Valdez AK

.


OK, I am again hopelessly behind in this journal. The combination of too much fun and near continuous daylight continue to confound my efforts to update the blog. Alright, I also do procrastinate a bit too. In any case I will give a thumbnail sketch of our travels during the last month, and then get on with our current adventures. Maybe, just maybe, I can go back and flesh in the details and post some pictures.



By the way. Google maps has made a change such that when I post our location ("Where the Heck Are We???"), the current location is no longer at the top of the list. Now it can be found only at the bottom of the list on the left side of the list of locations. I will continue to place our current location near the center of the maps. All of our locations, current and past, can be found somewhere in the list and are dated.



OK the 60 second update and some photos: We left Talkeetna and drove to Eagle River, a suburb about 10 miles north of Anchorage. A friend from high school in North Carolina has a house on a mountainside outside Eagle River, and we parked in a paved level spot on his driveway. From his house we can see Mt. McKinley, over 170 miles away and volcanoes Mt. Redoubt, Mt. Iliamna and Mt. Spurr. He wined and dined us for the next six nights while we made tourist trips into Anchorage and points nearby. Upon leaving Eagle River we headed down to the Kenai Peninsula and Seward. We hit Seward for the 4th of July weekend, probably not the smartest thing to do. Seward hosts the Mount Marathon race each 4th, and it's the biggest event in Seward all year. Seward has about 800 campsites in about a dozen city-owned campgrounds around town. All were full. We camped for five nights at a paved pullout on the side of the Resurrection River, a wonderful spot. The highlight of our stay in Seward was a wildlife and glacier tour where we saw a ton of wildlife. Actually many specimens were over a ton. We left Seward and drove to Homer. There we camped on the "Spit" for 5 mights. We watched the tide come in and out from our front window while the harbor seals munched on salmon. Homer claims to be the Halibut capitol of the world, and we watched the big fish come off the boats each evening. We then headed to Cooper Landing at the confluence of the Kenai and Russian Rivers. There we camped with Safari TREK friends from back east who are traveling throughout Alaska in a caravan. While there we paddled a 13-mile section of the Kenai River. We then headed back to Eagle River and my friend's house on the mountain, where we stayed for nine more nights of cushy camping and good companionship with an old friend and his family. As we were preparing to leave a moose cow and two calves came through the driveway and ambled over between our coach and our car. Unfortunately, all our cameras were in the coach and momma wouldn't let us anyway near there. Finally we left and headed for Valdez for another rendezvous with our TREK friends. Whew!



We are now camped at Bayside RV Park in Valdez. Valdez is an extraordinarily scenic town. We are within walking distance of the downtown and the harbor. Valdez was founded as an "All American" route to the Klondike gold fields. The Valdez Glacier turned out to be a formidable obstacle, and few miners completed the journey. On Good Friday 1964 Alaska suffered a 9.2 earthquake, the largest ever recorded in North America. 30 people were killed in Valdez when a section of the city near the waterfront sloughed off into the harbor. "Old Valdez" had been built on unstable glacial till. The city was relocated to a town site built on bedrock shortly after the disaster. Ironically, another tragedy occurred here on Good Friday when the Exxon Valdez struck Bligh Reef in 1989, causing the largest human-caused environmental disaster of its time.



Valdez is now known principally as the southern terminal of the Alaska oil pipeline. Other main activities are fishing and tourism. We haven't been fishing, but our TREK friends have. Their freezers are full and we have benefited from their lack of cold storage capacity. Fresh grilled wild salmon is pretty good! Each evening we have gone over to the Solomon Gulch hatchery on the far side of the bay to watch the salmon run and the bears come down to feed on them. Big fun.



We have been here for 4 nights and it is time to move again. We might head over on the Edgerton Highway towards Chitina and McCarthy near the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.