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20030717 Open new window with today’s pictures.
July 17, 2003
Thursday
Start: Kenny Lake RV Park & Mercantile, Kenny Lake AK
End: Bear Paw CG, Valdez AK
Miles: 90
Hi Temp: 66.2
Lo Temp: 51.1
We only moved a small distance today, but it got us into a different world.
We got up and ate with the cook (from East Texas) in the cafe. Then we hitched up and returned to the Richardson Highway and headed south on it. We loafed along, knowing we only had 90 miles to cover.
After an hour or so, we started into the Chugach Range along the coast. We ascended slowly to Thompson Pass. Just before we got to it, we came across Worthington Glacier sliding off a mountain into the valley. Took pictures.
Thompson Pass gets the most snow in Alaska. It has the record 24-hour snowfall of more than five feet. The record annual fall is something like 780 inches (95 feet). There are poles put into the right-of-way on each side to guide snowplows; they go up 20 feet and curve in toward the center of the road. The pass isn’t particularly high (2,600').
Then the road drops like a rock down to sea level and runs along the Valdez inlet, off Prince William Sound. You'll remember that as the site of the Exxon Valdez oil spill catastrophe.
We found our campground (not easy, as there are seven of them in or close to town). It's next to the small-boat harbor in town. As we were setting up, we found the microwave not working. Turned out that a frying pan had shifted in a cabinet and unplugged the microwave.
Then, we walked the business section of town. We checked out the local outfitter's store (lots of high-quality wear suitable for various outdoors activities) and gift shops. We got cash out of an ATM. We checked out the local surplus store, with the usual esoteric mixture of goods from ammo boxes to neon raingear.
We had let our supply of wine and beer run out as we entered the country, so we replenished that. We located the grocery store and church for future use.
The weather, once we topped the pass, went to light rain and low clouds. It's supposed to stay that way tomorrow and ease up on Saturday with partly sunny. Temperatures will be in the 50's and 60's. This is typical near-coastal Alaska weather.
We returned to the little house in the parking lot campground on Kobuk Street. We read and took it easy most of the afternoon. Then we had a simple dinner in the little house.
After that, we toured the small-boat harbor and signed up for a Glacier Tour and Prince William Sound cruise for Saturday afternoon. Supposed to see sea otters, sea lions, ice, etc.
We tried to sign up for the Monday ferry to Whittier but it was full. We signed up for the Tuesday morning ferry instead. We'll find ways to amuse ourselves here.
Then the usual computer chores and settling in. Dolores has cable with many channels, so that's making noise in the background.
20030718 Open new window with today’s pictures.
July 18, 2003
Friday
Start: Bear Paw RV Park, Valdez AK
End: Bear Paw RV Park, Valdez AK
Miles: 0
Hi Temp: 68.5
Lo Temp: 49.8
It was cool and cloudy this morning, but it cleared up (much to everyone's surprise) in the late morning.
We ate breakfast in, and then took the truck back up to Thompson Pass. We looked at scenery and historic places we hadn't known about yesterday. We even went past the summit to Worthington Glacier again. We were surprised to find a state recreation area there, with good viewpoints of the glacier, and quite close to the face of it.
We came back to town and drove out Mineral Creek Road to go to a trail. About two miles out this bumpy gravel road, we came to a bridge that looked as though it were going to collapse. Then we saw a tremendous steel beam under the wooden deck. We were still unsure about the integrity of the thing, since the right side was a foot above the left side. We could see that some folks had been bypassing the bridge and fording the creek on the downstream side. Discretion being the better part of cowardice (or something like that), we turned around and returned to town.
We drove around for a bit, and found the ferry loading area where we'll get on board next Tuesday. While riding, we found the convention center and a trail across from it that we'll do one of these days.
We went then to a trail near the small boat harbor. A lady (with dog) we ran into guided us up a steep hill, after which we reached an overview of the Valdez inlet. But the camera battery went dead at that point. We returned to town again, vowing to come back later to finish the hike.
It was mid-afternoon and we'd skipped lunch, so we went to the local Eagle store (Safeway subsidiary) and got a few things. Then we returned to the little house in the parking-lot campground. Dolores cooked up spaghetti with meat sauce while I did the hot Italian sausage. It was quite good.
Then we noticed a lot of activity in the parking-lot campground. Sure enough, a caravan of RV's being managed by Tracks to Adventure is checking in. Lots of confusion, people with walkie-talkies running around, and so forth. It'll slow down shortly.
After handling the 100+ photos taken today, and doing the one financial transaction required monthly, and these notes, it's still only 6:45pm. The sun is streaming in the windows. The temperature is in the mid-60's here. At Anchorage it's 71 - their record temperature for this day is 79. We have all the windows and vents open, airing out the place. But we had to shut the door - it felt like a full gale blowing through the place.
