Ketchikan City GuideAbout Ketchikan City Guide
An independent, unofficial guide to visiting Ketchikan, Alaska: what to see, what actually publishes a price, and how to spend a four-hour ship call or a full day without paying for something you could have walked to. We are not the City of Ketchikan, not the Ketchikan Gateway Borough, not the Ketchikan Visitors Bureau, not the US Forest Service, and not any tour operator or cruise line. We sell nothing. The whole guide starts on the Ketchikan city guide homepage, and every figure on the site carries the source it was read from.
Why this site exists
Ketchikan punishes a vague plan in three specific ways, and all three are about missing information rather than about crowds.
The first is the dock. Four berths sit on the downtown waterfront and a fifth option, Ward Cove, sits about 7 miles north with a free shuttle that costs roughly an hour of an eight-hour call. Almost nothing written about Ketchikan tells you which one you are on or what the difference does to your day.
The second is that most of this town does not publish its prices. The Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show sends you into a checkout before naming a figure. Potlatch Totem Park states on its own site that an entry fee supports the park and never says how much. Dolly's House Museum has no website at all. Of the four totem sites around town, exactly one publishes a price: Totem Bight, at $5.
The third is the rain. It falls 149.54 inches a year here across 232.6 days, and the month most people assume is worst is not the one that is. October is the wettest at 18.37 inches. June is the driest at 7.02.
So every price, hour and rule here is read off the official page of the body that sets it and labelled with that source. Where the official source states nothing, the page says not stated instead of borrowing a plausible figure from a ticket reseller.
How we check things
Each entity page carries a dated box near the top with the price, the booking rule and the crowding note, and the figure in it comes from one of a short list of bodies: the City of Ketchikan for the port, the museums and the water utility, the Ketchikan Gateway Borough for the bus, the airport ferry and the sales tax, Alaska DNR for the state park, the US Forest Service for the Tongass, Misty Fjords and the Discovery Center, Alaska DOT&PF for the state ferry, Alaska Department of Fish and Game for the salmon, and NOAA for every weather figure.
Where two official pages disagree, we print both and name which page says which. Two Forest Service pages give different opening hours for the Discovery Center. Two sources give different summit elevations for Deer Mountain. We do not quietly pick a winner.
Tour prices, ratings and review counts are the booking platform's own numbers on the card, not ours, and each tour section says so in a footnote. We have never taken a tour here, we do not claim to have, and there is no invented author persona anywhere on this site.
What we earn, and how
Some links on this site are affiliate links to GetYourGuide. If you book through one, the platform pays us a commission and you pay the same price you would have paid going direct. That is the whole business model and it is set out in full on the affiliate disclosure page.
Two consequences we hold ourselves to. Official links are never affiliate links: the first row of every ticket table is the body that runs the place, and that link carries no tracking of any kind. And the pages that make us no money are written to the same standard as the ones that do, which is why Ketchikan without a tour exists and argues, at length, that you may not need to book anything.
What this site is not
We do not operate or personally conduct these tours. We hold no bookings and can change none. We are not a ticket office, a tour operator, a travel agency or the official site of any museum, park or authority named here. If you need to move a time slot, get a refund or find a meeting point, the platform or operator on your confirmation email is the only party that can help, and the contact page says the same thing at more length.
We also do not publish a cost-of-living figure, a list of the best restaurants we have never eaten in, or a wildlife-viewing claim that no agency documents. Where those gaps appear, the page says so.
Corrections
Hours change with the season here, operators rename their trips and prices move every year. If a number on this site is out of date, write to us with what you found and when you were there. A corrected figure is worth more than a defended one, and a reader who has just stood in front of the door beats any page we can write.