Ketchikan

Ketchikan treated us well. The morning, as we pulled into port, dawned bright and sunny over this colorful town.

The town is all a-bustle with boats and planes running hither and yon.

People even create special parking places for their planes. I suppose there’s a car garage hiding somewhere in that picture, as well.

The boats and planes are pretty much focused on one thing: salmon. We took a “duck tour” in an amphibious vehicle (truck/boat) that took us by this salmon cannery. See all the gulls hanging out on the water, waiting for the cannery throw-aways?

Being an old fishing village with a lot of men working on their own, Ketchikan had its own Creek Street for the “ladies of negotiable affections.” It’s a popular place to walk now; I kept thinking that we were seeing a sanitized version of a place that was once rather skanky.

My very, very favorite thing, though, was looking down in the creek and watching the salmon run. It was amazing! I’ve never seen anything like it. At first I challenged our 17-year old tour guide about the fish being salmon; they looked too dark. “No,” he said, “those are salmon. They’re turning black because they’re starting to rot. They’re here in the stream to spawn and then to die, and they’re almost dead already.”

Those fish were struggling to swim upstream through the rapids of this creek. If you look carefully, I caught the teeny nose tip of one fish starting to jump up in the top part of the photo. It was rather sad to see some of them struggling and then being washed backwards. They seemed awfully tired.

There were other nice things to see in town. My parents posed for me in front of a totem pole. I forgot to make them mimic the two little singing guys up on the totem behind them.

And now we wave an adieu to Alaska. Well, Mama does, anyhow. We’re on our way to home port in Seattle. Cheerio!