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.
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.
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.
