Forestry Partnership and local chapter of Veterans for Peace got an OK from a Juneau Assembly committee on Monday to prune the overgrowth and plant spruce seedlings in the peace sign’s footprint. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO)https://media.ktoo.org/2019/03/21PEACE-npr1.mp3 On Monday, a Juneau Assembly committee authorized the local chapter of Veterans for Peace and the Juneau Urban Forestry Partnership to do some new landscape work on the peace sign at the end of Commercial Boulevard. In January, KTOO told you the story behind the huge peace sign carved out of the foliage on the hill. That was the story with surveyor and guerrilla artist Garrith McLean explaining how he laid out the symbol back in 2008. “It wasn’t anything political,” McLean had said. “Art for art’s sake, you could say.” The new work will be on the up-and-up. The groups plan to enlist volunteers to prune some of encroaching vegetation, and to plant spruce seedlings in the footprint of the peace sign. Eventually, they expect the spruce will outgrow and contrast with the existing alders on the hillside. Gene Miller is a retired forester and member of both groups. Gene Miller, left, and Craig Wilson pose for a photo in downtown Juneau on Thursday. Miller is a retired forester and member of Juneau Veterans for Peace and the Juneau Urban Forestry Partnership. Wilson is president of Juneau Veterans for Peace. Miller is holding a photo of the peace sign lit by people with headlamps and flashlights taken on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2014. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO)“People will begin to notice, we think, greening up of the spruce trees in about 5 years, because spruce that are well cared for will grow about 18 inches a year,” Miller said. “Most of us won’t be around long enough to see the full outcome.” He said spruce trees can live as long as 800 years. The timeline for the work isn’t set, but they’re aiming for this summer. “Our vision is that the peace sign will persist, and particularly the children in the community today that hear about it as adults maybe 50 years from now, some of them will be coming back to Juneau and say, ‘Oh, I remember when —’ that type of thing,” Miller said. Have your own Curious Juneau question? Submit it, subscribe to the Curious Juneau podcast, and catch up on past curiosities at ktoo.org/curious.

The alder trees — and the peace sign among them — at the end of Commercial Boulevard in Juneau are about 10 years old, pictured here on Jan. 8, 2019. The Juneau Urban Forestry Partnership and local chapter of Veterans for Peace got an OK from a Juneau Assembly committee on Monday to prune the overgrowth and plant spruce seedlings in the peace sign’s footprint. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO) <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/03/21PEACE-npr1.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/2019/03/21PEACE-npr1.mp3</a> On Monday, a Juneau Assembly committee authorized the local chapter of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Veterans-for-Peace-Juneau-Alaska-346669645488614/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Veterans for Peace</a> and the Juneau Urban Forestry Partnership to do <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TM29JgqqQ_PdFkA1jEUKyOw0ra_0FLXR/view?usp=sharing" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">some new landscape work on</a> the peace sign at the end of Commercial Boulevard. In January, KTOO told you <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/2019/01/11/how-a-mischievous-home-depot-surveyor-turned-this-hill-into-guerrilla-art/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">the story behind the huge peace sign</a> carved out of the foliage on the hill. That was the story with surveyor and guerrilla artist Garrith McLean explaining how he laid out the symbol back in 2008. “It wasn’t anything political,” McLean had said. “Art for art’s sake, you could say.” The new work will be on the up-and-up. The groups plan to enlist volunteers to prune some of encroaching vegetation, and to plant spruce seedlings in the footprint of the peace sign. Eventually, they expect the spruce will outgrow and contrast with the existing alders on the hillside. Gene Miller is a retired forester and member of both groups. <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/03/Gene-Miller-and-Craig-Wilson-20190321.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Gene Miller, left, and Craig Wilson pose for a photo in downtown Juneau on Thursday. Miller is a retired forester and member of Juneau Veterans for Peace and the Juneau Urban Forestry Partnership. Wilson is president of Juneau Veterans for Peace. Miller is holding a photo of the peace sign lit by people with headlamps and flashlights taken on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2014. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO) “People will begin to notice, we think, greening up of the spruce trees in about 5 years, because spruce that are well cared for will grow about 18 inches a year,” Miller said. “Most of us won’t be around long enough to see the full outcome.” He said spruce trees can live as long as 800 years. The timeline for the work isn’t set, but they’re aiming for this summer. “Our vision is that the peace sign will persist, and particularly the children in the community today that hear about it as adults maybe 50 years from now, some of them will be coming back to Juneau and say, ‘Oh, I remember when —’ that type of thing,” Miller said. Have your own Curious Juneau question? Submit it, subscribe to the Curious Juneau podcast, and catch up on past curiosities at <a href="http://www.KTOO.org/curious" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">ktoo.org/curious</a>.

Volunteers get thumbs up on spruced-up peace sign redesign

In Juneau, quirky people, untold stories and little mysteries are as abundant as the rain. For the things about Juneau you can’t Google, why not work with a KTOO reporter to satisfy your curiosity?  Curious Juneau is a recurring news feature driven by questions and reporting from our audience, starring you and your questions.

Norah Jones

Norah Jones performs on tour in 2010 promoting her album “The Fall.” (Creative Commons photo cropped from original by youngrobv)Juneau mom Mara Jennings said she was over the moon when she found out Norah Jones was playing a concert in Juneau. Over the years, she’s sung the nine-time Grammy Award winner’s songs like lullabies to her kids at night. “Yeah, moms get emotional about the songs they sing to their babies growing up. … I absolutely love her. I actually cried a bunch on Friday.” That was Feb. 1, when the tickets went for sale online through Ticketfly. Jennings had an account ready and an alarm set to buy tickets. But they immediately appeared sold out. Face value tickets started at about $60. She found tickets on other websites — of ticket resellers, also commonly known as “scalpers” — with huge markups she can’t afford. Up to $585 each. So why did the prices get so high?  https://media.ktoo.org/2019/02/14NORAH.mp3 Have your own Curious Juneau question? Submit it, subscribe to the Curious Juneau podcast and catch up on past curiosities on the Curious Juneau page. First off, Norah Jones’ team, the concert promoter and the ticket vendor all declined or didn’t respond to requests for comment. But I did find someone with years and years of experience with events and ticketing in Juneau: Nancy DeCherney, executive director of the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council. She also oversees Centennial Hall, which Norah Jones booked for her upcoming concert in July. She can’t think of another act that’s come to Juneau that’s topped the fervor around Norah Jones. “Well, people seem pretty upset that they didn’t get tickets. Yeah, it’s caused quite a stir,” DeCherney said. “You know, it’s a small venue for heaven’s sakes.” To be clear, the arts council wasn’t responsible for the Norah Jones ticket sales, but as the manager of the concert venue, it was given access to an early, limited sale for its members. Similarly — full disclosure — Jones’ team gave KTOO members access to the same early sale after buying promotional underwriting. DeCherney said professional ticket reselling is rare in Juneau. She can remember one notable case during one of her first years involved with Wearable Art. “A young man came in and bought more Wearable Art tickets than necessary and sold them on eBay,” she said. She didn’t know if it worked out for him. “I mean, it’s a small town, and so we all knew who it was. You know what I mean?” she said, laughing. At its core, the high prices are an indication of a supply-and-demand imbalance. Too many buyers for too few tickets. Mara Jennings suspects pros may have inflated demand for Norah Jones’ concert. “Well, my message to Ticketfly,” Jennings said, “would be that I think it would be a step of good faith for them to research the ticket sales for this event and to see if someone has purchased an unusually large number of tickets.” DeCherney said event organizers and ticket vendors like Vendini, which her organization uses, have a bunch of common ways to combat third-party sellers:  Cap how many tickets each buyer can get. Make the tickets non-transferable. Reserve some tickets to sell at the door.  Grumpy consumers probably don’t have a legal recourse. A state Department of Law spokesperson said there’s nothing on the books about reselling tickets. But many states have tried to legislate remedies. New York, for example, outlaws software-assisted mass buys and requires ticket resellers get licensed and bonded. Which is secondary market stuff. Before tickets get there, performers do have a supply-side lever of their own. Just this week, Norah Jones announced she was adding a third show in Anchorage due to demand as part of her tour.  Due to demand, two new shows have been added this summer. Tickets on sale Thursday, 2/14 at 10am local time. 7/19 – Salt Lake City, UThttps://t.co/WUQbnp5VRH 8/4 – Anchorage, AKhttps://t.co/Yyej6G6vNn pic.twitter.com/0WWGahr7IB — Norah Jones (@NorahJones) February 13, 2019  And (hint hint, nudge nudge) Norah Jones’ tour schedule has a few buffer days on either side of her show in Juneau. “I will be hopeful that I will be able to find a way to go enjoy her music live,” Jennings said.

<a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/02/Norah-Jones-2010-cropped.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Norah Jones performs on tour in 2010 promoting her album “The Fall.” (<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Creative Commons</a> photo cropped from original by <a href="https://flic.kr/p/8mQRbn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">youngrobv</a>) Juneau mom Mara Jennings said she was over the moon when she found out Norah Jones was playing a concert in Juneau. Over the years, she’s sung the nine-time Grammy Award winner’s songs like lullabies to her kids at night. “Yeah, moms get emotional about the songs they sing to their babies growing up. … I absolutely love her. I actually cried a bunch on Friday.” That was Feb. 1, when the tickets went for sale <a href="http://www.ticketfly.com/venue/29453-centennial-hall-juneau-arts-culture-center-jacc/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">online through Ticketfly</a>. Jennings had an account ready and an alarm set to buy tickets. But they immediately appeared sold out. Face value tickets started at about $60. She found tickets on other websites — of ticket resellers, also commonly known as “scalpers” — with huge markups she can’t afford. Up to $585 each. So why did the prices get so high? <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2017/01/Curious-Juneau_HeaderGraphic_small_01.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/02/14NORAH.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/2019/02/14NORAH.mp3</a> Have your own Curious Juneau question? Submit it, subscribe to the Curious Juneau podcast and catch up on past curiosities on the <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/curiousjuneau/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Curious Juneau page</a>. First off, Norah Jones’ team, the concert promoter and the ticket vendor all declined or didn’t respond to requests for comment. But I did find someone with years and years of experience with events and ticketing in Juneau: Nancy DeCherney, executive director of the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council. She also oversees Centennial Hall, which Norah Jones booked for her upcoming concert in July. She can’t think of another act that’s come to Juneau that’s topped the fervor around Norah Jones. “Well, people seem pretty upset that they didn’t get tickets. Yeah, it’s caused quite a stir,” DeCherney said. “You know, it’s a small venue for heaven’s sakes.” To be clear, the arts council wasn’t responsible for the Norah Jones ticket sales, but as the manager of the concert venue, it was given access to an early, limited sale for its members. Similarly — full disclosure — Jones’ team gave KTOO members access to the same early sale after buying promotional underwriting. DeCherney said professional ticket reselling is rare in Juneau. She can remember one notable case during one of her first years involved with Wearable Art. “A young man came in and bought more Wearable Art tickets than necessary and sold them on eBay,” she said. She didn’t know if it worked out for him. “I mean, it’s a small town, and so we all knew who it was. You know what I mean?” she said, laughing. At its core, the high prices are an indication of a supply-and-demand imbalance. Too many buyers for too few tickets. Mara Jennings suspects pros may have inflated demand for Norah Jones’ concert. “Well, my message to Ticketfly,” Jennings said, “would be that I think it would be a step of good faith for them to research the ticket sales for this event and to see if someone has purchased an unusually large number of tickets.” DeCherney said event organizers and ticket vendors like Vendini, which her organization uses, have a bunch of common ways to combat third-party sellers: <ul> <li>Cap how many tickets each buyer can get.</li> <li>Make the tickets non-transferable.</li> <li>Reserve some tickets to sell at the door.</li> </ul> Grumpy consumers probably don’t have a legal recourse. A state Department of Law spokesperson said there’s nothing on the books about reselling tickets. But many states have tried to legislate remedies. New York, for example, <a href="https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/ACA/25.24" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">outlaws software-assisted mass buys</a> and requires ticket resellers <a href="https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/ACA/25.13" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">get licensed</a> and <a href="https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/ACA/25.15" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">bonded</a>. Which is secondary market stuff. Before tickets get there, performers do have a supply-side lever of their own. Just this week, <a href="https://twitter.com/NorahJones/status/1095730001247227904" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Norah Jones announced</a> she was adding a third show in Anchorage due to demand as part of her tour. <blockquote> Due to demand, two new shows have been added this summer. Tickets on sale Thursday, 2/14 at 10am local time. 7/19 – Salt Lake City, UT<a href="https://t.co/WUQbnp5VRH" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://t.co/WUQbnp5VRH</a> 8/4 – Anchorage, AK<a href="https://t.co/Yyej6G6vNn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://t.co/Yyej6G6vNn</a> <a href="https://t.co/0WWGahr7IB" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">pic.twitter.com/0WWGahr7IB</a> — Norah Jones (@NorahJones) <a href="https://twitter.com/NorahJones/status/1095730001247227904?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">February 13, 2019</a></blockquote> And (hint hint, nudge nudge) Norah Jones’ <a href="http://www.norahjones.com/#tour-section" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">tour schedule</a> has a few buffer days on either side of her show in Juneau. “I will be hopeful that I will be able to find a way to go enjoy her music live,” Jennings said.

