Ketchikan

Day two of my recent trip to Alaska aboard the Celebrity Mercury was spent at sea cruising the Inside Passage. It was an eerie day. When I woke, it was a little foggy, but as the day progressed, you could see nothing beyond the ship. I felt like I was in a Stephen King novel. Around 3:30 or 4:00 in the afternoon, we sailed out of the fog and it turned into a beautiful day.

The next morning I woke early to see Ketchikan coming into view. I stepped out on my veranda and into a misty morning. We were just pulling up to the dock and through the fog I could just make out the Cape Fox Lodge with it's funicular crawling up the hillside. After eating breakfast, we were off the ship. My friend Cathy went to a small coffee kiosk and had a cup of Raven's Brew coffee which she really enjoyed. Then we boarded our bus that was to take us 10 miles north through the Tongass National Forest to Totem Bight State Park. This park was built as a replica of a Tlinget native settlement. There are 13 totem poles as well as a community house set right near the water's edge in a very natural setting. We walked a short trail through the temperate rain forest to reach the settlement. It was an incredibly peaceful area. As I was walking through, I veered off to the "beach." In Southeast Alaska, this is an area at the water's edge that is rocky and covered in mussels and kelp.

Back in the town of Ketchikan, our first stop was a shop my kids had remembered from visiting when we lived on Wrangell Island. KetchiCandies is still there and still selling lots of sweets. We meandered along the road and made our way up to Creek Street. This is an historic area of town which used to be the "Red Light District". The creek was filled with spawning salmon. Standing on the bridge, you could see them swimming up the creek and smell all of those which had already died.

I walked into the Scanlon Gallery and saw a whole wall featuring artwork by a friend of mine in Wrangell, Brenda Schwartz Yeager. I have several of her pieces and ended up buying a couple more. She paints watercolor images of the Southeast on old preserved navigational charts and they are quite unique. There were also prints by Rei Munoz and Barbara Lavallee. Cathy, who is quite a foodie, stopped at a little counter near the Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show and had a crab and chowder meal. It was fantastic, both dungeness and king crab. I went into a gift shop and found the Alaska Wild Berry Products chocolates I had been looking for. They are made of a berry jelly which is dipped in chocolate.

We reboarded the ship and started away from Ketchikan. As we were leaving, we watched floatplanes taking off and landing. We glided past two of the Alaska Marine Highway ferries, the MV Columbia and the MV La Conte. Then to my surprise, I saw the Cornelia Marie docked near the ferry terminal. This is one of the crab boats featured on the Discovery Channels "Most Dangerous Catch". It had been a beautiful day in Ketchikan, didn't rain on us, and we were headed up to the Hubbard Glacier.