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.
Long before the first cannery, the mouth of Ketchikan Creek was a summer fish camp of the Tongass and Cape Fox Tlingit — the Taant'a Kwáan, the "Sea Lion Tribe." The name they left on the water, Kitschk-hin, is conventionally translated "thundering wings of an eagle," and the modern Tlingit spelling is Kichx̱áan. Captain George Vancouver had sailed through in 1793, naming Revillagigedo Island and Behm Canal and marking the sea-stack of New Eddystone Rock, but for another ninety years the creek stayed what it had always been: a salmon place.
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.
