And many of those who live in and love Ketchikan say visitors help the city stay lively and keep the island feeling connected and relevant to the rest of the world. Still, it’s hardly without its charms: the slick brown harbor seals frolicking up the river, the eagles perched on the eves of historic Creek Street, the many narrow stairways cascading down the mountainside. Other communities of the Inside Passage often cite Ketchikan’s explosive growth as a cautionary tale of how quickly an unchecked tourism industry can change the face of a city. Kayaking in the waters near Ketchikan © Aubrie Pick / Lonely Planet Tourism helped fill the void: the industry now employs roughly a fifth of the workforce in the southeastern part of the state, also known as the Alaska panhandle. When the city’s pulp mill closed in the late nineties, more than 500 people lost their jobs overnight – a fate mirrored in other small communities up and down the Inside Passage. Once a fishing camp of the indigenous Tlingit people prior to white settlement, by 1937 Ketchikan hosted seven major canneries, earning it the title "Salmon Capital of the World." In turn, the surrounding forests spawned a massive timber industry, supplying wood for salmon cases and a burgeoning port. If this view was cleverly framed, you might think you were looking at a port city in the Caribbean the sun, the jade waters, the glistening white cruise ships ushering visitors down the gangplanks. Rowdy teenagers jumped from the red-iron trestle bridge and into the harbor below. One of the rainiest cities in North America, Ketchikan was bathed in sunshine on the day I arrived, the temperature well into the 20s. I’ve come here to begin a journey north through Alaska’s Inside Passage: a 500-mile stretch of the Pacific which courses through the Alexander Archipelago and is studded with more than 1000 forested islands. Like the rest of Tongass National Forest – at 16.7 million acres, the largest intact coastal rainforest in the country – the monument is blanketed with spruce and hemlock, the trees doggedly fighting their way up the granite wherever the slightest scrap of topsoil will allow.įlying over the Behm Canal in Misty Fjords National Monument © Aubrie Pick / Lonely Planetīook this trip: Misty Fjords Monument Floatplane Tour I step outside, balancing on the float, one hand still pressed to the cabin, gathering my senses as the water laps at the plane. We finally land in a small, unnamed pocket of the Misty Fjords National Monument, and pilot Dave Doyon, whose white-toothed grin betrays his amusement, kills the engine. Another tilt of the wings and I’m staring into the heavens one more and I’m looking at a fingerling canal stained green with algae and snaking through the forest below. I’m 2000ft in the air, staring through the portside window at a wall of granite shorn by glaciers during the last Ice Age. My knees are pinned to my chest in the back seat of a tiny Cessna 185 Skywagon. Hop among remote communities to encounter rural hospitality, landscapes teeming with wildlife and glaciers galore. Less a cruise, more a coastal adventure – this scenic route through Alaska’s islands is easily explored using the state-run ferry system.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |