Bell Island Hot Springs: Ketchikan's Boat-In Soak Where You Dig Your Own Pool
- November 4, 2026
Bell Island Hot Springs is a primitive, undeveloped thermal spring on the shore of Bell Island in Behm Canal, roughly 20 to 25 miles from Ketchikan by boat. There is no fee, no dock, no bathhouse, no sign, and no maintained pool. Hot water seeps up through the intertidal gravel, and bathers dig their own soaking basins at low tide with a shovel. Access is by boat or floatplane only, the springs are usable year-round, and the experience is exactly as wild as that sounds. This is a soak you build yourself, on a beach the ocean reclaims twice a day.
A hot spring that runs on the tide
Bell Island sits near the southern end of Behm Canal in the Ketchikan Gateway Borough, a forested knob of land between Revillagigedo Island and the Alaska mainland. Behm Canal is a drowned glacial channel more than a hundred miles long, and the water at Bell Island is deep, green, and cold. Hot water rising out of that shoreline seems like a trick until you look at a fault map. Southeast Alaska rides the edge of the North American and Pacific plates, and the Queen Charlotte-Fairweather Fault system runs offshore. Rainwater percolates down through fractured bedrock along those fault lines, heats at depth, and rises back to the surface. The U.S. Geological Survey has documented close to a hundred thermal springs across Alaska, and Southeast Alaska holds a cluster of them: Baranof Warm Springs, Tenakee Springs, White Sulfur Springs, Chief Shakes near Wrangell. Bell Island belongs to that family.
What makes Bell Island different is that the spring emerges inside the intertidal zone, below the reach of most high tides. The result is a hot spring whose availability depends on the moon as much as on geology. Ketchikan tides average around 15 feet of vertical exchange and can swing past 18 feet on the biggest pulls, which means the beach transforms twice daily. At high water the seeps are buried under cold seawater and there is nothing to soak in. As the tide falls, the ocean pulls back and exposes gravel that stays improbably warm to the touch, with seeps trickling out of the beach face. The source water comes up hot, hot enough that it must be diluted with seawater before a human can sit in it. No official temperature reading is published for these springs, so treat every pool you dig as untested water: start cool, add hot, and test with a hand or toe before committing anything else.
Getting there: the run from Ketchikan
Ketchikan is the base, and it is an easy town to reach by Southeast Alaska standards, with scheduled jet service, the Alaska Marine Highway ferry, and a summer cruise port. From there the trip to Bell Island is 20-odd miles of mostly protected Inside Passage water, depending on the route you choose up Tongass Narrows and around into Behm Canal or out through Clarence Strait. In a chartered boat or a rental skiff, that is a comfortable hour to an hour and a half of running, past salmon trollers, buoy haulers, and the occasional humpback working the channel. Local charter operators run wildlife and hot spring trips out of Ketchikan and know the beach, and a floatplane drop on sheltered water nearby is a real option for groups that want to trade boat time for flight time.
Strong sea-kayak parties do paddle this stretch, but treat that as an expedition, not a day trip. Behm Canal carries boat traffic, wind fetch, and cold-water consequences, and the Southeast Alaska margin for error is thin. There is no dock or mooring buoy at the springs, so you will anchor off the beach or pull your skiff well above the tide line. Remember that the same tide that exposes the springs will float anything you leave too low. Carry current charts, a VHF radio, a marine forecast you actually checked, and a float plan left with someone in town.
The soak: dig, test, adjust
The beach itself is narrow and gray, backed by a wall of old-growth western hemlock and Sitka spruce dripping with moss, part of the Tongass National Forest: nearly 17 million acres of temperate rainforest, the largest national forest in the country. On a cold morning the seep line announces itself as a ribbon of steam crawling off the gravel. The method is simple and old. Pick a spot where the sand and gravel run warm, dig a basin a couple of feet down with a folding shovel, line the edges with rocks, and let the seep and the residual seawater negotiate a temperature. You control it by breaching the seaward wall to admit cold water, or by packing the wall tighter to let the hot seep dominate.
The last time I dug in on a dropping tide, the pool filled scalding and I spent ten minutes teasing the rock wall open a finger at a time, letting the cold Pacific seep through until the water crossed from painful to perfect. I got maybe forty minutes of that, long enough to watch a humpback blow its way down the channel. Then the tide turned, the first cold tongue slid over the wall, and the visit was over. That is the rhythm here. The ocean gives you a window and then takes the beach back, and the etiquette is to let it. Knock down your pool or leave it for the tide, pack out everything you brought, and take only the soak.
Timing the tide
Timing is the whole game. Pull the NOAA tide table for Ketchikan before you go and plan to arrive an hour and a half to two hours ahead of low water, so you can dig while the beach is still draining and soak through the slack. The best visits come on big exchanges: the new and full moon tides, and the winter king tides, when the ocean pulls unusually far back and exposes gravel that ordinary lows never reveal. Night soaks are memorable and entirely doable with headlamps, but only if someone in the group owns the tide table and a watch. At roughly 56 degrees north latitude you get more than 17 hours of daylight at the summer solstice, and on clear winter nights the steam off your own dug pool occasionally rises under a sky worth staying up for.
Weather, wildlife, and staying safe
Ketchikan receives around 140 inches of rain in an average year, and Bell Island gets its share, so plan on precipitation and dress for immersion rather than for comfort. The genuine hazard here is cold water. Even in July the sea runs in the fifties, and a soaked bather standing in a wet wind loses heat fast. Wear a wetsuit layer or dry clothes staged on the boat, keep flotation on the water, and treat the beach like what it is: an intertidal zone with a current running through it. Black bears work the shoreline and brown bears live on the mainland side of the canal, so handle food carefully, make noise, and carry spray. There is no cell service out here; a VHF on channel 16 or a satellite messenger is the difference between an inconvenience and an incident. The spring water is untested and untreated. Soak in it, don't drink it, and expect some sulfur in the smell, which is normal for fault-fed water in this region.
History and the hot spring circuit
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Southeast Alaska's thermal springs drew a wave of bathhouse development, and local accounts describe a small resort and bathhouse operation near the Bell Island beach in the early 1900s, when fishing fleets and cannery crews from Ketchikan rode steamers out for the water. Storms, time, and remoteness removed nearly all of it. What remains is the spring itself, undeveloped and working exactly as it did before anyone built anything. Today Bell Island is a stop on the small-boat and Inside Passage cruising circuit, usually paired with a run toward Misty Fjords National Monument, 2.3 million acres of cliffs and fjords whose famous basalt spire, New Eddystone Rock, rises from Behm Canal's waters to the northeast. For hot spring travelers, Bell Island belongs on a Southeast circuit that also takes in Baranof Warm Springs, Tenakee, and Chief Shakes. The spring here keeps no schedule but the ocean's. Plan around the tide, bring a shovel, and you get one of the most honest soaks in Alaska.