THE KETCHIKAN GATEWAY BOROUGH LAND BRIEF
Land in the
Coastal Western Hemlock-Sitka Spruce Forests setting.
Ketchikan Gateway Borough has 4,857.1 square miles of land in Alaska. 2 mapped landscape regions meet across Ketchikan Gateway Borough: Coastal Western Hemlock-Sitka Spruce Forests, Pacific Coastal Mountains.
Deep bays, steep valley walls and an irregular shoreline reveal intense past glaciation. Wet maritime forests of hemlock and Sitka spruce characterize southeastern and south-central coastal Alaska.
Regional context: Coastal Western Hemlock-Sitka Spruce Forests ↗ · Regional mapping across the county footprint
Where the landscape changes
Ketchikan Gateway Borough intersects 2 mapped regional units. The largest mapped shares are:
- Coastal Western Hemlock-Sitka Spruce Forests61.8%
- Pacific Coastal Mountains38.2%
Pacific Coastal Mountains in Ketchikan Gateway Borough
Coastal Alaska's steep, wet mountains include large areas of glacial terrain. Rocky slopes and ice-covered highlands contrast with lower shrub-covered settings where vegetation can establish.
Read the regional source ↗Finding your parcel within Ketchikan Gateway Borough
The atlas lists 3 cities, towns, townships, and Census communities associated with Ketchikan Gateway Borough, including Ketchikan, Saxman, Loring. The list includes overlapping geography types and does not divide the county into exclusive service areas.
Ketchikan Gateway Borough by land and water
The Census records 1,820.5 square miles of water within Ketchikan Gateway Borough, or 27.3% of its total area. That share is close to Ketchikan Gateway Borough’s 27.3%. This is geographic context; waterfront status and usable land must be checked at the parcel.
For scale, Ketchikan Gateway Borough has 5,022.8 times the land area of nearby Saxman city (0.97 square miles). These areas describe boundaries, not comparable property prices.
The Census boundary meets Prince of Wales-Hyder Census Area, Wrangell City and Borough within Alaska. A tract near one of these lines should be matched to the county identifier on its own records.