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And through every boom, the poles kept watch. Ketchikan holds the world's largest collection of standing totem poles, spread across four destinations — Saxman Totem Park south of town, Totem Bight State Park to the north, Potlatch Park beside it, and the Totem Heritage Center downtown, which since 1976 has preserved unrestored nineteenth-century poles retrieved from Tlingit and Haida village sites. The carving tradition never stopped: master carvers still raise new poles, and the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian communities remain the living center of the town's art.
Rain is the price of all of it — more than 150 inches a year, measured with a wink on the downtown Liquid Sunshine Gauge. The reward is the setting: Misty Fjords National Monument begins about forty miles east, 2.3 million acres of glacier-cut granite walls, hanging valleys, and waterfalls that visitors reach by floatplane or boat up Behm Canal. Deer Mountain rises straight from the streets, its trail switchbacking to alpine views over Tongass Narrows; eagles crowd the spruce tops; and black bears fish Herring Cove in late summer.
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.
