Valdez – Ulen Adventures

9 July 2018. Valdez AK

9 July 2018. Last day in Valdez AK.

We started our last day here with just a little rain, so we left the KOA and did some touring. The town of Valdez was completely destroyed by an earthquake in 1964, and the whole town was rebuilt four miles away. The old town is memorialized with little pictures of many of the buildings that used to be there posted on small signs where the buildings used to be. You leave thinking how nature takes back what is hers…

We also took a short hike on the Dock Point Trail – there were no berries yet, so we weren’t too worried about bears.

View of Harbor Cove from Dock Point Trail

Chuck at West Overlook of Dock Point Trail (not the happiest I’ve seen him)

Cow Parsnip – all over the place here. The sap from this plant can cause burns on you.

We stopped at the harbor and watched some boats going out

The rain was clearing a bit, so we decided to try to drive up the Mineral Creek Trail:

There was a rickety bridge we got to use to cross over Mineral Creek

Mineral Creek Trail was quite narrow in places

Many of the waterfalls were covered in mist

One of the waterfalls that wasn’t covered in mist

As it started to rain again, we picked one of the three museums in town, the Maxine and Jesse Whitney Museum and took a quick tour. Filled with some interesting memorabilia from the Whitney’s collection. Then we picked a campground for the night that backed onto the harbor channel so we could watch the boats come in (through our camper window!) Tomorrow we catch our last Ferry at 6 am!

8 July 2018. Valdez AK

8 July 2018. Valdez KOA.

It’s raining and we are still restocking, today we concentrate on paying bills and doing paperwork. This gives us a chance to figure out how to get pictures off the dash cam! Here is the Momma and baby moose from Friday:

Our third week’s journey looks like this

It’s hard to get perspective just showing a week – here is our journey so far

We also saw a black bear today in our campground. That makes five black bear for the trip so far.

Black bear wandering through our campground

Because you are asking, here is our current wildlife count:

Chuck near Valdez – its so pretty here when it isn’t raining!

7 July 2018. Valdez AK

Our camping spot across the bay from Valdez

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:

Harbor Seals waiting for a turn to catch salmon

Salmon trying to get through the weir at the fish hatchery- I know,it’s hard to see them, but they are there.

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…

Valdez Glacier – A group of kayakers were paddling around icebergs

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.

6 July 2018. Valdez

6 July 2018. Valdez AK

Our journey took us today along a short span of the Richardson Highway to Valdez. (Pronounced Valdeeze to rhyme with sneeze!).

Suddenly a moose and her baby running down the road in front of us – couldn’t get the camera going fast enough – so only captured mom.

This is what dash cams are for – you can sort of see both moose here. Trouble is, we don’t know how to get pictures off the dash cam…

We didn’t have far to drive this morning, so we stopped at a couple of sites along the road: Worthington Glacier and a couple of waterfalls.

We did stop at the Worthington Glacier visitor center to get a closer look.

Lots of water coming down this one!

We took a quick tour around Valdez to find the grocery store and scope things out, but we decided to spend the first night across the harbor. We parked along the bank and watched the sea otters play!