Curious Juneau: Why do Norah Jones tickets cost over $500?

The alder trees — and the peace sign among them — at the end of Commercial Boulevard in Juneau are about 10 years old, pictured here on Jan. 8, 2019. The slope was cut and stabilized as part of the construction of the Home Depot. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO)https://media.ktoo.org/2019/01/11PEACE.mp3 Have your own Curious Juneau question? Submit it, subscribe to the Curious Juneau podcast and catch up on past curiosities on the Curious Juneau page. In Juneau, a lot of people like Wes Adkins have wondered aloud about this: “Ever since I moved to Juneau in 2012, I’ve been passing by this gigantic peace sign carved into the vegetation above Home Depot and Costco up in Lemon Creek,” he said. “I’m sure aliens didn’t do this. … Who do I need to thank for this creative work of art for our city?” He’s got surveyor Garrith McLean to thank. We met up the other day at the end of Commercial Boulevard, next to his handiwork. “Well, you know, my son and I worked on the Home Depot project, building this. And when we were done, we had this bare hill here, and it just seemed like it would be fun to have some artwork on it,” McLean said. In 2008, he was working for the construction company that built the Home Depot. Now 63 years old, he’s got long hair and a long beard that sits on his overcoat. It’s mostly gray with ginger roots — think ZZ Top, but with a vibe more like The Dude from “The Big Lebowski.” Garrith McLean catches his breath along the Lemon Creek Trail in Juneau on Jan. 8, 2019. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO)“Sure! I mean, I’m a giant fan, but I have not been to any of the fan clubs or the drinkathons,” he said. (For the record, his look predates the 1998 Coen brothers movie.) We hiked up a switchback to the top of the peace sign. The slope was steep below us. It’s getting overgrown with alders, but the vertical part of the peace sign is so precisely aligned with Commercial Boulevard that, visually, it still pops. McLean pointed to a spot a half-mile away where he surveyed the hillside that would be his canvas. Garrith McLean explains how he applied his expertise as a surveyor to lay out a peace sign on the hill at the end of Commercial Boulevard in Juneau on Jan. 8, 2019. The gap in the alders is the vertical part of the peace sign. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO)“I stood at the instrument, way down at the end of the road there —” “The instrument” is the thing on a heavy tripod that construction crews use that looks like a telescope or chunky camera. “Yeah, the theodolite. … So what I did was I just calculated the angle, the vertical and horizontal angle for each of the 36 points, at 10 degrees around the circle,” he said. So the circle is really a 36-sided polygon. Garrith McClean took these surveyor’s notes in 2008 to help lay out the peace sign at the end of Commercial Boulevard in Juneau in 2008. (Photo courtesy Garrith McLean)“And so that was pretty easy. Just sine and cosine. … Straight trig. ” Hear that, high schoolers? Guerrilla art: a practical application for trigonometry. “The guys ran around on the hill, and they stuck the survey points in the ground all around the circle,” McLean said. It’s “guerrilla” art because the city owns the land. They didn’t ask permission. “Well, you know, that was maybe an issue,” McLean said with a guffaw. “So, maybe we should have gotten permission. We didn’t really think or even consider the possibility of it being depicted as graffiti. But it may have been so, in fact.” Initially, they marked the peace sign with dark topsoil. The hillside was basically bare then, with only a light-colored jute meshing on it for stabilization. He showed me a photo — it’s like someone took a giant Sharpie to the hillside. The slope at the end of Commercial Boulevard in Juneau was cut, then stabilized with jute meshing, as part of the construction of the Home Depot in 2008. Surveyor Garrith McLean said the slope made for a good canvas; he laid out this peace sign with topsoil. (Photo courtesy Garrith McLean)He’s not sure, but he thinks city workers used leaf blowers to clear away the topsoil after a few days. McLean didn’t really maintain it after that. He thinks other volunteers over the years have used the markers still in the ground to clear the brush. The peace symbol itself was popularized during the Cold War. It’s a representation of the letters “n” and “d” for “nuclear disarmament” in a visual code called semaphore. That really wasn’t on McLean’s mind.  “It wasn’t necessarily a patriotic or political statement of any kind. It was merely a continuation of my life as I lead it,” he said. “My Volkswagen bus has peace symbols all over it, and it was just part of my heritage, I guess you could say. So it wasn’t anything political.” Or, as Jeff Bridges as The Dude might have said… McLean said it was art for art’s sake. Cue Bob Dylan’s “The Man in Me.”

The alder trees — and the peace sign among them — at the end of Commercial Boulevard in Juneau are about 10 years old, pictured here on Jan. 8, 2019. The slope was cut and stabilized as part of the construction of the Home Depot. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO) <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/01/11PEACE.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/2019/01/11PEACE.mp3</a> Have your own Curious Juneau question? Submit it, subscribe to the Curious Juneau podcast and catch up on past curiosities on the <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/curiousjuneau/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Curious Juneau page</a>. In Juneau, a lot of people like Wes Adkins have <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/02/Wes-Adkins-peace-sign-question.mp3" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">wondered aloud</a> about this: “Ever since I moved to Juneau in 2012, I’ve been passing by this gigantic peace sign carved into the vegetation above Home Depot and Costco up in Lemon Creek,” he said. “I’m sure aliens didn’t do this. … Who do I need to thank for this creative work of art for our city?” He’s got surveyor Garrith McLean to thank. We met up the other day at the end of Commercial Boulevard, next to his handiwork. “Well, you know, my son and I worked on the Home Depot project, building this. And when we were done, we had this bare hill here, and it just seemed like it would be fun to have some artwork on it,” McLean said. In 2008, he was working for the construction company that built the Home Depot. Now 63 years old, he’s got long hair and a long beard that sits on his overcoat. It’s mostly gray with ginger roots — think ZZ Top, but with a vibe more like The Dude from “The Big Lebowski.” <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/01/Garritt-McLean-2019-01-08.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Garrith McLean catches his breath along the Lemon Creek Trail in Juneau on Jan. 8, 2019. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO) “Sure! I mean, I’m a giant fan, but I have not been to any of the fan clubs or the drinkathons,” he said. (For the record, his look predates the 1998 Coen brothers movie.) We hiked up a switchback to the top of the peace sign. The slope was steep below us. It’s getting overgrown with alders, but the vertical part of the peace sign is so precisely aligned with Commercial Boulevard that, visually, it still pops. McLean pointed to a spot a half-mile away where he surveyed the hillside that would be his canvas. <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/01/Commercial-Boulevard-and-Garritt-McLean-2019-01-08-.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Garrith McLean explains how he applied his expertise as a surveyor to lay out a peace sign on the hill at the end of Commercial Boulevard in Juneau on Jan. 8, 2019. The gap in the alders is the vertical part of the peace sign. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO) “I stood at the instrument, way down at the end of the road there —” “The instrument” is the thing on a heavy tripod that construction crews use that looks like a telescope or chunky camera. “Yeah, the theodolite. … So what I did was I just calculated the angle, the vertical and horizontal angle for each of the 36 points, at 10 degrees around the circle,” he said. So the circle is really a 36-sided polygon. <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/01/surveying-notes.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Garrith McClean took these surveyor’s notes in 2008 to help lay out the peace sign at the end of Commercial Boulevard in Juneau in 2008. (Photo courtesy Garrith McLean) “And so that was pretty easy. Just sine and cosine. … Straight trig. ” Hear that, high schoolers? Guerrilla art: a practical application for trigonometry. “The guys ran around on the hill, and they stuck the survey points in the ground all around the circle,” McLean said. It’s “guerrilla” art because the city owns the land. They didn’t ask permission. “Well, you know, that was maybe an issue,” McLean said with a guffaw. “So, maybe we should have gotten permission. We didn’t really think or even consider the possibility of it being depicted as graffiti. But it may have been so, in fact.” Initially, they marked the peace sign with dark topsoil. The hillside was basically bare then, with only a light-colored jute meshing on it for stabilization. He showed me a photo — it’s like someone took a giant Sharpie to the hillside. <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2019/01/peace-sign-fresh-2008.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>The slope at the end of Commercial Boulevard in Juneau was cut, then stabilized with jute meshing, as part of the construction of the Home Depot in 2008. Surveyor Garrith McLean said the slope made for a good canvas; he laid out this peace sign with topsoil. (Photo courtesy Garrith McLean) He’s not sure, but he thinks city workers used leaf blowers to clear away the topsoil after a few days. McLean didn’t really maintain it after that. He thinks other volunteers over the years have used the markers still in the ground to clear the brush. The peace symbol itself was popularized during the Cold War. It’s a representation of the letters “n” and “d” for “nuclear disarmament” in a visual code called semaphore. That really wasn’t on McLean’s mind. “It wasn’t necessarily a patriotic or political statement of any kind. It was merely a continuation of my life as I lead it,” he said. “My Volkswagen bus has peace symbols all over it, and it was just part of my heritage, I guess you could say. So it wasn’t anything political.” Or, as Jeff Bridges as The Dude might have said… McLean said it was art for art’s sake. Cue Bob Dylan’s “The Man in Me.”

