Ketchikan calls itself ’Salmon Capital of the World.’ Does the title still fit?

Storefronts along Ketchikan’s dock district seen from the deck of a passenger cruise ship. Ronald Woan via Flickr

By Elly MacKay

There’s a small town in Southeast Alaska, tucked into a corner of the US’s largest rainforest, that built its culture and economy around salmon fishing. A banner hanging above the town reads Salmon Capital of the World, and the shops, full of salmon art and canned salmon with vintage labels, add legitimacy to the claim. Ketchikan, population eight thousand, is full of families that have found creative ways to thrive along this cold, rainy, coastline. The salmon industry has long been a pillar of their livelihoods, yet instability in the market has hobbled their success since Alaska’s statehood in 1959.

Overfishing, conflict over regulations and enforcement, and unpredictable market factors endanger ancient salmon populations and the people who rely on them. The salmon catch that gave the region its identity for decades is no longer a dependable economic anchor. Instead, the community has increasingly reached for another steady support: tourism. After health care – the core of many rural economies – it is the second largest employer. Some residents embrace it, while others resist.

The modern world of salmon fishing in Southeast Alaska tells the story of a small town, reliant on a few industries, struggling to stay afloat in an increasingly global economy. The history of salmon fishing in Southeast Alaska tells a different tale. It is one of extractive industries and the cycles of boom and bust that are inherent to Alaska’s economy – gold, salmon, timber, oil. Ninety years ago there were 14 salmon canneries in Ketchikan. Now there are three. But there are also 50 different charter companies available to take tourists salmon fishing. 

Brutally efficient fish traps powered an economic boom 

Ketchikan in 1941. US National Archives via Wikimedia Foundation

In Ketchikan’s salmon heyday, before statehood, many fishermen used fish traps. They placed nets at the mouths of rivers, catching salmon as they made their way to spawning grounds. In this way, virtually no salmon could escape, leading to huge catches but few spawning events. 

According to SitNews, while salmon populations shrunk, the economy swelled. In 1937, the fourteen canneries operating in the Ketchikan area packed 850,000 cases. When Alaska became a state, one of its first initiatives was banning fish traps, which now are only permitted on tribal lands.

After the end of fish traps, the market shrunk dramatically. In 1971, no cans were packed in the city of Ketchikan. 

But the catch steadily increased as the salmon population rebounded and the industry adopted more sustainable fishing methods. The region’s other main industry, timber, boomed in the 1970s and 1980s, before competition and environmental regulation began to slow it down. The Ketchikan Pulp Mill closed down in March 1997.

As growth stalled and reforms took hold, a regional fishing regime emerged

As the fish trap controversy wrapped up, conflict arose among Alaska, British Columbia, and the states of the Pacific Northwest. At issue was interception – the idea that a salmon may hatch in one state or province then swim to another, where they are caught by the other region’s fishermen. Each locality worried that their locally spawning salmon populations were being caught by fishermen beyond their jurisdiction. 

In 1985, the various competing parties agreed on the Pacific Salmon Treaty. “The treaty essentially says each country will get a fair share of the catch that’s equivalent to the production of the salmon they produce,” said John Field, Executive Secretary of the Pacific Salmon Commission. “Accounting for equivalent catches was a headache, and because of that equity gets very complicated,” he continued. “Chinook salmon are worth more than coho salmon, and coho are worth more than chum salmon, chum are worth more than pinks sometimes. So is it a financial equity? Is it a harvest equity? 

“Is it a cultural equity, so that Indigenous society can get their bare minimum need for food, social and ceremonial needs? It’s a very complex calculus, and it is a reason why the commission really ceased to function in the late 1990s.” 

A 1999 agreement produced a new plan that more delicately addressed the needs of every stakeholder. It is reassessed every ten years. “Alaska is at the northern end of North American salmon populations,” Field said. “Because salmon migrate sort of counterclockwise here in the North Pacific, Alaska has the benefit of harvesting their own origin salmon, as well as some of their neighbors’ salmon. 

“And it’s perhaps easy to blame Alaska for a lot of this controversy, but Alaska is just executing its fisheries the way they were designed under the treaty.” He concluded, “Alaska is held to the same standards and accountability as Canada, Washington and Oregon are held to.”