I think I'll stir up Dolores and take a walk before we settle in.
So we did. We walked to the convention center and up onto the overlook trail. It's short but steep with handrails, and ends at a gazebo on the hill. The view is outstanding. You can see mountains all the way around. You can see out to old Valdez.
Then we went down to Egan Drive, the main street of the place. We walked along it to a gift shop that doubles as the clothing store. They show the videos of the Good Friday, 1964, earthquake, and another about the pipeline construction. We watched the earthquake video (we've seen it before, elsewhere), made a little more spooky by being here, where 29 people were killed and the old town wiped out.
We then hiked back to the little house and settled in. The sun is still shining brightly at 9:00pm.
20030719 Open new window with today’s pictures.
July 19, 2003
Saturday
Start: Bear Paw RV Park, Valdez AK
End: Bear Paw RV Park, Valdez AK
Miles: 0
Hi Temp: missed it
Lo Temp: missed it
Up at a normal time to find a beautiful day. No clouds, and a nice breeze to keep the mosquitoes away. It eventually warmed up to about 70, but we were on the water and didn't see that.
We took a drive to the end of town and found the "End" sign. Then we drove out the road that ends at the Oil Terminal, stopping to watch the people out there fishing. They'd throw their lures out as far as they could. The salmon were splashing about 10 yards farther out.
The oil terminal tours have been suspended due to potential terrorism.
We came back and did nothing until 1:15pm or so. Then we eased over to the tour boat pier and waited for it. The boat (LuLu Belle) came in at 1:30 from her morning trip. It's a fiberglass, twin-screw, 70-foot cruise boat with lots of seating and a galley from which they sell coffee and hot dogs and other things. The captain/owner has been doing these cruises here for 27 years.
We boarded at 1:45 and were underway at the scheduled time of 2:00pm. We crossed the harbor slowly and found a raft of sea otters in front of the oil terminal. The captain talked about both and then went on to the Port Valdez exit into Valdez Arm off Prince William Sound.
On the water in Port Valdez, you see mountains all the way around. The exit goes around a point to Valdez Arm.
The captain stuck to the west side of Valdez Arm and found a deep depression in the near-vertical rock face at the side. He stuck the bow of the boat way into the depression, saying he had no fear because the face underwater also goes almost vertically down. In the depression, he pointed out nests of puffins and several puffins on their nests.
He backed out of the hole and went down the rock a bit to a rocky beach, on which we found perhaps 200 Stellar sea lions. They were doing the things you see them doing in documentaries - humping along on their stomachs, barking and bellowing and waving their necks back and forth to try to impress the others. Those in the water were incredibly graceful and quick.
We started out again and came across a purse seiner setting a net, so we stayed to watch that. The skiff held one end of the 40-foot-deep net while the seiner made a circle back to to the skiff dropping the rest of the net. The seiner took all the lines then and pulled in the line that goes around the bottom of the net. This forms a "purse" with the net closed at the bottom. The skiff then pulls the seiner to the side while the seiner brings in the net; if the skiff didn't do this, the seiner would wind up in the middle of its own net.
When the net is nearly all aboard, you can see the salmon splashing around in it. The net is brought aboard and the salmon slide across the deck into an open fish hatch to the hold. Then the seiner goes to another place and does another set.
Then the captain went out into the middle of Prince William Sound looking for whales. En route, the captain commented on the Exxon Valdez accident and the precautions being taken now to prevent a recurrence. I think the captain believes the reaction to the accident was over-reaction and that the precautions are excessive.
The Exxon Valdez got out of her outbound lane a mile wide, crossed a dead space a mile wide, crossed the inbound lane a mile wide, and got another mile outside that before she grounded. He called that total incompetence on the part of all those involved and the consequences to them were deserved.
The captain also feels the reporting of the oil spill was inaccurate and alarmist to stir up a good story. His opinion was that the cleanup the first year did some good, that the second year cleanup did nearly nothing and in the third year they couldn't find any oil worth working.
It was interesting commentary from someone who was there and is a seaman.
When we got to the middle of the sound, we still hadn't seen any whales. We stopped and everyone went to work with their binoculars. One of the crew spotted two spouts way to the south. So, off we charged to the south at flank speed for about half an hour. We came up to a pair of humpbacks feeding.
They would cruise very slowly along, getting their breath, spouting a couple of times, then take a deep dive. The deep dive lasted from three to seven minutes, after which they'd pop up, spout, and repeat the cycle. They didn't seem to mind us being there. Several time we could see their pectoral fin sticking out but they weren't in the mood to splash and play. We went with them for three of these cycles to give everyone a chance to photograph a whale tail shot. We got two of these sequences with our digital camera in the continuous mode (one shot per second).