How a mischievous Home Depot surveyor turned this hill into guerrilla art

Have your own Curious Juneau question? Submit it, subscribe to Curious Juneau podcast and catch up on past curiosities on the Curious Juneau page.https://media.ktoo.org/2018/10/30CJBELLS.mp3As recently as 2009, clock bells marked a specific location in Juneau. That year, former KTOO reporter Casey Kelly began a story like this:“As the clock chimes 12 o’clock, Mike Anderson works a ratchet jack at the end of an old pier at NOAA’s downtown port facility…”Hourly clock chimes. In downtown Juneau.Jeste Burton posts for a photo in her shop, Pie in the Sky, in downtown Juneau on Oct. 11, 2018. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO)In this Curious Juneau, local businesswoman Jeste Burton asks, “Where did the sound of the lovely chimes and bells go? When I first moved here there used to be these gorgeous bells that would ring all the time. They started at I believe at eight o’clock in the morning, finished at nine or 10 o’clock at night. During the holidays, at like, 4:30 in the afternoon, they would play like a whole big, lovely series of, like, sounds and musics and everything like that. … Will you pretty please turn them back on? I mean, I feel like it was one of the most endearing qualities about living in Juneau. It was like, my hands-down favorite thing.” The chimes or bells were actually from a carillon. That’s an instrument with a whole bunch of tuned bells. Keys are laid out like on a piano, but they’re connected to hammers that strike bells instead of strings. J. Allan MacKinnon is pretty sure he’s the only person around who’s played the carillon that rang across downtown Juneau for decades. He’s also known for playing the Friday Kimball organ concerts in the atrium of the State Office Building, which is where I met with him. MacKinnon was in town when the carillon was installed in the bank at the corner of Second and Seward streets. It was the National Bank of Alaska at the time, but now it’s a Wells Fargo (which bought out Bank of Alaska in 2000). He remembers the bank installing it in 1962, the year he graduated from high school. Verdin, the parent company of Schulmerich Carillons, has a record of a sale to the Juneau branch of the bank in 1967. MacKinnon kept a file of information on the carillon over the years, including a photo he snapped from the 1960s of a man in a suit at the keyboard. It looks like a piano but with three rows of keys. MacKinnon said he’s got a filing cabinet full of historical stuff. J. Allan MacKinnon snapped this photo in the 1960s of an unidentified man who played the Schulmerich Americana carillon at the National Bank of Alaska in downtown Juneau, which later became a Wells Fargo. MacKinnon remembers the bank installing the carillon system in 1962, though the carillon company has records of a sale to the Juneau bank branch in 1967. (Photo courtesy J. Allan MacKinnon)MacKinnon’s carillon file has old correspondence with the Juneau Assembly, Schulmerich Carillons (the company that manufactured Juneau’s carillon), and the Juneau Downtown Merchants Association, a predecessor of the Downtown Business Association. This model is a Schulmerich Americana. This carillon didn’t have any actual bells. It was electronic and designed to sound three kinds of bells: Flemish, harp and celesta. It was programmed to play the timekeeping chimes and a few songs for special occasions. MacKinnon studied music at the Westminster Choir College in New Jersey, with a focus on the organ. His studies were interrupted by several years in the Air Force during the Vietnam era. When he got back to the campus in the 1970s, he started dabbling with the carillon on campus. MacKinnon can’t remember when, but at some point after finishing college in 1975 and moving back to Juneau, he started playing the downtown carillon live for holidays and special occasions. It went on hiatus after the Christmas season of 1982. Its last concert might have sounded something like this: The carillon had fallen into disrepair and was largely obsolete. The bank donated it to the Downtown Business Association. In 1985, businesses, the Juneau Assembly and private donors pooled together $28,000 to restore it. Sealaska headquarters became its new home and MacKinnon programmed the restored unit. So back to Jeste Burton’s question: Why’d it stop? The 8 a.m. chime used to be her drop-dead cue to get to work. “So you didn’t have to look at your phone all the time, and you could be like, ‘I have to hustle my bustle,'” she said. “Because, on the half hour, it was, like, a single chime. And then on the hour, it would play a specific chime and then count out the hours like a grandfather clock would and it was – I loved it.” After the 1985 restoration, records and memories get fuzzy. The city clerk and I searched the next 33 years of Juneau Assembly minutes and meeting documents for the word “carillon.” There was one hit. It was in a 2014 memo noting it had been removed from the Sealaska building. Longtime city officials can’t remember why it was removed, or what actually happened to the parts. There wasn’t any fanfare around its decommissioning. Juneau Parks and Recreation Director Brent Fischer, who’s retiring after 25 years with the city, said his best guess is that the carillon was surplussed or trashed. MacKinnon doesn’t remember any problems with the carillon’s condition. When I met with him, he didn’t know it was gone. “But I’m interested in finding out, because something like that could get damaged or, you know, ignored,” he said. Three different Sealaska building managers, past and present, weren’t certain why it was removed, either. They each had conflicting memories and guesses. Regardless, Jeste Burton thinks the bells should come back. “Well, I feel like if we’re willing to put a ton of money into the whale — and I am in no way disparaging the whale — I think we as a collective community would derive equal value out of the beautiful lyricism of the bells,” she said. “And I would personally, with my very meager resources, be happy to kick in to that and I suspect there’s any number of other people who would.”

<a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2017/01/Curious-Juneau_HeaderGraphic_small_01.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Have your own Curious Juneau question? Submit it, subscribe to Curious Juneau podcast and catch up on past curiosities on the <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/curiousjuneau/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Curious Juneau page.</a><a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2018/10/30CJBELLS.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/2018/10/30CJBELLS.mp3</a>As recently as 2009, clock bells marked a specific location in Juneau. That year, former KTOO reporter Casey Kelly began a story like this:“As the clock chimes 12 o’clock, Mike Anderson works a ratchet jack at the end of an old pier at NOAA’s downtown port facility…”Hourly clock chimes. In downtown Juneau.<a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2018/10/Jeste-Burton-20181011.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Jeste Burton posts for a photo in her shop, Pie in the Sky, in downtown Juneau on Oct. 11, 2018. (Photo by Jeremy Hsieh/KTOO) In this Curious Juneau, local businesswoman Jeste Burton asks, “Where did the sound of the lovely chimes and bells go? When I first moved here there used to be these gorgeous bells that would ring all the time. They started at I believe at eight o’clock in the morning, finished at nine or 10 o’clock at night. During the holidays, at like, 4:30 in the afternoon, they would play like a whole big, lovely series of, like, sounds and musics and everything like that. … Will you pretty please turn them back on? I mean, I feel like it was one of the most endearing qualities about living in Juneau. It was like, my hands-down favorite thing.” The chimes or bells were actually from a carillon. That’s an instrument with a whole bunch of tuned bells. Keys are laid out like on a piano, but they’re connected to hammers that strike bells instead of strings. J. Allan MacKinnon is pretty sure he’s the only person around who’s played the carillon that rang across downtown Juneau for decades. He’s also known for playing the Friday Kimball organ concerts in the atrium of the State Office Building, which is where I met with him. MacKinnon was in town when the carillon was installed in the bank at the corner of Second and Seward streets. It was the National Bank of Alaska at the time, but now it’s a Wells Fargo (which <a href="http://www.alaskajournal.com/2016-03-09/museum-exhibit-celebrate-century-alaska-banking#.W9eiFmhKgYB" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">bought out Bank of Alaska in 2000</a>). He remembers the bank installing it in 1962, the year he graduated from high school. Verdin, the parent company of Schulmerich Carillons, has a record of a sale to the Juneau branch of the bank in 1967. MacKinnon kept a file of information on the carillon over the years, including a photo he snapped from the 1960s of a man in a suit at the keyboard. It looks like a piano but with three rows of keys. MacKinnon said he’s got a filing cabinet full of historical stuff. <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2018/10/1960s-Schulmerich-carillon-in-Juneau.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>J. Allan MacKinnon snapped this photo in the 1960s of an unidentified man who played the Schulmerich Americana carillon at the National Bank of Alaska in downtown Juneau, which later became a Wells Fargo. MacKinnon remembers the bank installing the carillon system in 1962, though the carillon company has records of a sale to the Juneau bank branch in 1967. (Photo courtesy J. Allan MacKinnon) MacKinnon’s carillon file has old correspondence with the Juneau Assembly, Schulmerich Carillons (the company that manufactured Juneau’s carillon), and the Juneau Downtown Merchants Association, a predecessor of the Downtown Business Association. This model is a Schulmerich Americana. This carillon didn’t have any actual bells. It was electronic and designed to sound three kinds of bells: Flemish, harp and celesta. It was programmed to play the timekeeping chimes and a few songs for special occasions. MacKinnon studied music at the Westminster Choir College in New Jersey, with a focus on the organ. His studies were interrupted by several years in the Air Force during the Vietnam era. When he got back to the campus in the 1970s, he started dabbling with the carillon on campus. MacKinnon can’t remember when, but at some point after finishing college in 1975 and moving back to Juneau, he started playing the downtown carillon live for holidays and special occasions. It went on hiatus after the Christmas season of 1982. Its last concert might have sounded something like this: The carillon had fallen into disrepair and was largely obsolete. The bank donated it to the Downtown Business Association. In 1985, businesses, <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2018/10/1985-08-0508_City-Borough-of-Juneau_Minutes.pdf" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">the Juneau Assembly</a> and private donors pooled together $28,000 to restore it. Sealaska headquarters became its new home and MacKinnon programmed the restored unit. So back to Jeste Burton’s question: Why’d it stop? The 8 a.m. chime used to be her drop-dead cue to get to work. “So you didn’t have to look at your phone all the time, and you could be like, ‘I have to hustle my bustle,'” she said. “Because, on the half hour, it was, like, a single chime. And then on the hour, it would play a specific chime and then count out the hours like a grandfather clock would and it was – I loved it.” After the 1985 restoration, records and memories get fuzzy. The city clerk and I searched the next 33 years of Juneau Assembly minutes and meeting documents for the word “carillon.” There was one hit. It was in <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2018/10/CBJ-carillon-memo-mention-2014_3_10.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a 2014 memo</a> noting it had been removed from the Sealaska building. Longtime city officials can’t remember why it was removed, or what actually happened to the parts. There wasn’t any fanfare around its decommissioning. Juneau Parks and Recreation Director Brent Fischer, who’s retiring after 25 years with the city, said his best guess is that the carillon was surplussed or trashed. MacKinnon doesn’t remember any problems with the carillon’s condition. When I met with him, he didn’t know it was gone. “But I’m interested in finding out, because something like that could get damaged or, you know, ignored,” he said. Three different Sealaska building managers, past and present, weren’t certain why it was removed, either. They each had conflicting memories and guesses. Regardless, Jeste Burton thinks the bells should come back. “Well, I feel like if we’re willing to put a ton of money into the whale — and I am in no way disparaging the whale — I think we as a collective community would derive equal value out of the beautiful lyricism of the bells,” she said. “And I would personally, with my very meager resources, be happy to kick in to that and I suspect there’s any number of other people who would.”

What happened to the downtown bells?

