Remembering the day Juneau disappeared

By SUZANNE DOWNING

Juneau is buried in white stuff. And no, we’re not talking about the old cocaine days of the heady 1970s.

Historic snowfall over the past several days has turned the capital city into a maze of snowbanks and obstacle course of shovels. Boats have sunk at the docks. Roofs are creaking under the load. Neighbors are digging each other out. The road to Thane is closed because of avalanche danger, leaving residents beyond the closure effectively stranded until the state can do what it does every winter: mitigate the slide path with explosives. If that brings the snow down across the road, then it will be days more to dig out the road.

That danger is visible, talked about, and has everyone’s attention in Juneau, when they’re not worried about their roofs collapsing.

But there’s another avalanche threat looming over Juneau that few are mentioning, and history suggests it deserves attention.

At approximately 2:15 pm on a winter day in 1972, a massive snowslide tore down Mount Juneau at the main waterfall drainage on the Last Chance Basin side of the mountain. What followed was not just a slide, but an air blast estimated at 180 miles per hour.

Downtown Juneau vanished.

A towering, billowing cloud of snow engulfed the city, swallowing landmarks,  including even the Federal Building, and sweeping all the way across Gastineau Channel to Douglas Island. For a moment, Juneau simply disappeared.

To this day, there has been no avalanche equivalent to the 1972 event.

Gold Creek was dammed by the slide. Basin Road along the northwest side of Mount Maria was buried. Juneau’s municipal water system was knocked out for two days after the spring line crossing Gold Creek was destroyed and power lines feeding the well pumps in Last Chance Basin were damaged. A check valve at the Eighth Street Reservoir malfunctioned after debris lodged in it, draining the reservoir completely.

People shoveled snow into their bathtubs to melt for water.

By sheer chance, photographer Skip Gray, barely out of high school, was standing at the A.J. Rock Dump with his camera when the slide came down. What initially looked like a catastrophe became one of the most iconic images in Juneau history. A decade later, that photograph ran across two pages in National Geographic as part a 1982 feature on avalanches.

I remember that day from my own angle. I was working after school at Shattuck and Grummett Insurance on Seward Street, filing documents at the window facing the street, when the blast of the snow cloud surged through the town. Through the glass, visibility dropped to nothing. It looked like an avalanche rolling through town, because, in a way, it was.

That memory stuck with me and many others who were in the middle of that event.

Today’s snowfall has reloaded the mountains above Juneau with an enormous amount of snow. While the Thane Road slide paths are getting the attention they deserve (and they will be blasted today, Jan. 1), there is another serious avalanche zone on Mount Juneau that should not be ignored, in addition to the Last Chance Basin path. It’s the slope directly above homes on Behrends Avenue and the area above the old Breakwater Hotel. It’s a stone’s throw from Juneau-Douglas High School.

Those houses sit beneath steep terrain that has proven, historically, it can move.

January is when Juneau typically sees stronger winds. Sometimes Taku Winds, which are intense. Wind loading, combined with deep snowpack, is what turns heavy snow into something far more dangerous. The conditions that produced the 1972 avalanche were extreme, but so is the snow on the mountains right now.

Suzanne Downing is the founder and editor of The Alaska Story and a graduate of Juneau-Douglas High School.

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