Ketchikan Map

The map is coloured by what a place costs you, not by what kind of place it is, because cost is the thing that decides a four-hour call and category is not.

Green is free. Five pins, and between them they carry most of what people remember about Ketchikan: the Creek Street boardwalk, the Married Man's Trail stairs behind it, the Deer Mountain trailhead above the town, and Herring Cove at the end of the south road. Nothing on a green pin has a gate, an opening hour or a ticket.

Cedar red is the totem sites. Four pins, and exactly one of them publishes a price: Totem Bight at $5. Saxman leaves the self-guided fee to the City of Saxman, which states it nowhere. Potlatch Totem Park says on its own site that an entry fee supports the park and never names it. The Totem Heritage Center publishes its hours but not its admission. The colour groups them because the choice between them is a single decision, laid out on the totem poles page.

Ink is a paid door, or one that will not say its price. The Discovery Center at $5, the Alaska Rainforest Sanctuary at $99 direct, Dolly's House, which has no website at all, and the Lumberjack Show, which sends you into a checkout before naming a figure.

Amber is off the road system. Misty Fjords, Neets Bay and George Inlet beyond the lodge road. Each one is a boat or an aircraft, and the price on the pin is the transport rather than the place.

Grey is arrival and transport. The berths, both ferry terminals, the airport, the Welcome Center and the library. These are not sights and we do not pretend they are, but they are what a first hour ashore actually needs.

Ketchikan sits on the western shore of Revillagigedo Island, on a strip between the water and a steep wooded ridge, and the road runs along that strip rather than through a town centre. That is why the pins form a line rather than a cluster, and why the distances on this map mislead if you read them as a European city.

There is no road out. The system runs a short way north and a short way south and then stops, and no official source publishes its total length. The airport is not on this island at all: it sits across the Tongass Narrows on Gravina Island, with no bridge, which is why the grey pin for it sits on the far shore and the pin beside it is a ferry landing.

Two consequences for a day. Anything on a green or ink pin in the town core is within a few minutes on foot of the berths, so the walking half of this map is genuinely walkable. Everything cedar-red is a bus ride at $2.00 or a tour, because the totem sites sit at the two ends of that strip: Totem Bight at milepost 10 north, Saxman south. And everything amber leaves the island.

Four points on this map are not reachable by car at any price, and they are the four most people come for.

Misty Fjords National Monument is up Behm Canal, east of town. The Forest Service charges no entrance fee for it, so the whole cost is the aircraft or the boat: the floatplane is $389 for about two hours. It cancels for cloud rather than for rain, which on a wet coast is a useful distinction.

Neets Bay is a working hatchery roughly 30 to 35 air miles out, releasing about 62 million summer chum eggs a year, which is the reason bears are there at all. The trip that goes is $399 and takes five hours door to door.

George Inlet has a road to the lodge on it but the inlet itself is public water inside the Tongass, and the crab lunch at $109.95 is what almost everybody is actually buying.

Prince of Wales Island and Metlakatla carry no pin here at all, because neither is a day trip from a ship call and putting them on the same map as a boardwalk would imply they are.

Four things are missing from the map above on purpose, and each absence is information rather than an oversight.

- Two places have no coordinate anywhere. Neither Dolly's House nor Married Man's Trail appears in Wikidata or OpenStreetMap, so their pins sit on the Creek Street boardwalk and the pin says so. We would rather show you the street than place a dot by eye. - The forest has no pin. The Tongass runs to roughly 16.7 million acres and every other pin on this map sits inside it. A dot in the middle of that tells a reader nothing, and earlier drafts of this page had one that dragged the whole view 200 kilometres north. - Three price columns are empty. Not because we did not look, but because the venue publishes nothing. The page for each one says what we checked and what to do instead. - Herring Cove carries no wildlife claim. Every operator that drives past it describes bears and eagles there. No Alaska Department of Fish and Game or Forest Service page documents the cove by name as a viewing site, so this map marks it free and says nothing more.

Half of what this map shows is seasonal, and the change happens on two specific dates rather than gradually.

On 1 October the sales tax drops from 8% to 5.5%, and the Discovery Center stops charging its $5 altogether and becomes free until April. So the ink pin that is the best value in summer becomes the best value in winter by a wider margin.

The cruise season runs roughly May to September, so from October the amber pins largely stop being sold: flightseeing and the bear trips run on the visitor season, and the hatchery run that makes Neets Bay worth the money is over by then anyway.

What does not change is the green. Creek Street is a public street with no gate at any time of year, Totem Bight keeps 7:00am to 6:00pm all year, and the Deer Mountain trailhead has no season at all. What limits them in winter is daylight: 7 hours 5 minutes at the December solstice against 17 hours 27 minutes in June. Ketchikan weather has the month-by-month picture.