Alaskan Adventure: Day 72 – We toured the town of Valdez today, including the Visitors Center and several museums. Valdez was one of my favorite places. It is so “Alaskan”. It’s wild old Alaskan beauty and history is still there and it is possible to get glimpses of what people arriving in 1898 for the gold rush saw. The beauty of the wildlife in the sea and shores that we saw from the Lu-Lu Belle boat tour, the swarming masses of salmon, the work of early civil engineers to build a road through a canyon, the tragedy of earthquakes and oil spills, all combine to make this place special.

Valdez mural honoring gold rush history.

We were looking for a grocery store and stopped here at the local spot “The Food Cache”. This was a good reminder that things in Alaska are not like things in the lower 48. Clearly there has never been an ADA Code inspection here. I don’t have a pic inside but it was packed from floor to ceiling with narrow (like walk sideways narrow) aisles.

These pics are from a different grocery store in Valdez. Things are more expensive in Valdez. Gasoline was around $6/gal.

A example of Alaskan practicality. This historic building; “The childhood home of Alaska’s first Governor Bill Egan” is a candy store.

We stopped at the Valdez Visitors Center. We have seen and visited several historic old Roadhouses on the tour. This display of roadhouses stretching from Valdez all the way up to Fairbanks explained how important (and crude) these early ‘hotels’ were to travelers.

36 Roadhouses on the 360 mile trail from Valdez to Fairbanks in 1906. Approximately every 10 miles, about as far as you could walk with baggage in a day.

Map of original Valdez town location at the base of Valdez Glacier.

1898 Map of “Recent Gold Discoveries”

Detail of Prince William Sound, Port Valdez and access to the “Gold Fields”

This is the front entrance to the Valdez Museum. Utilitarian Architecture at it’s finest. There are two “city” museums in Valdez. This one is “Old Town Valdez Museum”, the other is “Valdez Museum” both are interesting and this post is a mix of both.

The poem.

There was an attempt to build a railroad line to Valdez in 1905. The goal was to connect Port Valdez to the rich copper mines at Kennecott (in what is now Wrangell-St. Elias National Park). There was a race between rival factions. Rail lines were started and two tunnels through rock mountains were in progress when a shootout took place in 1907. This ended progress and the rail was never finished.

We were not able to stop at the tunnel pulloff. This is a screenshot of a photo I found online by Barry Swackhamer, June 24, 2010.

Jumping ahead about 50 years from the 1900 gold rush to around 1950 the trail over the Valdez Glacier has been replaced with a road through “Keystone Canyon” called the Richardson Highway.

Advertisement with happy smiling travelers.

The reality. Valdez-Fairbanks Stage Line was not a easy experience.

Then came the 1964 earthquake

We saw this grove of dead spruce trees in Resurrection Bay on our Lu-Lu Belle boat trip. Resurrection Bay got it’s name from a historic storm incident in 1792. Alexander Baranov, the first governor of Russian America was exploring the Gulf of Alaska when a storm forced his crew to find refuge in a Bay of Prince William Sound. The storm cleared on Easter Sunday so they named it Resurrection Bay.

March 24th, 1989 is the infamous date of the Exxon Valdez 11 million gallon oil spill.

Screenshot of Bligh Reef Light from internet. This marks the area that the single hull supertanker Exxon Valdez went aground on the rocks of Bligh Reef. Subsequent reforms now require oil tankers to have double hulls among other precautions. We saw this from a very long way away so it was nice to find a photo up closer.

Ship at an oil loading station near the Old Town Valdez Museum.

View across Port Valdez of Alyeska Oil Terminal. This is the storage/shipping facility at the southern end of the Alaskan Pipeline.