Juneau&MendenhallGlacier

The Road Ends and the Ice Begins

Juneau is the only state capital in the country with no road to it. The local highway runs a short way up the coast and a short way down it, then stops at both ends against mountain and water, connected to nothing. Everyone arrives by air or by water, and everything past the pavement is reached the same two ways. Air access here is not an upgrade on the drive. It is the transport.

Directly behind the town, higher and closer than a map suggests, sits the Juneau Icefield. The Forest Service puts it at 1,500 square miles of ice held in the Coast Mountains, and dozens of glaciers run off it toward the sea. From the ground you meet the end of one of them, and a glacier’s toe is its smallest and dirtiest part. The plateau above it, the tributaries feeding it and the crevasse fields where it bends over a step are all upslope and out of sight.

So the flight here is not a distant view of one famous peak. It is the whole of a system the ground shows you only at its edges.

What a Flight Actually Reaches

The icefield itself. A high white plain with dark ridges standing through it, big enough to read as country rather than as a feature. No road, trail or boat gets you to it.

Mendenhall. Thirteen miles of glacier reaching down into Mendenhall Lake, with a road and a Forest Service visitor centre on the near shore. It is the one glacier here most visitors already stand in front of, which makes it the useful comparison: the same ice traced back up its length to where it starts.

The glaciers with no road at all. Taku, Herbert, Eagle and Norris among them, running off the same icefield into empty valleys. Ordinary from the air, effectively unreachable otherwise.

The tidewater fjords. South of town, Tracy Arm and Endicott Arm cut deep and narrow into the range and end at glaciers that calve into salt water. Both sit inside a designated wilderness. By boat this is a long day; in the air it is a leg.

Admiralty Island. A Forest Service monument across the channel, known to the Tlingit as Kootznoowoo, holding one of the densest brown bear populations in North America. Most visitors arrive by floatplane, and access to the bear viewing ground is administered.

The channel and the mines. Gastineau Channel, Douglas Island opposite, and the ruins of the workings that put a town on a mountainside with no flat ground.

Standing on the Ice Is a Helicopter Job Here

The arrangement here is the reverse of the one at Denali, where park glacier landings run on ski-equipped aeroplanes under a park concession.

Most of this ice lies in the Tongass, the largest national forest in the country. Commercial landings on the icefield are made under Forest Service special use permits that set out where an operator may put an aircraft down, and the aircraft making them is a helicopter. That is why a flight here can include time standing on ice several thousand feet above the town, as one thing rather than two purchases.

Everywhere else, what you may land on comes down to who administers the ground: the Forest Service across most of Southeast Alaska, designated wilderness inside that, the state, and Alaska Native communities and corporations whose land is part of the region. Glacier Bay National Park lies west of here and sets its own air access rules. How that decision goes in general is covered in Heliports & Landing Zones, and the framework every charter flight operates under is explained in FAR Part 135 for Charter Customers in Plain-English.

Where Flights Operate From

Juneau International Airport, run by the city and borough, sits north of downtown in the Mendenhall Valley and carries the airline service, the general aviation traffic and the rotary operations on one field. Floatplanes are ordinary traffic here too, because much of Southeast Alaska moves on them. The ground leg out to the field is short.

The Ceiling Decides, and It Decides Late

This is coastal temperate rainforest. Cloud is the normal condition, not the exception, and what stops a flight is usually neither wind nor a hidden summit. It is a ceiling low enough to close the valleys leading up onto the ice.

That gives the delay here a different shape from a big mountain market. The flight is short, the climb up is the part that needs visibility, and a deck that shuts the route first thing has often lifted by the middle of the day. A private departure buys the ability to move by hours instead of losing the day, which is a smaller and far more reliable flexibility than waiting out a mountain. Area forecasts come from the National Weather Service in Juneau, and what a marginal one means for a booking is in Weather, Delays & Scheduling.

The Shared Flight Here Is Good

Juneau supports one of the largest per-seat helicopter sightseeing industries in the country, sized for ship days, flying a settled set of routes to a settled set of landing sites. On a clear July afternoon it does the standard icefield landing well, and for a fraction of an hour of whole-aircraft time, because every seat is sold. If that is the flight you want, spending more buys nothing.

The whole-aircraft case is not better ice. It is everything arranged around the ice, bought as the aircraft’s time rather than as your seat, which is what What a Charter Costs sets out.

Typical Routes and Flight Times

The icefield circuit climbs off the field, over the forest and onto the plateau, works a glacier or two and returns. The standard version is short, well under an hour in the air.

The landing flight is the same climb with time on the ice added, which is the part you are buying.

The fjord run goes south to the tidewater arms and back, trading a full day on the water for a leg in the air.

The regional leg runs point to point along a coast whose towns have no roads between them, against a ferry day.

What Hiring the Whole Aircraft Changes

You choose where the flight goes. The settled circuits exist because they work at volume. A private departure can spend its time on one valley, follow a glacier the length of it, or go south to the fjords instead.

You leave when the ceiling lifts. A shared flight departs when the manifest says so. In a market where the window opens and closes inside a morning, that difference is most of the product.

You fly off the ship calendar. The town’s rhythm and its landing site congestion are set by how many ships are alongside. An early departure on a quiet day is a different place.

You can put the camera first. Ice and cloud in flat northern light reward doors, angles and a second pass, covered in Aerial Photography & Film.

You can plan around what the aircraft carries. Load, seats and gear for a landing bear on which class suits the day, set out in Helicopter Class Comparison.

Seasonal Patterns

The season runs from roughly May into September, with long daylight through the middle of it. It is also the busiest the town gets, so the quiet hours are early and late rather than midday.

Late spring gives firmer snow on the ice and a less crowded waterfront. Late summer and early autumn are the wettest and stormiest part of the season, and the Pacific systems arriving then bring wind as well as rain. Winter is short on daylight and heavy on weather. The range holds snow well into spring, which is why the north end of Southeast Alaska is Heliskiing country.

Which Charter Types Dominate Here

Scenic flying, the bulk of it, framed as charter in Scenic & Sightseeing Charters.

Access flying. People, camps and equipment into country with no road, which on this icefield includes long-running research work.

Photography and film, drawn by ice, water and the light between them.

Point-to-point flying between coastal towns a road has never joined.

Related Pages

• Destinations: the other US charter markets and what defines each one.
• Denali: the other Alaska market, where the glacier landing belongs to the aeroplane.
• Knik Glacier & Chugach Range: Southcentral ice, reached from a road system.
• Prince William Sound: tidewater ice the day boat reaches too.
• Grand Canyon: the other market with a large shared sightseeing industry.
• Scenic & Sightseeing Charters: how charter-framed scenic flying works, wherever you fly it.
• Weather, Delays & Scheduling: why a low ceiling, not the forecast, decides this flight.
• Heliports & Landing Zones: who administers the ground, and what that means for a landing on ice.
• What a Charter Costs: what you pay for when you hire the aircraft instead of a seat.