Creek Street

The land around Ketchikan Creek is the homeland of the Tlingit people, who fished this salmon stream for generations and knew the site as a summer fish camp long before a town stood here. The Tlingit remain a central part of Ketchikan today, and their clan houses, totem carving, and art are woven through the wider community.

As Ketchikan boomed into a fishing and cannery port in the early twentieth century, flat land was scarce on the steep, rainy hillsides, so builders did what coastal Alaskans often did and built out over the water instead. Houses and businesses went up on pilings driven into the creek bed, linked by a plank walkway, and Creek Street took shape as a street with no cars, only boardwalk.

For decades Creek Street was Ketchikan's red-light district, a row of parlor houses that ran openly through the years when the fishing and logging fleets came to town, and closed by the mid-twentieth century. Local lore holds that this was the one place where, as the old joke goes, both the fish and the fishermen came upstream to spawn. Dolly's House, the home and business of one of the best-known madams, survives as a small museum furnished much as it was.

When the parlor-house era ended, the boardwalk slid into disrepair, then was rescued and restored as a historic district. The old houses were repaired and repainted, and the shops, galleries, and museums that fill them now keep the structures standing over the same creek they were built above a century ago.

Ketchikan Creek runs down out of the rainforest, past the boardwalk, and out to the sea channel, and it is one of the town's living salmon streams. In late summer the creek fills with returning salmon pushing upstream to spawn, sometimes in such numbers that you can watch them holding and darting in the pools directly below the planks.

The salmon draw everything that eats salmon. Bald eagles perch in the trees above the creek and along the pilings, harbor seals nose into the creek mouth to intercept fish, and gulls work the shallows. A small dam and fish ladder upstream let the salmon continue past the developed stretch toward their spawning gravel.

Because the fish return on their own natural clock, the creek changes character through the year, quiet and clear in spring, then crowded and splashing at the height of the run. It is a rare thing to watch a wild salmon migration from a downtown boardwalk.

Ketchikan sits inside the Tongass National Forest, the largest temperate rainforest in the United States, and the green wall of hemlock, spruce, and cedar rises immediately behind Creek Street. That rainforest is why the town is so wet and so lush, with moss on every railing and ferns crowding the slopes.

Beyond the eagles and seals drawn by the salmon, the surrounding forest and waterways hold black bears, Sitka black-tailed deer, and a rich seabird and shorebird life along the channel. Whales, including humpbacks, move through the nearby Inside Passage waters in the warmer months.

The Married Man's Trail, a footpath that climbs from Creek Street up into the trees, gives a quick taste of that rainforest, a mossy corridor of boardwalk and dirt that once let discreet visitors slip away from the parlor houses unseen.

Summer is the busy season, when the days are long, the salmon are running, and cruise ships fill the harbor. It is the liveliest and best time to catch the wildlife on the creek, with the trade-off of crowds on the boardwalk at midday.

Spring brings greening rainforest and quieter walkways before the peak visitor season arrives, though the salmon have not yet returned in force.

Fall carries the tail of the salmon run and thinning crowds as the cruise season winds down, with cool, wet, atmospheric days.

Winter is very quiet and very wet, with short daylight and many seasonal shops closed, but the boardwalk and the creek remain, dark and dramatic under the rain.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.