Rick & Carol's Journey (DL)

[Be sure to click on the photos for larger versions.]

This installment covers Friday (July 4) and Saturday (July 5).

Friday the 4th of July started with a bus tour of Valdez and its surrounds. The tour took us outside the fence of the Alyeska Marine Terminal. The terminal facilities store up to 9.8 million barrels of crude oil arriving via the 48” diameter Alaska Pipeline from Prudhoe Bay, and transfer it to oil tankers. At its height in the 1980s, the pipeline delivered over 2 million barrels a day; now it is handling less than 1 million. Valdez was chosen for the terminal for the same reason as it was a jumping off point for the gold fields 100 years earlier – it is the northernmost ice free harbor in the United States.

Marine Terminal From Across the River

From the bus we also saw a fish hatchery and fish ladder. It’s a little too soon in the season for salmon to be making it upstream, although purse seine fishing has started in the harbor. We then visited the site of Old Valdez, which was abandoned two years after a massive earthquake in 1964 destroyed the docks and damaged most of the town. Finally we drove around downtown Valdez, and saw the staging area for the small 4th of July parade.


After the bus tour, Carol and I went walking around the small downtown area.

We visited the Old Valdez portion of the Valdez Museum, where we watched an interesting film on Valdez from its founding in the gold rush days until its demise after the 1964 earthquake. After lunch at Ernesto’s Mexican Restaurant, we walked through the small downtown block party. This was followed by visits to the Whitney Museum, which contains a large collection of native Alaskan art and artifacts, and to the main portion of the Valdez Museum, which has more on the history of the area and the Alaska pipeline.




We finished our tour with a stop at Ruth Lake, where a canoe jousting contest was being staged.



This evening we went to an ice cream social with our caravan and stayed up late for the 11:00 p.m. fireworks show launched from a hill just behind our RV park.


Saturday was a 9-hour boat tour of Prince William Sound, including wildlife viewing, the icebergs broken off from Columbia Glacier, the face of Mears Glacier, and purse seine fishing boats.

Our Tailender Taking A Well-Deserved Nap

The wildlife included sea otters, sea lions, and humpback whales. We got more good whale pictures today than on any previous whale-watching trip.





Columbia Glacier is receding and icebergs that have separated from the glacier have formed a small wall of ice about 10 miles from the face of the glacier.



Mears Glacier, on the other hand, is advancing and we were able to get within a quarter mile of the glacier’s face.




Commerical purse seine fishing is underway for pink (sockeye) salmon. A purse seine is a 1200 foot net that is set out in a semicircle, then drawn closed to catch salmon in the “purse”. In addition to seeing boats setting and recovering their nets, we watched a full boat off-loading its catch to a processor’s buying boat.



On our return to the Valdez small boat harbor, we got a photo of our RV sitting on the shore.