The modern town runs on the water it always ran on. The Alaska Marine Highway ferries thread the Inside Passage, floatplanes buzz the Narrows, and the cruise fleet has made Ketchikan one of Alaska's busiest summer ports — the First City for more than a million visitors a year, five minutes from rainforest quiet in any direction. Commercial fishing and charter boats still work the same waters Chief Kyan's people fished, and the artist Ray Troll's fish-obsessed studio downtown keeps the salmon in the town's bloodstream.
The creek had a wilder era, too. From 1903 to 1954, Creek Street — the boardwalk on pilings over the water — was the town's red-light district, home to as many as thirty establishments; sportsmen joked it was the only place where both the fish and the fishermen went upstream to spawn. Dolly Arthur, its most famous madam, worked the green house at Number 24 from 1919 on, and her home survives as Dolly's House Museum. The discreet back path over the hill earned its own enduring name: Married Man's Trail.
Why People Visit Ketchikan Alaska
Because it is the concentrated version of Southeast Alaska: a walkable historic waterfront where the totem poles are real, the salmon run through downtown, the rainforest starts at the last streetlight, and the fjords are a floatplane ride away. First port of call, and for many travelers the one they remember longest.
