Day 2: Ketchikan

Ketchikan was nice. It was cloudy and rainy in the morning but it cleared up pretty quickly. We signed up for a "shore excursion" but we had a couple hours to kill before it started. We wandered around and found a coffee stand and sat by the water and had breakfast. There were 2 other cruise ships docked so there were a lot of people. Every other store in all of these tourist towns is a jewelery store. It's really annoying because you think there will be cool local shops and it's all just jewelery and ulu knives and things made out of antlers. Our tour started and our good friend Travis drove us out to Totem Bight State Park.

There are 14 totems at Totem Bight. Travis told us the stories told on them and explained how to read them and stuff. It was really interesting. Most of them tell stories about a family or a specific person but some of them explain how native Alaskans believed man was created and other folk stories to be passed on. This one below is the 3rd tallest totem pole in the world.

This is the clan house. It's where an entire extended family or small tribe would live. The totems on the four corners are guardians and the one in the middle is kind of like an introduction to the characteristics of the clan. All of the totems face the ocean so that a visiting or attacking clan can see if they're peaceful, their history, the characteristics of their current and past leaders, etc. The doorway is only about 4 feet high. They believe that spirits are very large so they make their doors small so that evil spirits can't get in.
The totems and the clan houses were all cut and carved with a tool called and adze. It looks like the wrong end of a hammer (the part you use to take the nail out) only it's really sharp. You can see the notches it makes in the wood. It's really really smooth, too. You can rub your hands on it and you would never get a splinter. Ketchikan is in a rainforest so it was cool to walk through and see how it works. It was my first rainforest. Oh and this was my first ever slug sighting. Apparently the local kids have slug races.After the totems, we moved right along to THE LUMBERJACK SHOW! It was amazing. My mom kept screaming because all of the events made her nervous. Our team was the Dawson Creek Camp (the red guys). We won. I lost my voice because I was cheering so loud. I think I cheered even louder than at Medieval Times but only because I had to be yelling over the chainsaws so often.

The Axe Throw

I don't remember the names of the other events...we lost this one.

It was pretty cool.

The log-roll was a crowd pleaser.

The cool thing about Ketchikan is that most of it is built on stilts over the ocean, even the roads. The ground is all steep granite. Even the houses are just built on stilts because you can't clear land to make a foundation. Some of the houses have about 200 stairs up to the front door. Ketchikan is also the salmon capitol of the world. We learned a LOT about salmon. They even taught us a cool trick to rememeber the five types of salmon. Alaska is just so educational.