Top Things to Do in Juneau

Salt spray pings your face as a humpback's dorsal fin slices the steel-gray water ten feet away. On the upper deck you smell diesel exhaust mixing with kelp while a naturalist's voice crackles over the speaker, "She's bubble-netting, look for the ring!"

You dip your paddle into opaque jade water while a guide sings Tlingit paddling chants. Somewhere under the hull, icebergs roll with a low glug.

A smaller catamaran slips past the cruise-ship queue, engine throttling down so you can hear the hollow knock of ice chunks against the hull.

You'll taste glacial rock flour on your tongue after the catamaran spins 180° to follow a fluke. Later you step onto dry land for a self-guided walk to Nugget Falls where cold katabatic wind smells like wet stone.

After paddling across the lake you trade paddles for trekking poles. The trail crunches over cryoconite, fine black dust that melts tiny holes in the ice under your boots.

Six-passenger inflatable boats feel like riding a Zodiac on an Arctic survey, your hips vibrate with every wave slap while a bald eagle drips fish scales onto the bow.

You rope up to step onto the glacier itself, hearing the pneumatic hiss of crampons biting azure ice while meltwater races through a moulin thirty feet deep.

Back at the dock, you'll still be wiping whale snot off your jacket when a server hands you a steaming king crab leg. Melted butter drips onto the pier boards, mixing with seawater.

Instead of shuttling you to the glacier, this tour parks at the Photo Point overlook, you smell hot brakes and spruce needles while zooming in on blue ice framed by fireweed.

Your driver's quads flex as the cab crests Chicken Ridge. From here you peer over tin rooftops toward Gastineau Channel where a floatplane's pontoons glitter like polished chrome.