Juneau moves to extend its seawalk to the farthest cruise dock

Two decades of building a waterfront path one stretch at a time, and Juneau still isn't done. Next up: the walk to the AJ Dock.

For a city that draws much of its identity from the water, Juneau has spent a long time trying to let people walk along it.

The downtown seawalk — the boardwalk that traces Gastineau Channel past totem poles, public art, and the breaching-whale fountain at its southern end — has been assembled piece by piece since the city adopted its Long Range Waterfront Plan in 2004. That plan imagined a single continuous walkway running the length of the downtown waterfront, from the Douglas Bridge south along the channel. Twenty years on, the seawalk is long and well-loved, but still not whole.

Now Juneau wants to add another link. The city has applied for the permits it needs to extend the seawalk from Franklin Dock, near the downtown core, south to the AJ Dock — the cruise berth that sits farthest from town.

That last detail is most of the "why." The AJ Dock is roughly a mile from downtown, and cruise passengers who come ashore there have no continuous waterfront route into the city. Extending the seawalk would give them — and the residents who use the path to walk dogs, sit on benches, and watch floatplanes lift off the channel — a safe, uninterrupted way to make the trip on foot.

The work isn't only about adding boardwalk. The project calls for tearing out a cluster of aging timber structures along that stretch of shoreline and replacing old chemically treated pilings with steel, cutting down on the leaching that comes with decades-old marine timber. In that sense, the extension is partly a cleanup of the ground it's built on.

The state's role in all this is narrow. The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation is weighing only whether the project meets water-quality standards under the Clean Water Act — not the larger questions of land use, tourism, or what a longer seawalk means for a downtown that already absorbs a heavy cruise season. Public comment opened June 12 and closes July 13.

After that, the decision moves on — one more piece in a twenty-year effort to let Juneau, finally, walk its own waterfront end to end.