Newer lawsuits argue for more equitable sharing of salmon abundance

The treaty may have quelled some of the controversy over salmon catches in Southeast Alaska, but not all. Today, the conflict manifests in two lawsuits regarding the allocation of salmon resources.

The environmental group Wild Fish Conservancy brought the first, claiming that the current allocation methods do not ensure that federally-protected orcas off the Washington coast have sufficient access to their primary food source, Chinook salmon. 

In 2022, the Wild Fish Conservancy prevailed in U.S. district court, and the presiding judge issued rulings that could have shut down the salmon fishery in the Southeast. But in both 2023 and 2024 an appellate panel stepped in to allow the salmon season to continue. 

The district court order had blocked the federal National Marine Fisheries Services’ approval of the local fishery’s summer and winter Chinook harvest to ensure protection of the orcas. Last October, the federal fisheries service did as the district court required and issued a new biological opinion looking at the consequences of salmon fishing on Washington state’s orcas. Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game reacted by saying in a press release the new document is “a far more comprehensive and robust analysis of fisheries impacts to ESA-listed salmon and Southern Resident killer whales, provides objective and measurable protections for ESA-listed Chinook salmon stocks.“

The second lawsuit was brought by the Metlakatla Indian Community. The state had blocked tribal members from entering traditional fishing grounds because of the new regulations. The tribe appealed. It lost in federal district court, but in 2022 the Ninth Circuit Appeals court ruled that the rules violated the community’s “right to fish traditional off-reservation fishing grounds.” 

Fishing has become less enticing to young people entering the workforce

On a local level, the culture of salmon fishing has changed significantly. “Once upon a time, when I was in college in California, I came back every summer and worked in the canneries because it was good pay. You could stay at home and save money. All my friends did it. ” said Dave Kiffer, a journalist for the Sitka Times. “Now, almost no local kids do that.”

The cost-benefit analysis that made sense when Kiffer was young, in the late 70s and 80s, just doesn’t work out now. “Don’t get me wrong, fishing has always been an expensive business,” Kiffer remarked. “I remember my father back in the 1970s would complain about the price of diesel getting over 25 cents a gallon. And boats were expensive back then, thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars. And that was when permits started, and they were very expensive, too. 

“But the reality is now, say you’re a troller, in order to buy a boat right now that you can troll during the limited salmon season in the summer, and then do halibut fishing, and maybe dive fishing, and maybe, black cod, or whatever – you’re looking at $250,000 or $500,000 for the right size boat. Then permits could cost anywhere from $25,000 a piece to $100,000 a piece. You’re at nearly a million dollars. You haven’t even caught a fish yet. And so it’s almost impossible.”While the fishing industry faces challenges, the fish populations themselves are relatively strong. Alaskan waters are typically healthy, and salmon populations are closely monitored by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. This region is within the Tongass National Forest, which stretches along the 500 miles of coastline that surrounds Ketchikan. A temperate rainforest, it is the largest national forest in the country. Notably, it has experienced drought in recent years.

As drought reduces streamflows, the salmon’s ability to swim upstream to their spawning grounds is hampered, according to studies by the US Department of Agriculture. Rising temperatures and acidification are also growing concerns. 

The decline in wild salmon has triggered efforts to supplement their numbers with young salmon released by hatcheries. Private non-profit hatcheries were authorized in 1974, leading to an increase of salmon, particularly chum, in the Southeast. 

These hatcheries release the salmon after their juvenile stage, and, if they are caught, it is using the same methods used catching wild salmon. In 2023, 23 percent of the commercial salmon harvest in Southeast Alaska was hatchery-origin, according to state records. 

Fish catch revenues trending down, influenced by war and global economics

Annual fish catches in the Southeast have fluctuated over the past four decades, but they seem to be trending downwards in recent years. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game reported a 56 percent decrease in the number of salmon harvested in 2024 compared to 2023. In 2024, the harvest consisted of 101.2 million salmon, totalling 450 million pounds. Since 1985, this is the lowest-ever total pounds harvested, and third-lowest total fish. 

As for the conversion of these salmon into profit for the people who catch or process them, those numbers are also down. In 2024, the statewide all-species “ex-vessel value” (the price fishermen get at the initial sale off the boat) was $304 million, down $94 million, or 23 percent, from 2023, and the third-lowest since 1975 when adjusted for inflation. 

The Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute annual report cites several causes for the poor performance of the industry: low demand, a strong US dollar (which depresses foreign sales), lingering inventory, and increased supply. 

The increased supply was a peripheral consequence of foreign conflict, according to Phil Doherty of the Alaska Seiners Association.

“Want to get into world politics?” he asked. “You’re not going to believe this. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia needed a lot of cash, so Russia started to dump a lot of their pink salmon on the market at a reduced price. We couldn’t compete.”

What has replaced salmon fishing as an economic driver? Any local could tell you: tourism. 

Every summer morning around nine, cruise ships pull up to the dock, towering over the two-story shops that line the waterfront, and spilling thousands of people onto the streets. The 2023 Ketchikan Visitors Bureau annual report shows that on peak summer days, roughly 16,000 cruise ship passengers explore the city, which has a population of 8,079.

Many local entrepreneurs take advantage of this, like Kamala Santos, who lived in Ketchikan for 15 years working in the tourism business. “We started a skip company back in the year 2000, taking tourists out on a 20-foot long skiff and teaching them to fish, and then pull up to a remote beach, and I would cook their fish. And so that became kind of a wilderness tour, if you will, for big cruise lines.”

For people like Santos, welcoming these tourists is obvious and natural. “I think it brings a stable economy, a vibrancy, of people coming to town and sharing the wealth, the resources of the Misty Fjords, of fishing, of native cultures, and funding those programs as well,” she said. “So I think it’s a worthy thing to be able to share the beauty of Alaska with so many people.

“A lot of people, it’s probably their first and last and only experience like that. To actually eat the fish you caught, just like an Alaskan would. And endure the weather in an open skiff, like an Alaskan would.”

For others, the change is harder to bear. “In the summertime, our relatively small town is overrun by tourists. But that’s the new economy here in the Southeast, so you have to accept it,” remarked Phil Doherty of the Alaska Seiners Association, in a November interview. “But at this time of the year, as soon as that last cruise ship leaves town, the whole downtown area just closes up. They’re probably 90 percent gift shops and tourists type of deals, so this town really buttons up at this time of year. We get to enjoy it when it’s dark and raining.” 

Tourists also become competition for salmon fishermen. As Doherty said, “If you’re going to come up here and go charter-boat fishing, whether you’re on a cruise ship, or you’re going to come up and go out to a lodge or something like that, you’re going to catch Chinook salmon and coho salmon. And that’s where the rub comes between the commercial trollers and the charter board industry.”

As charter fishing grows, so do concerns that sport fishing will exceed its share

The conflict between commercial and charter fishermen connects back to the allocation of resources as laid out by the Pacific Salmon Treaty. When the politics of who catches which salmon are already so fraught, bringing in large numbers of non-resident fishermen is not simple. The agreement is that 80 percent of the catch should go to commercial trollers (Alaskan fishermen), and 20 percent to charter fishermen (tourists), but it hasn’t been happening that way.

As Patrick Fowler of Alaska Fish and Game explained it, “In the three years that the plans have been in effect, the first year the sport fishery was significantly under, and then the last two years has been significantly over allocation. So it’s balanced out to be, you know, the average is about 22 percent of the allocation that the sport fisheries harvested.

“There’s a lot of people on both sides that are unhappy with that arrangement now,” Fowler said. 

In some ways, it seems that the fishing industry in Southeast Alaska is changing from a robust part of the economy into a relic kept alive for the pleasure of tourists. The history of Alaska can be laid out in terms of extractionist booms and busts – gold, salmon, timber, oil. While tourism does not scar the landscape with clearcuts and tailing ponds, the tourism industry is extracting and refining the idea of Southeast Alaska to be consumed by outsiders. Salmon fishing has been partially infected by the tourism industry’s touch, though the core of the traditional values and practices remain.

Matthew Scaletta, owner of a small gourmet cannery on Prince of Wales Island known as Wildfish Cannery, summed up the new reality: “I’m pretty sure a couple of the guys who fish for us, they do it for fun. Like, it’s get up early, go out, get to go out fishing for a few hours, and then it pays for the gas.” 

 

 

Edited by Felicity Barringer and Geoff McGhee.