7 July 2018. Valdez AK.
We left our bayside camping spot this morning in the fog, but we had a chance to stop by the Solomon Gulch fish hatchery on the way back to town. The salmon are not running real heavy yet, but there were plenty of predators looking for an easy meal. The fish hatchery salmon return to the fish hatchery, just like the wild salmon return to their birth lakes – all about 4 years after they left. The fish hatchery has a weir, too, to corral the salmon to a salmon ladder and back inside their tanks. We didn’t see any salmon in the salmon ladder, maybe because it was early on a Saturday and the fish hatchery people don’t work on Saturdays? But there were a bunch of salmon sitting at the weir trying to get in. The predators were lined up in the water, sort of according to size. Three huge Sea Lions were nearest the shore, a bunch of harbor Seals were about 150 ft offshore, and the playful sea otters were about 1/4 mile back:
We took a quick trip to the Valdez Glacier – mostly to see if the glacier campground was nice for later in the week. This glacier has receded back so you can’t really see the glacier from the parking area – but there were tourists out trying to kayak around the icebergs. We decided that it was too wet and rainy and crowded for us to unload our kayak today…
Well, it is officially our restocking day, so we hit the grocery store and car wash, then checked into a KOA so that we could do laundry and start our weekly housecleaning ritual.