Wyatt Earp

The famous gun as seen on Aug. 13, 2018 — more than a century after famous gunslinger Wyatt Earp is reputed to have left it behind on his way to Nome. (Photo by Jacob Resneck/CoastAlaska) Juneau’s Red Dog Saloon claims it has a pistol that belonged to one of history’s most notorious gunslingers. But does the bar’s story check out? Wyatt Earp was among the most famous frontier lawmen. In 1881, he and his brother fought alongside Doc Holliday in a deadly confrontation with outlaws at the Shootout at the O.K. Coral in Tombstone, Arizona which has been dramatized countless times for film and television.  Curious Juneau stars you and your questions. Every episode we help you find an answer. Catch up on past episodes, or ask your own question on the Curious Juneau page. https://media.ktoo.org/2018/09/07CJ-EARP.mp3 Subscribe to the podcast: [podcast-subscribe podcast=”curious”]  A decade after his death, the 1939 film Frontier Marshal was one of the earliest in a long line of films about his brutish style of justice. By the turn of the century, he was already a celebrity of sorts. That about when Wyatt Earp and his wife Josephine traveled to Nome at the height of the gold rush to start a saloon. Legend has it he briefly passed through the gold mining town of Juneau. And left something valuable behind: a Smith &amp; Wesson No. 3 revolver that to this day is a kitschy tourist attraction in a downtown bar. According to the legend, the revolver was confiscated by U.S. Marshals when Wyatt Earp was changing steamships in Juneau. Given the man’s fearsome reputation as a gunfighter, federal marshals demanded, or so the story goes, that Wyatt Earp surrender his weapon while in town. His boat to Nome in the morning left earlier than the federal offices reopened. The gun went unclaimed in federal custody. You can take the story at face value. But I got to talking with Juneau newspaperman James Brooks. “How did Wyatt Earp’s gun come to be on the wall of the Red Dog Saloon?” Brooks asked me on a recent afternoon. We agreed there’s got to be more to the story. “So the story that I got… back in the early 1900s, early teens or ’20s. The gun was part of what was then this Territorial Museum,” explained saloon owner Eric Forst. The pistol’s been a fixture behind the bar for decades, he said. The story is that a museum employee – or at least someone with access to its treasures – had a bit of a drinking habit, Forst said. “And he would periodically pay off his bar tabs with stuff out of the Territorial Museum,” he continued, “and at one point he had a significant bar tab at the Red Dog Saloon and he paid that with that gun.” At least that’s what Forst was told when he bought the bar a decade ago. The Territorial Museum would later become the Alaska State Museum so that’s where I headed next. “I can’t rule anything out but I have been through the records pretty thoroughly over the last 30 years,” said Steve Henrikson, curator of collections. “I’ve never seen it listed either as something that belonged to the museum or as a loan.” There’s something else that doesn’t add up. “I don’t believe that Wyatt and Josephine were in Juneau in June of 1900,” said New York-based author Ann Kirschner who’s written about Wyatt and Josephine Earp’s time in Alaska and published the 2013 book Lady at the OK Corral. “I believe they sailed from Seattle and stopped in Unalaska and then continued on to Nome, that was the western water route and I don’t believe that they would have necessarily stopped in Juneau.” I enlisted the help of Zachary Jones at the Alaska State Archives for help to confirm that. “We have records that document him in Nome,” Jones said. “But documenting a shot stop on his way to Nome is a little more difficult.” The only written account of Wyatt Earp’s time in Juneau comes second-hand. It’s contained in the official history of the first 50 years of the Alaska State Troopers and references federal records discovered in the 1960s. “Those letters purportedly say that U.S. Marshals had a … firm discussion with Wyatt Earp when he arrived in town,” the archivist told me. “If that’s true, it’s really interesting. I still don’t understand why a U.S. Marshal would want to accost and sort of run off a retired law officer.” He’s since written the national archives to see what might be on hand in Washington. In the meantime, not only is it questionable the pistol belonged to Wyatt Earp. There’s doubt he was even ever in Juneau. It felt like a dead end, but journalist colleague James Brooks suggested I dig deeper in the state archives. There’s a trove of old newspapers on microfilm in the archives. I thumbed through Juneau’s Daily Alaska Dispatch. I had a date and the name of the steamship: the sign on the wall said he’d been disarmed on June 27, 1900. He supposedly sailed two days later on the S.S. Senator. Juneau’s newspapers around that time are full of news about miners heading to Nome. (And ads for Rainier beer). But there’s nothing about Wyatt Earp or that ship. That’s because I was looking in the wrong place. Acting on Kirschner’s tip, I located an item in the Nome Daily News reporting on Wyatt Earp’s arrest in a drunken brawl. It’s dated June 29, 1900 – the same day he supposedly left his gun in Juneau. So there’s a hole in the bar legend right there. But just because the dates are wrong doesn’t mean the whole story’s bunk, though it probably is. From the start, bar owner Eric Forst told me he bought the saloon but not necessarily the legend around Wyatt Earp’s pistol. “The reality as of how it got to the Red Dog Saloon may be lost to history,” he said. “The story as I’ve been told, is what I told you, but I’ve never seen any documentation of how it ended up from one place to the other.” I was hoping for a firmer resolution. But James Brooks takes the long view. “Maybe that’s for the best, I mean this is someone whose life is shrouded in legend,” Brooks suggested. “There’s almost as many tall tales as there are facts. So maybe it’s kind of appropriate that it’s that way.” Either way, it’s a good story. And it brings tourists from all over the world who stop in at the Red Dog Saloon for a glimpse of the famous revolver.

The famous gun as seen on Aug. 13, 2018 — more than a century after famous gunslinger Wyatt Earp is reputed to have left it behind on his way to Nome. (Photo by Jacob Resneck/CoastAlaska) Juneau’s Red Dog Saloon claims it has a pistol that belonged to one of history’s most notorious gunslingers. But does the bar’s story check out? Wyatt Earp was among the most famous frontier lawmen. In 1881, he and his brother fought alongside Doc Holliday in a deadly confrontation with outlaws at the <a href="https://truewestmagazine.com/wyatt-earps-pistol/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Shootout at the O.K. Coral</a> in Tombstone, Arizona which has been dramatized countless times for film and television. <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/curious/curious" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> </a>Curious Juneau stars you and your questions. Every episode we help you find an answer. Catch up on past episodes, or ask your own question on the <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/curiousjuneau/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Curious Juneau page.</a> <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2018/09/07CJ-EARP.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/2018/09/07CJ-EARP.mp3</a> Subscribe to the podcast: [podcast-subscribe podcast=”curious”] A decade after his death, the 1939 film Frontier Marshal was one of the earliest in a long line of films about his brutish style of justice. By the turn of the century, he was already a celebrity of sorts. That about when Wyatt Earp and his wife Josephine traveled to Nome at the height of the gold rush to start a saloon. Legend has it he briefly passed through the gold mining town of Juneau. And left something valuable behind: a Smith &amp; Wesson No. 3 revolver that to this day is a kitschy tourist attraction in a downtown bar. According to the legend, the revolver was confiscated by U.S. Marshals when Wyatt Earp was changing steamships in Juneau. Given the man’s fearsome reputation as a gunfighter, federal marshals demanded, or so the story goes, that Wyatt Earp surrender his weapon while in town. His boat to Nome in the morning left earlier than the federal offices reopened. The gun went unclaimed in federal custody. You can take the story at face value. But I got to talking with Juneau newspaperman James Brooks. “How did Wyatt Earp’s gun come to be on the wall of the Red Dog Saloon?” Brooks asked me on a recent afternoon. We agreed there’s got to be more to the story. “So the story that I got… back in the early 1900s, early teens or ’20s. The gun was part of what was then this Territorial Museum,” explained saloon owner Eric Forst. The pistol’s been a fixture behind the bar for decades, he said. The story is that a museum employee – or at least someone with access to its treasures – had a bit of a drinking habit, Forst said. “And he would periodically pay off his bar tabs with stuff out of the Territorial Museum,” he continued, “and at one point he had a significant bar tab at the Red Dog Saloon and he paid that with that gun.” At least that’s what Forst was told when he bought the bar a decade ago. The Territorial Museum would later become the Alaska State Museum so that’s where I headed next. “I can’t rule anything out but I have been through the records pretty thoroughly over the last 30 years,” said Steve Henrikson, curator of collections. “I’ve never seen it listed either as something that belonged to the museum or as a loan.” There’s something else that doesn’t add up. “I don’t believe that Wyatt and Josephine were in Juneau in June of 1900,” said New York-based author Ann Kirschner who’s written about <a href="https://truewestmagazine.com/wyatt-earps-alaskan-adventure/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Wyatt and Josephine Earp’s time in Alaska</a> and published the 2013 book <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/books/review/lady-at-the-ok-corral-by-ann-kirschner.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Lady at the OK Corral</a>. “I believe they <a href="https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045604/1900-05-20/ed-1/seq-12/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">sailed from Seattle</a> and stopped in Unalaska and then continued on to Nome, that was the western water route and I don’t believe that they would have necessarily stopped in Juneau.” I enlisted the help of Zachary Jones at the Alaska State Archives for help to confirm that. “We have records that document him in Nome,” Jones said. “But documenting a shot stop on his way to Nome is a little more difficult.” The only written account of Wyatt Earp’s time in Juneau comes second-hand. It’s contained in the official history of the first 50 years of the Alaska State Troopers and references federal records discovered in the 1960s. “Those letters purportedly say that U.S. Marshals had a … firm discussion with Wyatt Earp when he arrived in town,” the archivist told me. “If that’s true, it’s really interesting. I still don’t understand why a U.S. Marshal would want to accost and sort of run off a retired law officer.” He’s since written the national archives to see what might be on hand in Washington. In the meantime, not only is it questionable the pistol belonged to Wyatt Earp. There’s doubt he was even ever in Juneau. It felt like a dead end, but journalist colleague James Brooks suggested I dig deeper in the state archives. There’s a trove of old newspapers on microfilm in the archives. I thumbed through Juneau’s Daily Alaska Dispatch. I had a date and the name of the steamship: the sign on the wall said he’d been disarmed on June 27, 1900. He supposedly sailed two days later on the S.S. Senator. Juneau’s newspapers around that time are full of news about miners heading to Nome. (And ads for Rainier beer). But there’s nothing about Wyatt Earp or that ship. That’s because I was looking in the wrong place. Acting on Kirschner’s tip, I located an item in the Nome Daily News reporting on Wyatt Earp’s arrest in a drunken brawl. It’s dated June 29, 1900 – the same day he supposedly left his gun in Juneau. So there’s a hole in the bar legend right there. But just because the dates are wrong doesn’t mean the whole story’s bunk, though it probably is. From the start, bar owner Eric Forst told me he bought the saloon but not necessarily the legend around Wyatt Earp’s pistol. “The reality as of how it got to the Red Dog Saloon may be lost to history,” he said. “The story as I’ve been told, is what I told you, but I’ve never seen any documentation of how it ended up from one place to the other.” I was hoping for a firmer resolution. But James Brooks takes the long view. “Maybe that’s for the best, I mean this is someone whose life is shrouded in legend,” Brooks suggested. “There’s almost as many tall tales as there are facts. So maybe it’s kind of appropriate that it’s that way.” Either way, it’s a good story. And it brings tourists from all over the world who stop in at the Red Dog Saloon for a glimpse of the famous revolver.

Did Wyatt Earp really leave his gun in Juneau?

“Barefoot Guy” Ezra Strong looks out on Dredge Lake during a hike. (Photo by Adelyn Baxter/KTOO) Xtratufs, Bogs, Muck Boots — comfortable, waterproof footwear is pretty much a necessity here in Juneau. But not for the local some know as “the barefoot guy.”  Curious Juneau stars you and your questions. Every episode we help you find an answer. Catch up on past episodes, or ask your own question on the Curious Juneau page. https://media.ktoo.org/2018/04/20barefoot.mp3 “Oh yeah, barefoot guy! What’s the story?” said Juneau resident Michael Boyer. “Is he a hobbit? Is he into New Age spiritual stuff? Don’t his feet get cold?” Boyer lives in the neighborhood above Juneau-Douglas High School. As he’s out walking his dog or with his kids day to day, he’s noticed a certain walker who also frequents the area. “Rain, shine, 10 degrees, 70 degrees, uh, never any shoes,” Boyer said after submitting his question to Curious Juneau. He wanted to know more about the mysterious man whose bare footprints crisscross the neighborhood. One 30-degree day, I had my own sighting downtown near the State Office Building. The ground was slick with ice, and across the street, a bearded man in cargo shorts was walking — without shoes. I introduced myself and he laughed in a “not again” kind of way. I met Ezra Strong on a sunny day in late March for a hike along Dredge Lake Trail. Several inches of snow were on the ground. He wore shorts, a light pullover and, of course, no shoes. Strong grew up in Tenakee Springs, the youngest of six kids. He’s 29 and works in IT for the Juneau School District, where he has to wear sandals. He’s brought a book with him for the hike, just something he pulled off the shelf at home. He often reads while he walks. As we set off, I noticed pretty quickly that Strong seemed to fare better than me in a lot of the slushy spots. “Stuff like this, I’m probably better off than most people in shoes,” he said. “Actual real ice? Not so much.” He said he would love it if they made micro spikes for bare feet, but he makes do. Gravel sticking to his feet is probably the most annoying thing he deals with. Ezra Strong poses after a hike on Dredge Lake Trail. (Photo by Adelyn Baxter/KTOO) Of course, the main question is why go barefoot at all? “My right foot is defective. I was born with a birth defect, apparently,” he said. “I think it has something to do with the shape of the arch.” One of his older brothers had the same issue. Doctors told their parents the solution was to break the foot and reset it. Doctors did that for the brother, but by the time Strong came along, his mom hesitated. “I guess she didn’t want to have to put another kid through having his foot broken, so they just never did it to me,” he said. “So, getting stuff that fit me was a pain.” Strong’s right foot is abnormally wide. And people with weirdly shaped feet just don’t have a lot of options. As a kid growing up in a rural community, running around without shoes was no big deal. He moved to Fairbanks for college. Winters were colder and he didn’t have a car. For the first time, his feet started drawing attention. A reporter for the student newspaper at the University of Alaska Fairbanks did a story on him. Then the questions really started up. “Facebook and that sort of thing were just becoming a thing,” he said. “I started getting these weird emails from people on the East Coast who had read this.” He doesn’t understand the fascination with his feet. For him, it’s always been about comfort. He experimented with different sizes, styles and brands, but nothing works. He owns a pair of 15-year-old running shoes — They’re about two sizes too big, and the sides are almost worn away. “The shoes hurt pretty bad too, but it’s better to have the shoe pain for 15 minutes to go jogging than it is to deal with having a shattered callus for the next three days,” Strong said. He’s experienced mild frostbite, cuts, infections and cracked heels. Ezra Strong hikes barefoot along the Dredge Lake Trail in Juneau. (Photo by Adelyn Baxter/KTOO) He uses over-the-counter products like Flexitol, a cream with shea butter and aloe, to help heal. But it’s not as easy as it used to be. “As I get older, my theory, again, is my body takes a little longer to recover and to repair,” Strong said. “It’s been getting worse.” Not long ago, he reached out to a California startup company that 3-D prints shoes. Their custom-sizing model seemed promising. But they told him they’re in the middle of a transition period and not accepting orders. Strong said he’s hopeful technology will eventually catch up to his feet. In the meantime, it’s not all bad. “I have to say, I love being a bad influence for children,” he said, laughing. “The idea to these children that you don’t have to wear shoes for your entire life seems to startle them and I have seen more than one child, when they see me pass, sit down on the sidewalk or the beach and start trying to pull off their own shoes.”

