Valdez, Alaska...the pinks are in!

Worthington Glacier

Tiekel River

On Sunday, we awoke to partly blue skies with the pretty Tiekel River flowing swiftly past us. After a quick breakfast, we continued down the Richardson Highway toward Valdez. The road took us next to the huge Worthington Glacier, one of the most accessible of Alaska's more than 10,000 glaciers. We stopped at an overlook with several other tourists and admired it for a while.

Worthington Glacier

In 1919, the Richardson Highway, following the path of the old Keystone Canyon Trail, became Alaska's first highway and Valdez became the primary port for traffic into and out of the state's interior. The road also goes through Thompson Pass just north of Valdez, originally a Native Alaskan trading route that was mapped in 1899 as a path for gold rushers to the Klondike gold fields. The Pass also has the dubious distinction of being the snowiest spot in Alaska, receiving over 550 inches of snow per year on average. A local told us the snowplowers use GPS devices to find and plow the roads 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in winter. Yikes.

Bridal Veil Falls
along Thompson Pass

We continued our descent through the Chugach Mountains toward Valdez at the coast and came across the beautiful Bridal Veil Falls on our left. These falls are simply the largest of many beautiful waterfalls along the green Thompson Pass. So pretty.

As we neared Valdez, the Prince William Sound came into view with the towering Chugach Mountains forming a ring around Port Valdez. Even with the cloudy day we could tell the scenery was spectacular. We settled into the Bear Paw RV Park, a friendly place right next to the small boat harbor. The staff person gave us all manner of great recommendations, from places to eat to free things to do in town. We walked around and made our way to an excellent lunch at Old Town Burgers, a very casual restaurant in a trailer offering an extremely tasty salmon burger. Yum!

We spent the afternoon catching up with laundry and other chores before walking around the small boat harbor in the drizzle. The clouds and rain are very typical of Valdez in the summer with the temperature at just about 50 degrees, but apparently this has been an unusually rainy season. After a nice home-cooked meal of pork chops and then our standard happy hour and cards, we turned into pumpkins.

On Monday, with the drizzle and heavy clouds firmly in place, we decided to take in the town's free museum, the Maxine & Jesse Whitney Museum at the Prince William Sound Community College. The exhibits focus on the vast private collection of the Whitneys over the course of their life in Alaska. Maxine amassed arts and crafts from all the far reaches of the state. After purchasing the business from her friend Alma Eades, Maxine traveled by bush plane to remote villages buying Alaskan artifacts to put in her gift shop in Fairbanks. The museum now holds the entirety of her collection, including animals, mammoth tusks, arrowheads, ivory carvings, whalebone masks, Inupiaq dolls, elaborate fur parkas and all manner of other native items.

Ivory tupilaqs and other carvings

While there we watched two films showing in the little auditorium. The first was 'Prince William Sound, Up Close', a film shot over 10 years with 14 different cameras by one man. He shows a broad cross-section of the beauty and life that thrives in the Sound. We saw hundreds of different species of birds, sea lions, sea otters, and whales, as well as the underwater plants and animals. He filmed glacier calving, where giant chunks of ice fall off a glacier and into the water causing enormous waves and a spectacular crashing sound. The second film was another documentary called 'Eating Alaska', shot by a former vegetarian from the lower 48 who moved to Alaska and married a man who supports himself by harvesting sea cucumbers, trawling for shrimp, and hunting big game. Like an Alaskan version of 'Food Inc.', we were totally engrossed in the movie and chatted at length afterwards about the dilemmas it raised for folks trying to eat locally in sustainable ways. Fascinating.

After a disappointing and very high priced 'Thai' lunch made by some friendly folks at Mai Thai, we headed over to the Solomon Gulch Fish Hatchery. The hatchery produces pink (pinks) and silver (coho) salmon for the Common Property for commercial and sport fishing purposes. Those fish return to the hatchery beginning each June through the end of August.

Port Valdez near the fish hatchery

Pink salmon spawning

We drove 5 miles outside of Valdez and around to the opposite side of the Valdez Port where we watched the seagulls picking at the fish remains on the muddy flats of the low tide. As we neared the hatchery, a large electronic sign warned us of a brown bear and her four cubs spotted in the area feeding on the spawning salmon. Fortunately, there was no mama brown bear today and so we could get out of the car and walk over to the rocks where several fishermen had taken her place. The pink salmon, in their sheer desperation to reach their birthplace to spawn, clump together and swarm over each other in the water. With such big numbers of fish returning at the same time, they create little waves in the water where hundreds, or even thousands, of them in each bunch struggle to reach the mouth of the hatchery and up the little inlet.

Sea lions, seagulls and a bald eagle
(white head on left)

Just beyond the Solomon Gulch Fish Hatchery we parked next to the fish weir, a contraption used to control the number of salmon who reach the hatchery successfully. The fish weir looks like a big metal grate held up a foot or so above the surface of the water so that the salmon swimming upstream have to jump over it in order to reach their spawning grounds. Those who can't surmount the obstacle end up squished together with thousands of their closest friends trying in vain to swim through the rocks or the net on the side of the weir.

Pinks bunched at the weir

Carcass-munching seagulls

We watched as these fishies all swam over each other in the shallow water, flopped on the rocks or through the small spaces between the rocks. Some became stuck between the rocks gasping for air, so a compassionate 10 year old boy saved a few of them by grabbing them by the tail and flinging them back into the fray of the deeper water. As interesting as they are to watch (and even to try to save), they are all close to death with the spawning as their last hurrah.

More pink salmon

We walked around on the big rocks next to the fish weir. As we turned our attention out to the port, we could see thousands of seagulls flying above others feeding on salmon carcasses. Incredibly, off in the distance we spotted 10 or 12 sea lions in the water and a bald eagle sitting on the rocks in the low tide. As exciting as the birds and the sea lions were to see, I was thoroughly mesmerized by the fish. What an experience!

Solomon Gulch Fish Hatchery

After all that excitement, we drove to the former townsite of Valdez. On March 27, 1964, at 5:36pm a magnitude 9.2 earthquake occurred suddenly about 45 miles west of the town. The result was devastating. The town was originally settled by gold rushers in 1898 who pitched their tents on the gravel delta of the Valdez River. When more permanent buildings took the place of the tents, the town grew and became the northernmost ice free port in Alaska.

Since the town and its docks had been built on the 10,000 year old deposits of a glacial river, the earthquake liquefied the unstable ground under it. Though glacial silt and gravel had caused settling problems for years, the earthquake actually caused an underwater landslide of the loose soil into the ocean. This landslide resulted in a tsunami away from the town that, when the water returned, flooded the rest of the buildings not destroyed by the quake. Sadly, the 30 people standing on the city dock watching the unloading of the large cargo ship, the Chena, were immediately swept away and drowned; two others on the ship were killed by shifting cargo during the event.

The ship was shoved into the dock and briefly grounded by the outgoing tsunami before the incoming water freed it. The devastation to the town was monumental, but the changes that came later have shown the endurance of the Valdez people. Following the earthquake, geologists discovered the instability of the ground on which the town had been built and recommended the entire town be moved. In 1967, Valdez moved to the new townsite, where it remains. The New Valdez is located about 4 miles west of the old site and, most importantly, on stable bedrock. All that remains of the Old Valdez site are the empty foundations of several buildings, some pilings where the dock once stood and a couple of signs about the town's history.

We returned to the RV to get ready for Tuesday's big adventure. Ken cooked us a nice salmon dinner, followed by happy hour and watching the Olympics, before we headed to bed.

Except for the constant drizzle and heavy clouds obscuring the view, what a great day!