Magnum Enterprises

About Magnum Enterprises

Ketchikan gets called the rain capital of Alaska for good reason, but when a cold snap does grip the Tongass Narrows, the snow that falls on this steep hillside town behaves like nothing else in the state, wet and heavy one hour and glazed to ice the next as the temperature swings around freezing. Magnum Enterprises works the driveways and stairways cut into that hillside, where houses stack up above the water in tiers connected by staircases as much as streets. With the cruise docks quiet and Creek Street's boardwalk empty for the season, winter here is a private, working town, and getting a driveway clear before someone has to walk down to catch the ferry matters more than it would in a place with other options. Rain moving in behind a snowfall can turn a clean driveway into a sheet of ice within hours, so timing a return visit is as much a part of the job as the first pass. Cutting through that mix, keeping a hillside street passable while the Narrows sits gray and misted over below, is Ketchikan winter work in its truest form.