Project Description

Once the industrial soul of Ketchikan, this place is slowly being swallowed back by the wild.

The Ward Cove Pulp Mill rose in the 1950s, turning Southeast Alaska’s old-growth timber into pulp and paper that traveled the globe. At its height, it employed hundreds of workers and fundamentally altered the shoreline — an entire way of life built around its towering smokestacks.

It shut down in 1997. What’s left is steel, concrete, and quiet — rust creeping beneath moss, rain softening the edges, the forest steadily taking back what was once taken from it.