Rick Steves Says This Panhandle City Has America's Ugliest State Capitol Building

It could be that America's most thoughtful traveler, Rick Steves, was already a wee bit grumpy when he disembarked from his Alaska cruise ship in downtown Juneau. As you may well know, Steves is a cruise skeptic, as any kind of pre-packaged vacation is the opposite of his "back door" travel style that emphasizes authentic and often overlooked experiences. Steves only begrudgingly agrees that in a few cases, a cruise can be sensible, affordable, and enjoyable. So when he laid eyes on Alaska's statehouse and declared it "the ugliest state capitol building in the USA," Steves probably still had his cruise goggles on. The Alaska capitol building is indeed a bland, uninteresting neoclassical shoebox that has made lists of ugly government buildings before, but it's more disappointing than actively offensive.

The rest of Juneau, Steves quickly added, "has a certain Alaskan charm." He went on to praise its rustic Russian Orthodox church, Gold Rush vibe, and the seafood at Tracy's King Crab Shack. Juneau's main drag, historic South Franklin Street, is where you can follow in his footsteps and saunter along looking for seafood or a brew pub, both of which you'll find in abundance. With a population of just 32,000, Juneau is so compact that it's a tremendously walkable town, where you can even hike right from downtown, trekking a hearty 4,000 feet up Mount Roberts for a view. The Mendenhall Glacier is a must-see and just 12 miles away. To get sense of just how compact Juneau is, just look at the scale of the city (above) compared to the hulking cruise ship docking in the port. 

That ugly capitol? A few years ago, the state held a design competition, and an award-winning avant garde LA architectural firm called Morphosis won with a futuristic, translucent dome that looks like an alien egg about to hatch. The townsfolk weren't fans of the design, so when funds ran out, there was a sigh of relief. The old capitol may be ugly, but it's also unobtrusive, doing little to detract from the frontier-town ambiance Rick Steves so admired when he visited. And as cruise ports go, it's a charmer.

But you don't come all the way to Alaska to be a townie — Juneau is also the gateway to the vaunted Inside Passage, and seeing it up close is the very good reason Steves, who can go anywhere he likes, booked a cruise here. Only a boat deck grants access to those grand views you can't really see any other way but gliding by on the water, jaws agape as glaciers calve, whales breach, and mountains soar. The cruise Steves took out of Juneau was a typical Alaskan Cruise, in that the focus wasn't on port hopping, but on gliding by some of the grandest scenery in the world, an itinerary Steves enthusiastically described as "seven days of pure nature."

To board an Alaskan cruise, you can fly to Juneau from Seattle in two hours, but you can't drive here, as the city is perched on the side of steep mountains and not connected to the rest of the continent by any road. State-run ferries travel the Alaska Marine Highway, connecting Juneau to Bellingham, Washington, in the south — a three day trip — and continuing, in stages, all the way to the Aleutian Islands in the north.

If you have a DIY streak, you can use that vaunted ferry system to put together your own cruise, as the boats that serve the Alaska Marine Highway have restaurants, and even some staterooms resembling sleeper cars on trains, and will even allow you to pitch a tent on deck – this is what locals, college kids with backpacks, and adventurers do. "There was a naturalist on board who would give lectures about local wildlife-whales, bears, etc. Also the ferries are used by locals so it was a great way to meet the natives," one Redditor writes. "I highly recommend it over cruise ships."

On the way to Juneau from Bellingham, you can stop in Ketchikan, and small, scenic towns like Wrangell, where you can explore the largest National Park in America, the Wrangell-St Elias National Park & Preserve, where you might see bear and moose. Then on to tiny, artistic Sitka, a hidden gem of a town steeped in Native culture, where you can watch local artists carve totems at the Sitka National Historical Park, then take a hike through the world's largest intact temperate rainforest in the Tongass National Forest. A stop in Haines lets you see bears catching spawning salmon on the Chilkoot River, if you time it right. Arriving in Juneau, you can avoid 4th Street, where that ugly capitol building stands, and head on down to South Franklin for a celebratory meal at Tracy's Crab Shack, having completed a trip very much in the spirit of the "back door travel" style Rick Steves recommends.