Valdez

Friday-Saturday, August 6-7.  We headed down the Richardson Highway to Valdez today, leaving the Brundiges (and the squirrel) behind.  We had forgotten what a pretty drive this highway is, although it is rough with frost heaves.  Lots of beautiful mountains, waterfalls, raging rivers and streams.

We are back on the pipeline route, and we see it from time to time.  We have now traveled the entire 800 miles of this route, which is pretty cool.  Here is Pump Station 12.  None of the pump stations allow tours since 9/11, unfortunately.  Joe would have really been interested in seeing the inner-workings of one of these stations.

This is Mt. Billy Mitchell in front of us.

The Worthington Glacier is along this highway, and we started seeing it several miles out.

We stopped and walked down to the viewpoint, but we didn't walk out to the glacier.  It has receded a lot since our 1998 visit.  You can see an ice cave in the second picture.

We crossed Thompson Pass, which is only 2,678 ft elevaton, but it is credited with "snowfall extremes" in Alaska.  The records here at Thompson Pass are:  974.5 inches for one season (1952-53); 298 inces for one month (Feb. 1953; and 62 inches for a 24-hour period (Dec. 1955).  How would you like to face that shoveling job!

Coming down off the Pass is Keystone Canyon, a very beautiful canyon with cascading waterfalls.  Here are two that are on many postcards.  The first is Bridal Veil Falls, and the second is Horsetail Falls.

Valdez is where the pipeline ends, and Old Valdez was devastated by the 1964 earthquake, so there is now a New Valdez.  We were able to stay at a military campground here, which looks like it is just a state campground that the military put in some more spaces at, and allows a military/DoD discount.  It was very woodsy, scenic, with a waterfall ending right in the campground.  You can see Valdez Glacier from this campground.

We had another maintenance issue here.  Actually, we just figured out the problem here.  We had trouble getting our living room slide to come in all the way, so when we got here, Joe got underneath the RV to check things out.  He discovered that one of the rear airbags had a wear-hole worn through, and that airbag was completely flat.  This isn't a stopper, fortunately, he just let the air out of the opposing airbag to just a maintenance level, and we can deal with it when we get home.  It does make the RV ride a little rougher.

While he was under the RV, a bear and cub came into the camp site two spots down, but of course we all missed it.  Sure scared the mother and little girl pretty good, though.  She said the bears had been by the day before as well.
Since is wasn't raining, David started a campfire, which blazed briefly (with the help of charcoal lighter fluid) but we never really got it going.  David and Ar'gent are resting after all his hard work.

I made taco salad for dinner and Mazie thought it was picture-perfect, so here it is. It was pretty yummy.

I also made a pretty lemon bundt cake, and I missed having Kaylee here to help me with the baking.

Saturday morning we drove out to the Valdez Glacier, just right outside the campground.  There was a glacier lake there, with icebergs scattered across it.  (Joe didn't know if they were actually "icebergs," because he thought they probably were not floating, but we don't know that.)

Mazie is holding a piece of glacial ice in this picture.

From there, we drove out to the old Valdez town site, which was destroyed in the 1964 earthquake.  We had been here on our last trip, so we didn't spend much time taking pictures here.  You can see a tanker out in the bay.  There's a refinery across the bay, but the pictures of that didn't come out very well.

Then we drove out toward the salmon fish hatchery.  The tide was low and there were lots of salmon in the creek right across from the bay.

There were also a lot of dead salmon where the water had receded with the tide.  We don't know if these salmon had spawned and died naturally, or if they got left high and dry when the tide went out.  It smelled pretty bad from the dead fish, and there were lots of seagulls eating them.

We drove a little further down this road and saw lots of people fishing.  These were the pinks coming in, and they were so thick that snagging them was not very challenging.   The blue building in the background is the salmon fish hatchery.  More about that later.

The numbers of fish in front of the fish hatchery were amazing -- there were literally thousands, maybe tens of thousands, trying to get up the fish weir to get upstream.  You can see how hard they were working here, but one would get over it every once in a while.