“Barefoot Guy” Ezra Strong looks out on Dredge Lake during a hike. (Photo by Adelyn Baxter/KTOO) Xtratufs, Bogs, Muck Boots — comfortable, waterproof footwear is pretty much a necessity here in Juneau. But not for the local some know as “the barefoot guy.” <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/curiouswww.ktoo.org/curious" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> </a>Curious Juneau stars you and your questions. Every episode we help you find an answer. Catch up on past episodes, or ask your own question on the <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/curiousjuneau/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Curious Juneau page.</a> <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2018/04/20barefoot.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/2018/04/20barefoot.mp3</a> “Oh yeah, barefoot guy! What’s the story?” said Juneau resident Michael Boyer. “Is he a hobbit? Is he into New Age spiritual stuff? Don’t his feet get cold?” Boyer lives in the neighborhood above Juneau-Douglas High School. As he’s out walking his dog or with his kids day to day, he’s noticed a certain walker who also frequents the area. “Rain, shine, 10 degrees, 70 degrees, uh, never any shoes,” Boyer said after submitting his question to Curious Juneau. He wanted to know more about the mysterious man whose bare footprints crisscross the neighborhood. One 30-degree day, I had my own sighting downtown near the State Office Building. The ground was slick with ice, and across the street, a bearded man in cargo shorts was walking — without shoes. I introduced myself and he laughed in a “not again” kind of way. I met Ezra Strong on a sunny day in late March for a hike along Dredge Lake Trail. Several inches of snow were on the ground. He wore shorts, a light pullover and, of course, no shoes. Strong grew up in Tenakee Springs, the youngest of six kids. He’s 29 and works in IT for the Juneau School District, where he has to wear sandals. He’s brought a book with him for the hike, just something he pulled off the shelf at home. He often reads while he walks. As we set off, I noticed pretty quickly that Strong seemed to fare better than me in a lot of the slushy spots. “Stuff like this, I’m probably better off than most people in shoes,” he said. “Actual real ice? Not so much.” He said he would love it if they made micro spikes for bare feet, but he makes do. Gravel sticking to his feet is probably the most annoying thing he deals with. Ezra Strong poses after a hike on Dredge Lake Trail. (Photo by Adelyn Baxter/KTOO) Of course, the main question is why go barefoot at all? “My right foot is defective. I was born with a birth defect, apparently,” he said. “I think it has something to do with the shape of the arch.” One of his older brothers had the same issue. Doctors told their parents the solution was to break the foot and reset it. Doctors did that for the brother, but by the time Strong came along, his mom hesitated. “I guess she didn’t want to have to put another kid through having his foot broken, so they just never did it to me,” he said. “So, getting stuff that fit me was a pain.” Strong’s right foot is abnormally wide. And people with weirdly shaped feet just don’t have a lot of options. As a kid growing up in a rural community, running around without shoes was no big deal. He moved to Fairbanks for college. Winters were colder and he didn’t have a car. For the first time, his feet started drawing attention. A reporter for the student newspaper at the University of Alaska Fairbanks did a story on him. Then the questions really started up. “Facebook and that sort of thing were just becoming a thing,” he said. “I started getting these weird emails from people on the East Coast who had read this.” He doesn’t understand the fascination with his feet. For him, it’s always been about comfort. He experimented with different sizes, styles and brands, but nothing works. He owns a pair of 15-year-old running shoes — They’re about two sizes too big, and the sides are almost worn away. “The shoes hurt pretty bad too, but it’s better to have the shoe pain for 15 minutes to go jogging than it is to deal with having a shattered callus for the next three days,” Strong said. He’s experienced mild frostbite, cuts, infections and cracked heels. Ezra Strong hikes barefoot along the Dredge Lake Trail in Juneau. (Photo by Adelyn Baxter/KTOO) He uses over-the-counter products like Flexitol, a cream with shea butter and aloe, to help heal. But it’s not as easy as it used to be. “As I get older, my theory, again, is my body takes a little longer to recover and to repair,” Strong said. “It’s been getting worse.” Not long ago, he reached out to a California startup company that 3-D prints shoes. Their custom-sizing model seemed promising. But they told him they’re in the middle of a transition period and not accepting orders. Strong said he’s hopeful technology will eventually catch up to his feet. In the meantime, it’s not all bad. “I have to say, I love being a bad influence for children,” he said, laughing. “The idea to these children that you don’t have to wear shoes for your entire life seems to startle them and I have seen more than one child, when they see me pass, sit down on the sidewalk or the beach and start trying to pull off their own shoes.”

What’s the deal with Juneau’s barefoot guy?

A cold weather phenomenon known as the Taku winds causes white caps and water to mist into the air Friday, Jan. 6, 2017, on the Gastineau Channel as seen from U.S. Coast Guard Station Juneau. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO)John Hollis began serving in the Coast Guard in 1974. He transferred to Juneau three years later for a 13-month stint in public affairs. “I liked it up there. My main job was to answer press queries,” Hollis said. “The biggest thing while I was there was the oil came down to Valdez, and worked that extensively.” Hollis asks: What’s the highest wind speed recorded in Juneau? The answer will blow away this Coast Guard retiree.  Curious Juneau stars you and your questions. Every episode we help you find an answer. Catch up on past episodes, or ask your own question on the Curious Juneau page. https://media.ktoo.org/2018/04/11CJWIND.mp3 Hollis, 70, grew up in Southern California, but he said the weather he remembers in Juneau was somewhat comparable. Except it gets a little windier here. “There’s an area south and just inland from Juneau where the wind just tunnels through there, just outrageous amounts of wind. I just don’t remember getting that kind of wind the one winter I was there in Juneau – not outrageous amounts of wind.” So I called Sharon Sullivan, who’s a meteorologist intern at the National Weather Service. She said records downtown are a little inconsistent because sensors are placed in different areas. And historically, there were just poor records. “We did find at least the Federal Building had 78 mph wind gust Jan. 7, 2017, and some of the other ones was listing 57, 60 mph,” she said. “The airport we had — the highest recorded there was 92 mph at the airport on Nov. 1, 1969.” She said in March this year, gusts of about 72 mph were recorded at the Juneau docks. Some Taku wind gusts in 2011 and 2015 reached as high as 85 mph. “I think the one in 2015, a 15,000-pound gangway in the Douglas Boat Harbor was actually moved as a result of these higher wind speeds,” Sullivan said. “It takes a lot of force to move that.” John Hollis retired from the Coast Guard in 1995, and later worked in publishing in Southern California. He and his wife now live in North Carolina to be closer to their grandchildren. His memory of the winds as he experienced was fuzzy. He guessed they topped out around 20 or 30 mph, “Enough to certainly catch your attention.” When I tell him they topped 90 mph at the airport, this was his reaction. Hollis came back to Juneau about eight or nine years ago on a cruise ship. But he still remembers his commute from Douglas to the Coast Guard office in the Federal Building, all those years ago. “The worst thing when I would walk to work in the winter, crossing the bridge, I would get all the snow going right in my ear.  That wasn’t very fun. That doesn’t sound fun at all.

A cold weather phenomenon known as the Taku winds causes white caps and water to mist into the air Friday, Jan. 6, 2017, on the Gastineau Channel as seen from U.S. Coast Guard Station Juneau. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO) John Hollis began serving in the Coast Guard in 1974. He transferred to Juneau three years later for a 13-month stint in public affairs. “I liked it up there. My main job was to answer press queries,” Hollis said. “The biggest thing while I was there was the oil came down to Valdez, and worked that extensively.” Hollis asks: What’s the highest wind speed recorded in Juneau? The answer will blow away this Coast Guard retiree. <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/curiouswww.ktoo.org/curious" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> Curious Juneau stars you and your questions. Every episode we help you find an answer. Catch up on past episodes, or ask your own question on the <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/curiousjuneau/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Curious Juneau page.</a> <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2018/04/11CJWIND.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/2018/04/11CJWIND.mp3</a> Hollis, 70, grew up in Southern California, but he said the weather he remembers in Juneau was somewhat comparable. Except it gets a little windier here. “There’s an area south and just inland from Juneau where the wind just tunnels through there, just outrageous amounts of wind. I just don’t remember getting that kind of wind the one winter I was there in Juneau – not outrageous amounts of wind.” So I called Sharon Sullivan, who’s a meteorologist intern at the National Weather Service. She said records downtown are a little inconsistent because sensors are placed in different areas. And historically, there were just poor records. “We did find at least the Federal Building had 78 mph wind gust Jan. 7, 2017, and some of the other ones was listing 57, 60 mph,” she said. “The airport we had — the highest recorded there was 92 mph at the airport on Nov. 1, 1969.” She said in March this year, gusts of about 72 mph were recorded at the Juneau docks. Some Taku wind gusts in 2011 and 2015 reached as high as 85 mph. “I think the one in 2015, a <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/2015/02/02/high-winds-cause-damage-around-douglas-harbor/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">15,000-pound gangway in the Douglas Boat Harbor</a> was actually moved as a result of these higher wind speeds,” Sullivan said. “It takes a lot of force to move that.” John Hollis retired from the Coast Guard in 1995, and later worked in publishing in Southern California. He and his wife now live in North Carolina to be closer to their grandchildren. His memory of the winds as he experienced was fuzzy. He guessed they topped out around 20 or 30 mph, “Enough to certainly catch your attention.” When I tell him they topped 90 mph at the airport, this was his reaction. Hollis came back to Juneau about eight or nine years ago on a cruise ship. But he still remembers his commute from Douglas to the Coast Guard office in the Federal Building, all those years ago. “The worst thing when I would walk to work in the winter, crossing the bridge, I would get all the snow going right in my ear.  That wasn’t very fun. That doesn’t sound fun at all.