There were a few dolphin feeding in the vicinity as well. The captain ran through them at a good speed, trying to get them to join us and swim with us, but they went off and fed some more.
The cruise was supposed to last five hours and we were nearing that point already - still in the sound.
Away we went at high speed for the Columbia Glacier. It's in the next bay west of Valdez. We blasted around and along an island and saw a couple of eagles. On the way, we saw the M/V Bartlett, a ferry with the Alaska Marine Highway. When we got into the bay, we found a gigantic field of ice bits broken off the glacier. There was no way to go through that with a fiberglass boat, and the face of the glacier was still seven miles away. So the captain talked about his experience with it.
The face was where we stopped when he first came here, so it's receded seven miles in twenty-seven years; but observations of the past two years indicate it has stopped and is in balance, neither receding or proceding. He recounted studies made of the glacier by students from some university whose findings were that the glacier where they studied it was solid ice to the rock underneath - about a thousand feet underneath. They believed the glacier was actually a fjord frozen solid extending forty miles inland. Whatever the case, this glacier takes up 440 square miles, the size of Los Angeles proper.
As he was talking, the ferry caught up. It seems our captain had said he was coming over here, so the captain of the Bartlett decided to come over and take a look as well. Schedules are a little loose, said our captain. It was very interesting, since this is the ferry we'll ride to Whittier Tuesday morning.
Then we started back for Valdez. On the way, the captain explained the operational concept of the salmon seiners (they can only fish for so many hours - if they get full, they sell the catch to a larger ship and offload the catch to that ship so they can keep catching.
He also had a few comments for the local politicians, calling them very fore-sighted people. Seems they're so fore-sighted that they built the world's largest floating concrete dock to form the base for a container shipping port. Unfortunately, no regular user of the pier has been found due to the cost of trucking the containers over Thompson Pass and on to Fairbanks. It's easier to put them on train cars at Seward and have the train take them to Fairbanks, the only real inland market. So it's pretty much unused.
Then he credits them with the foresight to build a five-silo grain elevator next to the container pier, so there would be a place to store the grain until it could be shipped. The fact that no grain has yet been grown in Alaska doesn't mean anything, since the grain elevator will be there when they do grow it.
We took another look at the oil terminal on the way in, after a couple of stops to photograph eagles in trees next to the shore. Then we pulled into the small boat harbor and we stepped off - two hours late.
It was a great cruise.
We dropped off our camera and binoculars at the little house and went to the Harbor View Restaurant for dinner. D had crab-covered halibut and I had plain halibut. We split a bottle of Jacob's Creek Chardonnay. It was very nice.
Then we came back to the little house (at 10:35pm) and settled in.
20030720
July 20, 2003
Sunday
Start: Bear Paw RV Park, Valdez AK
End: Bear Paw RV Park, Valdez AK
Miles: 0
Hi Temp: 71.4 (two days)
Lo Temp: 49.5 (two days)
Today, by design, is a quiet day.
Late up, ate breakfast, went to church. Cute little church a few blocks from here. The priest suffers from asthma, so he's sent up here in the summer to help. He's normally in Arizona.
Went out for lunch at Mike's Palace. D had a steak sandwich & I had Alaska Shrimp Louis, both good.
Then we did the laundry and I scrubbed most of the bugs and dirt off the front of the trailer.
We did a simple dinner in and watched TV and read the Sunday paper from Anchorage.
The weather is back to mostly cloudy and mid-60's, which isn't all bad.
20030721 Open new window with today’s pictures.
July 21, 2003
Monday
Start: Bear Paw RV Park, Valdez AK
End: Bear Paw RV Park, Valdez AK
Miles: 0
Hi Temp: 68.7
Lo Temp: 55.0
This isn't much of a day, as it turns out. The clouds are in, almost at zero altitude, it's misty and occasionally, it rains hard.
Dolores has a sore throat and general feelings of a cold coming on. She's staying in the little house under a comforter and taking it easy in an attempt to minimize it.
I'm running around doing minor errands. One propane bottle went dry, so I got that filled. I walked to the grocery store for bananas. Shortly, I'll check the e-mail and send the notes up to and including this one.
Then we'll continue taking it easy for the rest of the day.
Later on, I'll disconnect all the utilities but the electric so we can move out early in the morning. We have to check in at the ferry landing before 6:15am for a 7:15am departure to Whittier, across Prince William Sound. So, it'll be an early wake-up call tomorrow.
Valdez is nice. We've enjoyed our stay here. I don't think we could live here, what with 250 to 400 inches of snow a year, but summers here are great.