This video posted to Facebook today shows an avalanche coming down Mount Juneau at about 1 p.m. Wednesday.
While downtown homes are visible in the foreground, the path of the avalanche is toward the uninhabited Silverbow Basin.
Juneau’s Emergency Programs Director Tom Mattice said there have been no reports of missing people, injuries or property damage.
“Yeah we saw an impressive powder cloud, but no, that was not a catastrophic-sized avalanche,” Mattice said.
With a relatively low snowpack, Mattice said he was a little surprised by the natural avalanche.
“The Earth’s terrain acts like an egg carton. And so, we might lose one egg here, and one egg there, but we don’t lose the entire carton very often,” Mattice said. “But after the snow builds up and that egg carton gets completely loaded up, then we get a lot bigger avalanches.”
Mattice said the urban avalanche risk remains moderate today. He encourages residents and people enjoying the outdoors in avalanche-prone areas to use common sense, and to keep an eye on the urban avalanche advisories he regularly updates online at Juneau.org/avalanche.
Jeremy Hsieh is the deputy managing editor of the KTOO newsroom in Juneau. He’s a podcast fiend who’s worked in journalism since high school as a reporter, editor and television producer. He ran Gavel Alaska for 360 North from 2011 to 2016, and is big on experimenting with novel tools and mediums (including the occasional animated gif) to tell stories and demystify the news. Jeremy’s an East Coast transplant who moved to Juneau in 2008.