Juneau’s recorded wind speed blows away Coast Guard retiree

A doll display at Aunt Claudia’s Dolls museum in downtown Juneau. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO) Kerri Tanner has lived in Juneau for six years — but there’s one place she’s never been, and she has lots of questions:  Curious Juneau stars you and your questions. Every episode we help you find an answer. Catch up on past episodes, or ask your own question on the Curious Juneau page. https://media.ktoo.org/2018/03/01MUSEUM.mp3 “What is the doll museum? How did it come to pass? How do you get in it? How does someone collect enough dolls to put in a museum? Are they old worn teddy bears? Are they antique dolls?” Tucked away on the second floor of the Triangle Building, there’s a museum filled with snapshots of history – but in this museum, they’re made out of wood, cloth and plastic. Aunt Claudia’s Dolls, a Museum, displays a collection of handmade Alaska Native and antique dolls. The nonprofit museum’s curator is a dollmaker herself. Mary Ellen Frank is the director and curator of Aunt Claudia’s Dolls museum at 114 South Franklin, on the second floor of the Triangle Building. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO) Plastic, wood and tools clatter around as Mary Ellen Frank searches some boxes. “I’ve sort of cleaned up now, because I’ve been … working on the museum more,” she says. “But this is a doll I’ve been working on.” She picks up the torso and a head with long dark hair. She test fits the pieces together, along with a pelvis, and the doll begins to take shape. “I’m interested in trying to do a fully articulating wooden body so there’ll be springs,” she says. “So she’ll be fully posable and movable. I’ve got her legs all ready to go. Here’s some of her springs.” Born in 1952, Frank’s fascination with dolls began early. Some of the dolls that she had in her crib and as a young girl are nestled with care in a green shoe organizer hanging on her studio wall. There’s giraffes, knitted dolls and even a pink bunny. Mary Ellen Frank shows off her studio and workspace at Aunt Claudia’s Dolls museum in downtown Juneau. Frank creates custom dolls and owns an extensive collection of Alaskan Native doll art. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO) Now she’s the director and curator of Aunt Claudia’s Dolls. Pictures of the museum’s namesake, Claudia Kelsey, are featured throughout museum. A former state economist, Frank took a doll-making workshop in 1988, where she met Claudia. “At that time, some little old lady with a doll collection. I sort of trivialized it,” Frank said. “But then I saw at Christmastime at times the state museum would put on shows of her dolls and they were so fascinating.” Frank began visiting Claudia’s house weekly. “She was mainly interested in antique dolls and dolls from around the world,” she said. “She had probably 800 dolls. Her thing, she was so proud that she had never purchased a doll personally. They’d all been given to her by family to start with and then people that knew that she loved dolls started giving her dolls.” Claudia died about 10 years ago, leaving her collection of dolls with a friend, who in turn asked Frank what to do with them. “I had a studio in this building so I said, ‘Until we find another place for them, we can move them into an adjacent room to my studio and I’ll store them there until we find another place.’” They moved Claudia’s collection from the house to the studio, cabinet by cabinet and doll by doll. The two women first opened the studio for its first First Friday in 2008. Then they decided the downtown location was the perfect place for the collection. Claudia’s antique and cultural dolls are just one part of the museum. The other is Frank’s collection of Native American and Alaska Native dolls she’s collected — and some she’s made herself. A doll in the likeness of Tlingit elder Walter Soboleff is on display at Aunt Claudia’s Dolls museum in downtown Juneau. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO) She creates likenesses of Alaska Native leaders and elders, and favors Northwest Coast art and dolls. Frank took Northwest Coast carving classes and uses several of the tools in making her dolls. She even uses Alaska yellow cedar. “Dolls are so culturally interesting and you can see so much about a culture from looking at these dolls,” Frank said. “And you kind of learn stuff by looking at the clothing that dolls provide. People don’t wear a lot of this clothing anymore but you get a picture of where it came from.” Aunt Claudia’s Dolls is located at 114 S. Franklin St., Suite 105, with street access across from the Rockwell. Normally, it’s only open during tourist season, but the rest of the year the museum opens for First Fridays and Saturdays. This weekend, it’s open from 4 to 7 p.m. Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free. Our question asker Kerri Tanner plans to finally make it to the museum. “When I think of doll museum, I don’t think of the Native dolls. I think of the typical baby doll or teddy bear,” Tanner said. “So it’s neat that she’s got all of it.” David Purdy contributed to this report.  Juneau's doll museum Never been to Juneau's doll museum? It's open Friday 4-7:00 p.m. and Saturday noon-5:00 p.m. (admission is free)Full story: https://www.ktoo.org/2018/03/01/yes-there-really-is-a-doll-museum-in-juneau-and-its-filled-with-little-treasures/ Posted by KTOO on Thursday, March 1, 2018

A doll display at Aunt Claudia’s Dolls museum in downtown Juneau. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO) Kerri Tanner has lived in Juneau for six years — but there’s one place she’s never been, and she has lots of questions: <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/curiouswww.ktoo.org/curious" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> </a>Curious Juneau stars you and your questions. Every episode we help you find an answer. Catch up on past episodes, or ask your own question on the <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/curiousjuneau/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Curious Juneau page.</a> <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2018/03/01MUSEUM.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/2018/03/01MUSEUM.mp3</a> “What is the doll museum? How did it come to pass? How do you get in it? How does someone collect enough dolls to put in a museum? Are they old worn teddy bears? Are they antique dolls?” Tucked away on the second floor of the Triangle Building, there’s a museum filled with snapshots of history – but in this museum, they’re made out of wood, cloth and plastic. <a href="https://www.facebook.com/AuntClaudiasDolls/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Aunt Claudia’s Dolls, a Museum</a>, displays a collection of handmade Alaska Native and antique dolls. The nonprofit museum’s curator is a dollmaker herself. Mary Ellen Frank is the director and curator of Aunt Claudia’s Dolls museum at 114 South Franklin, on the second floor of the Triangle Building. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO) Plastic, wood and tools clatter around as Mary Ellen Frank searches some boxes. “I’ve sort of cleaned up now, because I’ve been … working on the museum more,” she says. “But this is a doll I’ve been working on.” She picks up the torso and a head with long dark hair. She test fits the pieces together, along with a pelvis, and the doll begins to take shape. “I’m interested in trying to do a fully articulating wooden body so there’ll be springs,” she says. “So she’ll be fully posable and movable. I’ve got her legs all ready to go. Here’s some of her springs.” Born in 1952, Frank’s fascination with dolls began early. Some of the dolls that she had in her crib and as a young girl are nestled with care in a green shoe organizer hanging on her studio wall. There’s giraffes, knitted dolls and even a pink bunny. Mary Ellen Frank shows off her studio and workspace at Aunt Claudia’s Dolls museum in downtown Juneau. Frank creates custom dolls and owns an extensive collection of Alaskan Native doll art. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO) Now she’s the director and curator of Aunt Claudia’s Dolls. Pictures of the museum’s namesake, Claudia Kelsey, are featured throughout museum. A former state economist, Frank took a doll-making workshop in 1988, where she met Claudia. “At that time, some little old lady with a doll collection. I sort of trivialized it,” Frank said. “But then I saw at Christmastime at times the state museum would put on shows of her dolls and they were so fascinating.” Frank began visiting Claudia’s house weekly. “She was mainly interested in antique dolls and dolls from around the world,” she said. “She had probably 800 dolls. Her thing, she was so proud that she had never purchased a doll personally. They’d all been given to her by family to start with and then people that knew that she loved dolls started giving her dolls.” Claudia died about 10 years ago, leaving her collection of dolls with a friend, who in turn asked Frank what to do with them. “I had a studio in this building so I said, ‘Until we find another place for them, we can move them into an adjacent room to my studio and I’ll store them there until we find another place.’” They moved Claudia’s collection from the house to the studio, cabinet by cabinet and doll by doll. The two women first opened the studio for its first First Friday in 2008. Then they decided the downtown location was the perfect place for the collection. Claudia’s antique and cultural dolls are just one part of the museum. The other is Frank’s collection of Native American and Alaska Native dolls she’s collected — and some she’s made herself. A doll in the likeness of Tlingit elder Walter Soboleff is on display at Aunt Claudia’s Dolls museum in downtown Juneau. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO) She creates likenesses of Alaska Native leaders and elders, and favors Northwest Coast art and dolls. Frank took Northwest Coast carving classes and uses several of the tools in making her dolls. She even uses Alaska yellow cedar. “Dolls are so culturally interesting and you can see so much about a culture from looking at these dolls,” Frank said. “And you kind of learn stuff by looking at the clothing that dolls provide. People don’t wear a lot of this clothing anymore but you get a picture of where it came from.” Aunt Claudia’s Dolls is located at 114 S. Franklin St., Suite 105, with street access across from the Rockwell. Normally, it’s only open during tourist season, but the rest of the year the museum opens for First Fridays and Saturdays. This weekend, it’s open from 4 to 7 p.m. Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free. Our question asker Kerri Tanner plans to finally make it to the museum. “When I think of doll museum, I don’t think of the Native dolls. I think of the typical baby doll or teddy bear,” Tanner said. “So it’s neat that she’s got all of it.” David Purdy contributed to this report. <blockquote><a href="https://www.facebook.com/ktoopublicmedia/videos/1537051569727510/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Juneau's doll museum</a> Never been to Juneau's doll museum? It's open Friday 4-7:00 p.m. and Saturday noon-5:00 p.m. (admission is free)Full story: <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/2018/03/01/yes-there-really-is-a-doll-museum-in-juneau-and-its-filled-with-little-treasures/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.ktoo.org/2018/03/01/yes-there-really-is-a-doll-museum-in-juneau-and-its-filled-with-little-treasures/</a> Posted by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ktoopublicmedia/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">KTOO</a> on Thursday, March 1, 2018</blockquote>

Yes, there really is a doll museum in Juneau and it’s filled with little treasures

Bronze pelicans dive bomb the concrete behind a bus stop near the Federal Building in Juneau on Thursday. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO) At the corner of Ninth Street and Glacier Avenue in downtown Juneau, there’s a 16-foot column of bronze. Closer up, you can see the bronze was sculpted into nine individual pelicans, oriented so they appear to be diving — into pavement.  Curious Juneau stars you and your questions. Every episode we help you find an answer. Catch up on past episodes, or ask your own question on the Curious Juneau page. https://media.ktoo.org/2018/02/23PELICANS.mp3 In a handwritten comment on an official, federal General Services Administration condition checklist, one snarky inspector described it best: “The pelicans have yet to collide with the ground.” But the closest place you’d find a live pelican is maybe near Vancouver, and that’s only in the summer, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. So what’s the deal with this statue? In this Curious Juneau, we try to find out why these temperate and tropical birds are in front of one of the capital city’s biggest buildings. Tour guides share one pervasive local legend. Local Ken Kearny has heard it, too. “Supposedly, the person that got the contract for that looked on the map and saw Pelican, Alaska, and made pelicans, although there aren’t any pelicans in Alaska.” Another story is that there was a shipping mix up; somewhere in Florida, there’s a federal building with our eagle statue, and we got their pelicans. An exhaustive search of an art database for Florida federal buildings did turn up some eagle artwork, but nothing old enough to match up with the pelicans sculpted in 1966. A spokesperson with the General Services Administration said the mix-up story is just an urban legend, and the statue was no mistake. But I’d gotten a tip that somewhere in the federal building’s bare-walled maze of a basement, there’s a painting of the pelican statue with valuable information on the back. I wrangled a federal building employee for my pelican painting chase. We couldn’t find it under the dim, fluorescent lights. We did find old architectural plans for the building. In some, it looks like the statue was supposed to be surrounded by a pool of water, which would explain why the birds are diving. Part of a technical drawing of Juneau’s Federal Building shows a sculpture at the corner of Ninth Street and Willoughby Avenue surrounded by a water feature. The drawing was in the basement of the federal building in 2017. The pool doesn’t exist, but the sculpture of diving pelicans does. (Photo by Carter Barrett/KTOO) Another local tale is that the artist didn’t know how to sculpt eagles. This is also false. The artist, Thomas Hardy, passed away in 2016. But he sculpted the eagle on a presidential seal at a memorial in Washington D.C. for Franklin D. Roosevelt. The eagle is perched on a “1933” with its wings outstretched. An eagle sculpture is part of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., as pictured here in January 2018. Artist Thomas Hardy also made the diving pelicans sculpture outside Juneau’s Federal Building. (Creative Commons photo by Plum Pine) Hardy also made the University of California Berkeley campus’s golden bear statue. So that’s two iconic Alaska animals that were passed over. After exhausting local leads, I filed a records request with the General Services Administration in D.C. About a month later, a 90-page document arrived. It was mostly unexciting emails and maintenance forms about the statue. But this local legend is something the government employees have tried to work out for themselves. In GSA emails, one employee contacted Hardy in 2011 and confirmed this story. And it’s not nearly as exciting as local legend describes. Architect Linn Forrest was working on Juneau’s federal building in the ‘60s when he visited Hardy’s studio in Oregon. He saw Hardy working on the pelican statue and selected it. That’s it. It’s anticlimactic. But maybe it’s not such a bad thing. “It’s unique, it’s different. But we like it,” said Juneau resident Daneille Lepoidevin. “I’ve been here since 2000, and it’s always been part of Juneau.” Bronze pelicans dive bomb the concrete behind a bus stop shelter near the Federal Building in Juneau on Thursday. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO)

