Our Petersburg retro logo features the Alaska bear — a frontier emblem of the territorial north, rendered distressed in black-and-white with a hand-printed, crate-stamp feel that suits a town that has always packed fish out of its own harbor. The bear stands square, walking the shore the way a working bear actually walks, and the "Alaska Territory" framing and "Est. 1959" date together honor the long frontier era and the statehood that finally followed it. On a tee, a cap, or a wall print, the bear reads as what Petersburg actually is: a working Alaska fishing town that built its own hall, raised its own children on the waterfront, and never gave the Norwegian language up.
Today Petersburg keeps the largest home-based halibut fleet in Alaska, the 1912 Sons of Norway Hall in continuous use, the Little Norway Festival every mid-May, the Tlingit petroglyphs at Sandy Beach still readable in the right light, and a population of about three thousand who still mostly know each other. Our Petersburg designs gather that identity into wearable form: the bear, the harbor, the Narrows, the Norwegian heritage, the LeConte ice. Explore the collection and carry a little of Alaska's Little Norway with you.
Why People Visit Petersburg Alaska
- Walk Sing Lee Alley and the Sons of Norway Hall — the 1912 white-and-red gambrel-roofed wood-frame building on pilings over Hammer Slough, the first Sons of Norway lodge in Alaska, still in continuous community use, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.
- Visit Bojer Wikan Fishermen's Memorial Park at the south end of Sing Lee Alley — the nine-foot bronze fisherman sculpture, the Valhalla Viking ship replica, and the roll of Petersburg fishermen lost at sea.
- Take a day boat tour to LeConte Bay and the LeConte Glacier — the southernmost tidewater glacier in North America, calving icebergs the size of small buildings into a long fjord roughly 25 miles southeast of town.
- Visit the Clausen Memorial Museum just off the harbor for the Tlingit fish-trap and petroglyph collections, the cannery-era industrial history, the world-record king salmon, and the original Cape Decision Lighthouse Fresnel lens.
- Walk the North Boat Harbor and South Harbor — the largest home-based halibut fleet in Alaska, plus working salmon and crab boats, and one of the best harbor walks in Southeast Alaska.
- Hike Three Lakes Trail on Mitkof Island in the Tongass National Forest — three small lakes linked by boardwalk through the muskeg, blueberry-thick in late summer, a classic Southeast Alaska temperate-rainforest walk.
- Walk the Sandy Beach Recreation Area south of town to see Tlingit petroglyphs and the remains of stone fish traps visible at low tide — Mitkof Island's pre-1897 layer.
- Cross to Kupreanof on a skiff or kayak — the smaller island community right across the Narrows, no roads connecting to it, a five-minute crossing from the Petersburg harbor.
- Come back for the Little Norway Festival in mid-May for the Valhalla parade, the rosemaling on every shutter, lutefisk and lefse on the menu, and the Leikarring folk-dancers in costume.
- Petersburg is also a natural stop on the Inside Passage between Juneau, Sitka, Ketchikan, and Wrangell — each town its own character, each a separate ferry day.
