Ketchikan gets around 160 inches of rain a year and nobody who lives there is particularly bothered by it. That should tell you everything you need to know about the people this place produces.

It is the first Alaskan city most visitors see when the cruise ships come through Tongass Narrows, and it is genuinely one of the most visually striking entries into any place anywhere. The mountains come straight down into the water. Creek Street hangs over Ketchikan Creek on pilings and the salmon run directly underneath it every season like they are completing a commute. Totem Bight State Historical Park holds a collection of totem poles that represent Tlingit and Haida cultural history with a depth that a quick walk-through does not do justice to, but people keep coming back because the place demands it.

Strange Allies made this hoodie and sweatshirt for the people who did not just pass through. The graphic arches Ketchikan across the chest in heavily distressed varsity lettering, cracked and worn in a way that looks completely at home in a place that measures toughness by whether you stayed. Alaska sits below it in a roughed-up boxed stamp, edges worn, zero pretense. The whole design has the energy of gear pulled from a University of Alaska Southeast locker room that has been through a few decades of Southeast Alaska winters.

The Blueberry Arts Festival takes over downtown every August and turns the whole city into something unexpectedly alive. The Ketchikan Kings hockey program has built real community around it. Misty Fiords National Monument sits just outside town and is one of the more genuinely staggering places in North America, the kind of landscape that makes people go quiet and stay that way for a while. Fishing charters run out of here for king salmon and halibut in a serious way, not the tourist version.

People who grew up here and moved south wear this. Seasonal workers who did one summer in Ketchikan and have been comparing every job since wear this. Travelers who got off the ship, wandered off the main drag, and accidentally fell for the actual town wear this as their one honest souvenir.

Gift it to someone who has the rain in their bones and would not trade it.