Bronze pelicans dive bomb the concrete behind a bus stop near the Federal Building in Juneau on Thursday. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO) At the corner of Ninth Street and Glacier Avenue in downtown Juneau, there’s a 16-foot column of bronze. Closer up, you can see the bronze was sculpted into nine individual pelicans, oriented so they appear to be diving — into pavement. <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/curiouswww.ktoo.org/curious" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> </a>Curious Juneau stars you and your questions. Every episode we help you find an answer. Catch up on past episodes, or ask your own question on the <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/curiousjuneau/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Curious Juneau page.</a> <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2018/02/23PELICANS.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/2018/02/23PELICANS.mp3</a> In a handwritten comment on an official, federal General Services Administration condition checklist, one snarky inspector described it best: “The pelicans have yet to collide with the ground.” But the closest place you’d find a live pelican is maybe near Vancouver, and that’s only in the summer, according to the <a href="https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/American_White_Pelican/lifehistory" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Cornell Lab of Ornithology</a>. So what’s the deal with this statue? In this Curious Juneau, we try to find out why these temperate and tropical birds are in front of one of the capital city’s biggest buildings. Tour guides share one pervasive local legend. Local Ken Kearny has heard it, too. “Supposedly, the person that got the contract for that looked on the map and saw Pelican, Alaska, and made pelicans, although there aren’t any pelicans in Alaska.” Another story is that there was a shipping mix up; somewhere in Florida, there’s a federal building with our eagle statue, and we got their pelicans. An exhaustive search of an <a href="https://www.gsa.gov/fa/#/results/buildings?Building%20Name=&amp;State=FL&amp;City=" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">art database for Florida federal buildings</a> did turn up some eagle artwork, but nothing old enough to match up with the pelicans sculpted in 1966. A spokesperson with the General Services Administration said the mix-up story is just an urban legend, and the statue was no mistake. But I’d gotten a tip that somewhere in the federal building’s bare-walled maze of a basement, there’s a painting of the pelican statue with valuable information on the back. I wrangled a federal building employee for my pelican painting chase. We couldn’t find it under the dim, fluorescent lights. We did find old architectural plans for the building. In some, it looks like the statue was supposed to be surrounded by a pool of water, which would explain why the birds are diving. <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2018/02/IMG_9170.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Part of a technical drawing of Juneau’s Federal Building shows a sculpture at the corner of Ninth Street and Willoughby Avenue surrounded by a water feature. The drawing was in the basement of the federal building in 2017. The pool doesn’t exist, but the sculpture of diving pelicans does. (Photo by Carter Barrett/KTOO) Another local tale is that the artist didn’t know how to sculpt eagles. This is also false. The artist, Thomas Hardy, passed away in 2016. But he sculpted the eagle on a presidential seal at a memorial in Washington D.C. for Franklin D. Roosevelt. The eagle is perched on a “1933” with its wings outstretched. <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2018/02/FDR-Memorial-DC-eagle-2018-01-23-e1519349085522.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>An eagle sculpture is part of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., as pictured here in January 2018. Artist Thomas Hardy also made the diving pelicans sculpture outside Juneau’s Federal Building. (Creative Commons photo by <a href="https://flic.kr/p/23EgJim" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Plum Pine</a>) Hardy also made the University of California Berkeley campus’s golden bear statue. So that’s two iconic Alaska animals that were passed over. After exhausting local leads, I filed a records request with the General Services Administration in D.C. About a month later, <a href="https://drive.google.com/open?id=1dMs2lkOgrdW6RarNPdePcbCPy9OTShmW" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">a 90-page document arrived</a>. It was mostly unexciting emails and maintenance forms about the statue. But this local legend is something the government employees have tried to work out for themselves. In GSA emails, one employee contacted Hardy in 2011 and confirmed this story. And it’s not nearly as exciting as local legend describes. Architect Linn Forrest was working on Juneau’s federal building in the ‘60s when he visited Hardy’s studio in Oregon. He saw Hardy working on the pelican statue and selected it. That’s it. It’s anticlimactic. But maybe it’s not such a bad thing. “It’s unique, it’s different. But we like it,” said Juneau resident Daneille Lepoidevin. “I’ve been here since 2000, and it’s always been part of Juneau.” Bronze pelicans dive bomb the concrete behind a bus stop shelter near the Federal Building in Juneau on Thursday. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO)

Does Juneau really have a Florida federal building’s pelicans?

Douglas resident Mark Calvert wants to know what the concrete blocks in the Lemon Creek area were for. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO) Tall tales abound about the mysterious blocks near Lemon Creek: Ancient monoliths, hatches for alien spacecraft, White Alice — even cow graves. But nothing really, so to speak, concrete.  Curious Juneau stars you and your questions. Every episode we help you find an answer. Catch up on past episodes, or ask your own question on the Curious Juneau page. https://media.ktoo.org/2018/02/09BLOCKS.mp3 Mark Calvert was one of the first to ask one of our most frequently asked questions: What are those blocks along Vanderbilt Hill Road? We took a walk around the wetlands. “It’s a nice cold, clear day out here — sun kind of shining through, but shining through enough,” Calvert said. “We’re in the wetlands, right at the turn off, off of Egan right by the Pioneer Home. … The creek coming out and all these concrete pilings, and traffic going by.” The blocks stand taller than a person. With a friend, you might be able to wrap your arms around the skinnier ones. Moss grows over one of the concrete blocks near Lemon Creek. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO) Moss has grown over the tops and sides. They’ve been there for decades. Some blocks sport rebar handles to climb up. On one, three pieces of rebar poke out the top. Perhaps they had anchored something larger? “They’re in some type of pattern out here and I have zero idea why,” Calvert said. “So trying to figure out what the pattern is and why they’re here instead of somewhere else.” A blog about Alaska’s Cold War-era early warning radar system led me to a military connection. In 1992, the U.S. Army put together an inventory of debris at the site. Army documents note a 28-by-73-foot building, a 10-by-17-foot building — and 40 concrete antenna footings — our blocks! A cartographer for the city and borough of Juneau found an aerial photo from 1962 showing the site. An 1962 aerial image shows a distinct footprint of the concrete blocks. (Photo courtesy City and Borough of Juneau) The antennas are already gone. But the footprints of the blocks are clear, including some smaller ones that have long been removed.    It’s another piece of the puzzle, from a very specific point in time and perspective. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had more. The Corps documented that the Army originally obtained the site by special use permit from the Department of Interior in July 1954. Richard Ragle is a project manager in the corps’ Alaska district. He works in a program that focuses on cleaning up formerly used Department of Defense sites. “Most of these sites were used briefly by DOD and then turned over to other federal or private entities,” Ragle said. “This is one of the early projects that the Alaska district worked on.” Ragle said that in 1985 the Corps hired a contractor to perform a site assessment, which included digging into some historical records about the site.  A 1986 report prepared for the Army identified the site as the Juneau Alaska Communication System Five Mile Station. That report includes a brief military history that says it was used as a “Juneau-Kenai VHF scatter circuit project and storage site.” That’s a way to send radio signals farther without line of sight. By bouncing signals off a layer of the atmosphere, it could theoretically bounce to Kenai. Corps documents show the U.S. Coast Guard and Bureau of Land Management took possession in 1959. This is where the Corps’ paper trail went cold. Former Juneau resident Kathleen “Teeney” Metcalfe was born in the mid-1950s and remembers asking her dad about the blocks. (Metcalfe moved to Anchorage about 25 years ago, but still has family in town.) “He said that they were the bases for communication towers,” she said. “I don’t remember towers being on them, even when I was a kid, I just remember the concrete blocks.” In the mid-1970s, Metcalfe worked as a janitor soon after graduating from high school. She remembers cleaning a telecommunications building in that area. “It was a little tiny building, and it was somewhere near where the pioneer home is now. For whatever reason, in my mind the Coast Guard ran it,” Metcalfe said. “I remember that when you went inside there was just a bunch of radios, but that were built into the walls.” Metcalfe says there was also a telephone operator’s headset and a switchboard. That fits with the 1986 Corps report, Ragle said. “The Coast Guard was using the buildings on the site and had no concerns about anything, and if I really remember correctly the state wasn’t interested in the former antenna anchors being cleaned up that were in the wetland.” Army documents say removing the footings would be more harmful than letting them stay. “You’d have to take a fairly big excavator into the wetlands, which would be fairly destructive,” Ragle said. Today, online property records show Alaska Department of Natural Resources owns the property on the north side of Vanderbilt Hill Road, about 26 acres. U.S. Coast Guard owns about 5 acres on the other side. The blocks are still there to this day. But that doesn’t keep people, like Mark Calvert, from guessing what they are. “You never know in this town why somebody does something,” Calvert said. “You see the aftermath of a lot of crazy ideas around town sometimes.”

Douglas resident Mark Calvert wants to know what the concrete blocks in the Lemon Creek area were for. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO) Tall tales abound about the mysterious blocks near Lemon Creek: Ancient monoliths, hatches for alien spacecraft, White Alice — even cow graves. But nothing really, so to speak, concrete. <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/curiouswww.ktoo.org/curious" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> </a>Curious Juneau stars you and your questions. Every episode we help you find an answer. Catch up on past episodes, or ask your own question on the <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/curiousjuneau/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Curious Juneau page.</a> <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2018/02/09BLOCKS.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/2018/02/09BLOCKS.mp3</a> Mark Calvert was one of the first to ask one of our most frequently asked questions: What are those blocks along Vanderbilt Hill Road? We took a walk around the wetlands. “It’s a nice cold, clear day out here — sun kind of shining through, but shining through enough,” Calvert said. “We’re in the wetlands, right at the turn off, off of Egan right by the Pioneer Home. … The creek coming out and all these concrete pilings, and traffic going by.” The blocks stand taller than a person. With a friend, you might be able to wrap your arms around the skinnier ones. Moss grows over one of the concrete blocks near Lemon Creek. (Photo by Tripp J Crouse/KTOO) Moss has grown over the tops and sides. They’ve been there for decades. Some blocks sport rebar handles to climb up. On one, three pieces of rebar poke out the top. Perhaps they had anchored something larger? “They’re in some type of pattern out here and I have zero idea why,” Calvert said. “So trying to figure out what the pattern is and why they’re here instead of somewhere else.” A blog about Alaska’s <a href="http://www.tundradaisy.org/index.html" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Cold War-era early warning radar system</a> led me to a military connection. In 1992, the U.S. Army put together an inventory of debris at the site. Army documents note a 28-by-73-foot building, a 10-by-17-foot building — and 40 concrete antenna footings — our blocks! A cartographer for the city and borough of Juneau found an aerial photo from 1962 showing the site. An 1962 aerial image shows a distinct footprint of the concrete blocks. (Photo courtesy City and Borough of Juneau) The antennas are already gone. But the footprints of the blocks are clear, including some smaller ones that have long been removed.    It’s another piece of the puzzle, from a very specific point in time and perspective. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had more. The Corps documented that the Army originally obtained the site by special use permit from the Department of Interior in July 1954. Richard Ragle is a project manager in the corps’ Alaska district. He works in a program that focuses on cleaning up formerly used Department of Defense sites. “Most of these sites were used briefly by DOD and then turned over to other federal or private entities,” Ragle said. “This is one of the early projects that the Alaska district worked on.” Ragle said that in 1985 the Corps hired a contractor to perform a site assessment, which included digging into some historical records about the site. A 1986 report prepared for the Army identified the site as the Juneau Alaska Communication System Five Mile Station. That report includes a brief military history that says it was used as a “Juneau-Kenai VHF scatter circuit project and storage site.” That’s a way to send radio signals farther without line of sight. By bouncing signals off a layer of the atmosphere, it could theoretically bounce to Kenai. Corps documents show the U.S. Coast Guard and Bureau of Land Management took possession in 1959. This is where the Corps’ paper trail went cold. Former Juneau resident Kathleen “Teeney” Metcalfe was born in the mid-1950s and remembers asking her dad about the blocks. (Metcalfe moved to Anchorage about 25 years ago, but still has family in town.) “He said that they were the bases for communication towers,” she said. “I don’t remember towers being on them, even when I was a kid, I just remember the concrete blocks.” In the mid-1970s, Metcalfe worked as a janitor soon after graduating from high school. She remembers cleaning a telecommunications building in that area. “It was a little tiny building, and it was somewhere near where the pioneer home is now. For whatever reason, in my mind the Coast Guard ran it,” Metcalfe said. “I remember that when you went inside there was just a bunch of radios, but that were built into the walls.” Metcalfe says there was also a telephone operator’s headset and a switchboard. That fits with the 1986 Corps report, Ragle said. “The Coast Guard was using the buildings on the site and had no concerns about anything, and if I really remember correctly the state wasn’t interested in the former antenna anchors being cleaned up that were in the wetland.” Army documents say removing the footings would be more harmful than letting them stay. “You’d have to take a fairly big excavator into the wetlands, which would be fairly destructive,” Ragle said. Today, online property records show Alaska Department of Natural Resources owns the property on the north side of Vanderbilt Hill Road, about 26 acres. U.S. Coast Guard owns about 5 acres on the other side. The blocks are still there to this day. But that doesn’t keep people, like Mark Calvert, from guessing what they are. “You never know in this town why somebody does something,” Calvert said. “You see the aftermath of a lot of crazy ideas around town sometimes.”

