Ketchikan sits at the bottom of the Alaska Panhandle like it got there first and decided to stay. It is the first port of call on the Inside Passage and for a lot of people it is the first piece of real Alaska they ever touch. That first impression tends to be permanent.

Creek Street is built on pilings over Ketchikan Creek and it has the kind of history that a town either leans into or tries to bury. Ketchikan leans in. The creek runs with salmon every summer and watching the fish push upstream through the middle of town is one of those experiences that realigns something in your brain about where you are and what the world actually looks like outside of concrete.

The Ketchikan Indian Community and the broader Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian cultural presence here is not background detail. Totem Bight State Historical Park and Saxman Totem Park hold some of the finest collections of standing totem poles anywhere in the world. The Southeast Alaska Discovery Center puts the whole region into context in a way that takes time to fully absorb.

People kayak the surrounding waterways, fish the streams and bays, hike the Deer Mountain Trail above town, and fly out to Misty Fiords National Monument on floatplanes that take off from the harbor like it's a completely normal Tuesday. At the University of Alaska Southeast Ketchikan Campus, students are getting their education in a rainforest. That sentence is just true.

Strange Allies made this shirt for the commercial fishermen, the forest service workers, the artists who settled here because nowhere else made sense, and the travelers who came for a cruise stop and started researching ferry schedules home.

Distressed vintage print. Retro athletic arch. Alaska below Ketchikan like the state is vouching for the city.

Men/unisex, long sleeve, kids. Strange Allies. The First City on a shirt.