Mendenhall Valley, Juneau Mendenhall Valley, Juneau The Mendenhall Valley (historically Mendenhall, colloquially The Valley) is the drainage area of the Mendenhall River in the U.S. state of Alaska. The valley contains a series of neighborhoods, comprising the largest populated place within the corporate limits of the City and Borough of Juneau, Alaska's capital. The valley was formed by Mendenhall Glacier over the course of roughly three thousand years. It was named for physicist and meteorologist Thomas Corwin Mendenhall. The Mendenhall Valley begins ten miles from the downtown area, at the intersection of Egan Drive and Glacier Highway, and ends ten miles farther west
Juneau, Alaska ships between the months of May and September. The city is named after a gold prospector from Quebec, Joe Juneau, though the place was for a time called "Rockwell" and then "Harrisburg" (after Juneau's co-prospector, Richard Harris). The Tlingit name of the town is ("Base of the Flounder’s River," ‘flounder,’ ‘base,’ ‘river’), and Auke Bay just north of Juneau proper is called ("Little lake," ‘lake,’ ‘diminutive’) in Tlingit. The Taku River, just south of Juneau, was named after the cold wind, which occasionally blows down from the mountains. Juneau is unusual among U.S. capitals (except Honolulu, Hawaii) in that there