Juneau’s concrete blocks spark tall tales about their origins 

(Video still by David Purdy/KTOO)    Curious Juneau stars you and your questions. Every episode we help you find an answer. Catch up on past episodes, or ask your own question on the Curious Juneau page. https://media.ktoo.org/2018/01/180103CJ-TUNNEL.mp3 Ever notice a set of doors on either side of Juneau’s Telephone Hill? There’s one next to the State of Alaska Facilities Center. The other one’s next to the parking garage at Second and Main. Guess what? They connect. City Manager Rorie Watt graciously unlocks the set of doors that cover exposed rock next to the transit center parking garage. “Welcome to a little-known but infamous piece of our transportation infrastructure in downtown Juneau,” Watt says as he swing the doors open. “This is the Second Street Pedestrian Tunnel.”   The tunnel resembles a historic mine shaft. There are timber cross-braces shoring up the entrance. But this isn’t from mining; it’s actually a lot newer. Watt ventures inside. “I think the idea at the time is it would make a nice connection,” Watt said, using a flashlight to trace the edges of the 7-foot-by-10-foot opening. “But when the tunnel was built, you can just see that this is maybe eight feet, rough finished. It’s not exactly inviting to the public.” The tunnel runs about 350 feet. The other end is barely visible in the inky blackness. We’re underneath what’s known as Telephone Hill. This tunnel’s actually a continuation of Second Street, which abruptly ends at Main Street. But it follows the street’s legal right-of-way to connect Main Street to Willoughby Avenue. It’s what the original planners had in mind back in the 1970s. “They thought it would be interesting and a short cut to go through there,” recalled Don Gotschall, an 83-year-old retired civil engineer. He said the brainchild of the tunnel was Hugh Macaulay, chief engineer at Alaska Electric Light and Power. “He liked to do things the hard way,” Gotscall said. In a March 4, 1976, letter to the city, Macaulay pitched the tunnel idea. The letter survives in AEL&amp;P’s archives. “I’ve heard some rumors floating around and I was a little curious myself, so I went back to our files and archives and came across a folder of the tunnel down there on Second Street,” Eric Eriksen, the power company’s head of transmission and distribution, said in a phone interview. Macaulay wrote that the power company planned to bore a tunnel for a high-voltage power line. He proposed making it large enough for pedestrians. “He described the project and some potential benefits and in that he went on to inquire if the city would be interested in partnering with the project,” Eriksen said. Macaulay wanted the city to split the estimated $60,000 cost of the tunnel. That dollar amount is what Eriksen finds amusing. “You know, I don’t think we’d probably even get started boring for $60,000 today,” he said. Minutes from a 1976 meeting record naysayers on the Assembly balking at the expense. They were overruled and the funding was approved on a 5-3 vote. (Video still by David Purdy/KTOO) From here the record gets murkier. It’s not clear when exactly the tunnel was opened to the public or for how long. Gotschall says it couldn’t have been for very long. “As I recall, what they did was they opened it up and they found that the rock is so fractured under there that it leaked water and wasn’t real attractive for people going through,” Gotscall said. “You had to wear rain gear.” The tunnel was quietly sealed. Wags referred to it then and now as Overstreet’s Underpass after Bill Overstreet, the mayor at the time. Juneau’s current Mayor Ken Koelsch was hired as a high school teacher in the late 1960s by Bill Overstreet, then the school superintendent. Koelsch recalled there were always doubters and it wasn’t surprising when the tunnel was boarded up. “It was just one of these pipe dreams and it was like, ‘OK, great you’re going to put in an Overstreet Underpass, it’s going to get a lot of use and it just faded after that and we haven’t come back to that,” the mayor said. “But it’s always in the memory bank of a lot of people here.” Koelsch says he’d entertain reopening the tunnel, especially if the city ever decides to build a new city hall over the parking garage next to the Second Street entrance. “I think it’s a great idea,” he said. “I would like to see us actually consider it. But I think the momentum will come when we start with the new city hall.” The tunnel continues to serve AEL&amp;P’s purpose: a 69,000 volt power line connects its two downtown substations, making the downtown grid more reliable. And 25 years later, the city was finally able to capitalize on its investment. In 2001, a 16-inch water main was installed. The piles of dirt cover a water line to insulate it and keep it from freezing in Juneau’s Telephone Hill (Video still by David Purdy/KTOO) City Manager Rorie Watt says proposals to reopen the tunnel to the public are sometimes floated, but he’s skeptical it could ever work. “I think there’s a charm to the idea that will never go away,” Watt said. “But it’s balanced out by the practicality of what it actually is.” So for now the Second Street Tunnel – or Overstreet’s Underpass if you prefer – continues to convey water and power, but not people, through the rock beneath Telephone Hill.

(Video still by David Purdy/KTOO) <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/curiouswww.ktoo.org/curious" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> </a>Curious Juneau stars you and your questions. Every episode we help you find an answer. Catch up on past episodes, or ask your own question on the <a href="http://www.ktoo.org/curiousjuneau/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank">Curious Juneau page.</a> <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2018/01/180103CJ-TUNNEL.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://media.ktoo.org/2018/01/180103CJ-TUNNEL.mp3</a> Ever notice a set of doors on either side of Juneau’s Telephone Hill? There’s one next to the State of Alaska Facilities Center. The other one’s next to the parking garage at Second and Main. Guess what? They connect. City Manager Rorie Watt graciously unlocks the set of doors that cover exposed rock next to the transit center parking garage. “Welcome to a little-known but infamous piece of our transportation infrastructure in downtown Juneau,” Watt says as he swing the doors open. “This is the Second Street Pedestrian Tunnel.” <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/2018/01/03/juneaus-forgotten-pedestrian-tunnel-carries-water-power-telephone-hill/tunnel-11-16-9-00_01_42_08-still002/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <a href="https://www.ktoo.org/2018/01/03/juneaus-forgotten-pedestrian-tunnel-carries-water-power-telephone-hill/cbj_tunnel-03/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> The tunnel resembles a historic mine shaft. There are timber cross-braces shoring up the entrance. But this isn’t from mining; it’s actually a lot newer. Watt ventures inside. “I think the idea at the time is it would make a nice connection,” Watt said, using a flashlight to trace the edges of the 7-foot-by-10-foot opening. “But when the tunnel was built, you can just see that this is maybe eight feet, rough finished. It’s not exactly inviting to the public.” The tunnel runs about 350 feet. The other end is barely visible in the inky blackness. We’re underneath what’s known as Telephone Hill. This tunnel’s actually a continuation of Second Street, which abruptly ends at Main Street. But it follows the street’s legal right-of-way to connect Main Street to Willoughby Avenue. It’s what the original planners had in mind back in the 1970s. “They thought it would be interesting and a short cut to go through there,” recalled Don Gotschall, an 83-year-old retired civil engineer. He said the brainchild of the tunnel was <a href="http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/juneauempire/obituary.aspx?pid=165744061" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Hugh Macaulay</a>, chief engineer at Alaska Electric Light and Power. “He liked to do things the hard way,” Gotscall said. In a March 4, 1976, letter to the city, Macaulay pitched the tunnel idea. The letter survives in AEL&amp;P’s archives. “I’ve heard some rumors floating around and I was a little curious myself, so I went back to our files and archives and came across a folder of the tunnel down there on Second Street,” Eric Eriksen, the power company’s head of transmission and distribution, said in a phone interview. Macaulay wrote that the power company planned to bore a tunnel for a high-voltage power line. He proposed making it large enough for pedestrians. “He described the project and some potential benefits and in that he went on to inquire if the city would be interested in partnering with the project,” Eriksen said. Macaulay wanted the city to split the estimated $60,000 cost of the tunnel. That dollar amount is what Eriksen finds amusing. “You know, I don’t think we’d probably even get started boring for $60,000 today,” he said. <a href="https://media.ktoo.org/2018/01/1976-05-20_City-Borough-of-Juneau_Minutes.pdf" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Minutes from a 1976 meeting</a> record naysayers on the Assembly balking at the expense. They were overruled and the funding was approved on a 5-3 vote. (Video still by David Purdy/KTOO) From here the record gets murkier. It’s not clear when exactly the tunnel was opened to the public or for how long. Gotschall says it couldn’t have been for very long. “As I recall, what they did was they opened it up and they found that the rock is so fractured under there that it leaked water and wasn’t real attractive for people going through,” Gotscall said. “You had to wear rain gear.” The tunnel was quietly sealed. Wags referred to it then and now as Overstreet’s Underpass after Bill Overstreet, the mayor at the time. Juneau’s current Mayor Ken Koelsch was hired as a high school teacher in the late 1960s by Bill Overstreet, then the school superintendent. Koelsch recalled there were always doubters and it wasn’t surprising when the tunnel was boarded up. “It was just one of these pipe dreams and it was like, ‘OK, great you’re going to put in an Overstreet Underpass, it’s going to get a lot of use and it just faded after that and we haven’t come back to that,” the mayor said. “But it’s always in the memory bank of a lot of people here.” Koelsch says he’d entertain reopening the tunnel, especially if the city ever decides to build a new city hall over the parking garage next to the Second Street entrance. “I think it’s a great idea,” he said. “I would like to see us actually consider it. But I think the momentum will come when we start with the new city hall.” The tunnel continues to serve AEL&amp;P’s purpose: a 69,000 volt power line connects its two downtown substations, making the downtown grid more reliable. And 25 years later, the city was finally able to capitalize on its investment. In 2001, a 16-inch water main was installed. The piles of dirt cover a water line to insulate it and keep it from freezing in Juneau’s Telephone Hill (Video still by David Purdy/KTOO) City Manager Rorie Watt says proposals to reopen the tunnel to the public are sometimes floated, but he’s skeptical it could ever work. “I think there’s a charm to the idea that will never go away,” Watt said. “But it’s balanced out by the practicality of what it actually is.” So for now the Second Street Tunnel – or Overstreet’s Underpass if you prefer – continues to convey water and power, but not people, through the rock beneath Telephone Hill.

Juneau’s forgotten pedestrian tunnel carries water, power through Telephone Hill

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