They had a sign posted with the number of eggs they try to retrieve here.  I think it was 300 million total; 230 million pinks, but we can't remember the other numbers.

Mazie picked up a brochure that gave the numbers, so here's what it says:  "The goals of the Valdez Fisheries Development Association are to produce an annual return of 10 million pink, 300,000 chum, 100,000 silver and 10,000 king salmon.  The hatchery, completed in 1983, is licensed to incubate and rear to release size 230 million pink, 18 million chum, 2 million silver and 300,000 king salmon eggs.  Each femal egg yields about 1700 eggs.  The eggs are fertilized and placed into incubators.  The babies, called fry, spend about a month in salt water rearing pens where they're fed until release.  About 50% of returning adults are caught by commercial fishermen.  Marine survival (adults back from fry released) averages 4% for pinks, 10% for silvers, and 2% for chums. "

There was a beautiful waterfall that was part of the water source here.  We saw two eagles in the trees near this waterfall when we came back in the evening.

Once these fish got up over this weir, they were pretty well stopped by the waterfall.  There were diversion panels on each side of this weir, but the one toward the building went into a fish ladder that took them right into the fish hatchery.

The fish ladder had several stages, probably about a dozen, each one elevating a little more, until they reach the top, where there were 6-8 lanes that fed into the hatchery.  There were fish all along here, some of the segments were almost full, while others had just a few.  This area is marked as dangerous for bears, and the bears often come in here to feed.  It would certainly be easy pickings for them right now.

Finally, since we didn't see any bears, we headed into town for some lunch.  There are so many creeks and rivers in Alaska, I guess they finally ran out of names for them.

This water was sorta brown, brackish looking, but there were even a few salmon in it.

After we had lunch, we walked down to the harbor, and one of the boats had just brought in its catch of the day.  They weighed this halibut, 172 lbs.  But the record for the season had been caught the day before, I think it was 363 lbs, which is a new record for Valdez.

On our way out of town, we stopped at the U.S. Forest Service salmon spanning viewing center (just missed a bear here, too).  There were lots of fish here, just swimming around, with males swimming through every once in a while and scattering all the fish.  They had an underwater camera that we watched inside their center, but I really didn't see any fish release its eggs.  Outside, we saw the females laying on their side, making their nest, and Joe thought he might have seen some eggs released.  They were also having a Dutch Oven cooking demonstration up in the woods, so we walked up the trail to that.  Joe went exploring a little further to check out the waterfall (but he didn't run into that bear here either).

Finally, we went back to camp, and Mazie and I gathered up our laundry and headed out to the laundramat back down at the main highway.  Just outside the campground, however, we finally saw a bear and cub!  It ran up the little hill, right into the campground, so we turned around and went back to see if we could find them.  And we did!

Apparently, some campers had left some food outside their tent and the bears were very interested in it.  The mama bear was a little spooked by us sitting in the car watching, but the cub just did not want to leave the goodies in the backpack!

This was about 5 sites down from our campsite and I kept trying to call Joe, but we kept losing our phone signal.  Finally, I just drove down there, honked for him to come out, and he jumped in the car to go see the bears (in his sock feet).  Dave also came out in his sock feet, but he just told us to run them his way (unfortunately, that didn't happen).  So we got back down there, and the cub was still working on that backpack.

I think this is the mama bear, but the picture isn't real good.  She was a little more cautious.

Finally, we thought we should try to scare them off so they didn't destroy these people's tent, so Joe yelled and banged on the side of the car, and they took off.

I dropped Joe back off at the RV and Mazie and I finally got our laundry done.  After dinner, we drove back down to the salmon hatchery area to see if any bears showed up there.  We got lucky.  We found another black bear across the road from the hatchery.  We followed him for a while as he munched on berries and vegetation, but finally he got to the creek we had stopped at that morning, and he had his salmon dinner.  We watched him eat 5 salmon before we left, some of them he just ate part of, some he just ate the eggs that squirted out, and the last one we watched him, he seemed to be eating the entire thing.  It was great fun to get to see this.

It was a good day!