Ketchikan receives more annual rainfall than any other city in Alaska — 162 inches on average — yet its position at the southern mouth of the Inside Passage made it the natural gateway for Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian peoples who carved some of North America's densest concentrations of totem poles into the coastal temperate rainforest. By 1900, thirteen salmon canneries lined Ketchikan Creek, processing over two million cases annually and drawing workers from Japan, the Philippines, and Scandinavia. The city's Creek Street boardwalk, built on pilings above the tidal zone, once housed thirty-three brothels and remains the most photographed stretch of wooden architecture in Southeast Alaska. Today, the trolley tours connect five distinct landscapes within a twenty-mile radius. Saxman Native Village, three miles south of downtown, holds the world's largest collection of standing totem poles — thirty-three monuments carved between 1890 and 1940, restored by the Civilian Conservation Corps and maintained by Tlingit and Haida carvers who still practice the art in open workshops. Herring Cove, eight miles north, anchors a gravel beach where brown bears fish for pink and chum salmon during July through September runs, observed from elevated platforms that keep visitors sixty feet above the intertidal zone. The Tongass National Forest surrounds Ketchikan on three sides — 16.7 million acres of Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and red cedar, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world. Trails wind past devil's club thickets and skunk cabbage meadows, crossing streams that still see coho salmon spawn in October. Ketchikan trolley tour tickets provide access to these ecosystems alongside cultural interpreters who trace the migration routes, fishing calendars, and clan histories that shaped the region's indigenous civilizations for eleven thousand years before Russian contact in 1741. Ward Cove, once the site of the Ketchikan Pulp Company mill that operated from 1954 to 1997, now serves as a departure point for lighthouse cruises past Guard Island's automated beacon, commissioned in 1904 to guide steamships through Tongass Narrows. The narrows themselves, less than a quarter-mile wide at the tightest point, funnel strong tidal currents that Tlingit fishermen learned to read for herring migrations — the silver schools that gave Herring Cove its name and still return each spring in numbers sufficient to cloud the water surface.