A new place for Ketchikan visitors to rest their heads before exploring The Last Frontier.
How tourists dictate new development. With a growing number of tourists visiting Southeast Alaska, Best Western needed additional rooms at its Ketchikan hotel… and they needed them fast. With a schedule driven by the short tourism season in Alaska, Reid Middleton served as the structural engineer for designing this four-story wood frame hotel addition in less than two months. While many structures use a concrete transfer deck over parking, a structural steel solution was selected because of the high concrete prices in Ketchikan and the easy access to fabricated structural steel shipping from West Coast ports. An innovative long-span steel beam allowed a nearly 70-foot-wide column-free traffic circulation lane along the portion of the building closest to the original hotel.
