(aka “terminal face”, “terminus”, “foot”)
As at 24 May 2015…
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The headline refers to area, not population – nobody makes their home atop the Taku Glacier’s surface, which still covers 650-plus square kilometres.
i took this post’s photo at 7.39 pm on 24 April 2015, circa one minute after “our” floatplane lifted off the Taku River, adjacent to Taku Lodge, and we began the return flight to Juneau.
In less than one more minute – as you will see in the next post – we’d be immediately in front of the Taku Glacier’s enormous snout.
This is the world’s thickest mountain glacier, but….
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Our May 2015 dinner destination – Taku Glacier Lodge, aka “Taku Lodge” – is only 48 kilometres distant from downtown Juneau.
It is, however, genuinely “remote”.
No road reaches it; access is only via floatplane or boat.
The surrounding terrain meets any reasonable definition of “wilderness”.
It includes the world’s thickest alpine glacier, one of its most productive (wild) “salmon rivers” and part of the world’s largest substantially-intact, temperate rainforest.
All of this untamed splendour sits well within Juneau’s “city limits”, which extend to the Canadian border!
In urban reality, Juneau is one of North America’s smaller cities.
However, its designated governance “footprint” makes Juneau – notionally – the second-largest city in all of North America.
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All three aerial photos in this post were taken within a “window” of little more than one minute.
Their “star” is the same glacier, & fewer than twenty minutes had passed since “our” floatplane had taken off from the fiord immediately in front of downtown Juneau.
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The immediately preceding post showed a small part of one of the same glacier’s obviously-retreating edges.
Not very many seconds earlier, we were looking down – and upstream – at an unknown number of square kilometres of this still-gigantic “river” of ice’s surface.
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This and the next post’s photos were both taken within a “window” of circa 30 seconds, about 3 minutes after I took the…
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Merely two minutes on from the moments documented in #25, we were flying over the same lake, but had turned its “corner”.
Now, we were facing the glacier which fed the lake.
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This post’s photos were taken within a single minute, on the afternoon of 24 May 2015.
Our nimble, but not speedy floatplane was only eight minutes or so into our scenic flight from Juneau.
As you can see, the landscape was becoming progressively “bigger” & wilder.
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This post’s photo was taken just three minutes after the previous one’s.
Circa five minutes earlier, our float plane had lifted off from Juneau’s Gastineau Channel.
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On the afternoon of 24 May 2015 “our” floatplane took off from the Gastineau Channel – the fiord adjacent to Alaska’s capital city.
Juneau is a surprising place, as is true of all of the low-lying, coast-adjacent terrain on southeastern Alaska’s “panhandle”.
This “strip” is not a cold place, by northern North American standards, at least.
Snow falls are infrequent, usually modest. Much of the natural vegetation is temperate rainforest.
In “the season”, cruise ships disgorge huge numbers of tourists onto Juneau’s tourist-tacky foreshore.
In terms of permanent residents, however, Alaska’s capital city is a small town; if it were in China, it would be a “village”.
Australia calls the likes of Mount Gambier, Albany, and Bathurst “cities”; Juneau is a little more populous than “The Mount”, but a deal less so than Albany or Bathurst.
Juneau is unique among capital cities in one crucial respect: no roads connect it to anywhere more than a few kilometres distant.
The mountains and glaciers just inland of “the strip” are so formidable that all visitors – and all supplies – reach Juneau via sea or air.
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