Valdez!

The road to Valdez was what we are finding to be uphill, downhill, huge curves, sneaky dips & bumps topped off with construction zones.  The interesting part of the construction zones is there’s only one highway between cities, so there’s nowhere for a detour.  The roads aren’t very wide, so they have a lot of places where they stop traffic in one direction and have pilot cars lead a bunch of vehicles through, cars, trucks, motorcycles RVs & eighteen-wheelers.  The problem is some of the construction zones are miles long so there is a substantial wait for your turn to drive through the zone.  One was so big is there were pilot cars going in both directions, forcing one to stop to the other pass.  You might have to wait 20-30 minutes for your turn.  So, it can be exasperating.  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention muddy.  And this isn’t even the “Alaskan Highway”, just a highway in Alaska.....  

We did pass a beautiful still lake early then a nice waterfall later in the day, Bridal Veil Falls.

Fortunately, we got to Valdez ok and got the go ahead to thoroughly wash our rigs.  Mica & I washed for two hours used 120 gallons of water later, CC is beautiful!

I’m not really sure why I washed her, we’ll be back on the Alaskan Highway in two days heading south, but I often say washing CC is my therapy.  Plus,maybe when we get back to civilization, I’ll only have one inch of dirt on her not two.

Our full day in Valdez was an eight-hour cruise on a pretty nice boat looking for more wildlife and glaciers.  There are nine glaciers in the Valdez area & two of them are close to the water of Prince Edward Sound.  Our campground was about 100 yards from the harbor, actually backed up to the inlet.  I found myself sitting outside a lot watching all the fishingboats & tenders going in & out.

Here’s our rigs parked as we left on the boat.

We saw the end of the Alaskan Pipeline.  Its terminal is in the port of Valdez.  The oil is stored in a bunch of oil tanks then off loads it to tankers.  

Tanker getting loaded with Alaska Crude

The historic Exxon Valdez disaster didn’t happen in the port, it was a couple of miles away, almost into the Gulf of Alaska. Since that event they have quite a few protocols in place to hopefully prevent another disaster.  Including all tankers are double hulled and all tankers are carefully escorted out to sea.  Plus, a number of oil spill prevention & cleanup at the ready 24 hours a day.

Whale tail 

Iceberg from Columbia Glacier, nice shade of blue.

A tender offloading salmon from a fishing boat, they use a huge vacuum!

Sea Otters chillaxin’

Puffin

Ice field approaching Meares Glacier.

Ice field

Meares Glacier

It’s behind us!

The captain turned off the engines so we could hear the glacier talking.  It makes loud bang & pops as she calves off icebergs.  We saw little ones happen but couldn’t get them on camera live.

Seals on ice everywhere 

Kayakers too.

The crew collected some ice for us to feel, Mica is holding 400-year-old ice!

When Rita wasn’t looking, I might have bit off a chunk to eat.

Meares is growing, not shrinking, you can see where it’s mowing down trees on the side as it closes toward the water

We hung out for about 30 minutes then started heading back to Valdez.  We did see a colony of sea lions and some waterfalls.  

One nice thing about this ship was that they supplied food.  We have toasted bagels & coffee on the way out & dinner on the way back. Got back to the harbor, walked to CC & we had a nice fire & happy hour,

Tomorrow is a free day, plan on relaxing before we head to Tok, Alaska and our return engagement on the Alaskan Highway, yipee?