Valdez

The only context I had for Valdez, AK was the Exxon Valdez disaster.  It's a lot like the other port towns we've visited up here, rugged and more about work than tourism.  The drive down to Valdez is a spur, so we have to retrace our path for about 115 miles to get back on track, but it was worth the drive.  From our campsite, you can see at least a dozen separate glaciers.  We hiked up to the base of one, awesome.  Here are some pictures from the area.

Bridal Veil Falls in Keystone Canyon, AK.  About 10 miles outside Valdez.  It's a couple hundred feet tall or so, hard to tell in the picture.

This makes the scale of Horsetail Falls a little easier.  That's Laurie standing right at the base in the bottom left corner.  This is right across the highway from Bridal Veil Falls.

So we were told, an eccentric old woman kept bunnies as pets and when she died, they were turned lose on the town.  They're everywhere, blond, brown, gray.  They're not exactly scared either.  Reminds me of the chickens in Key West.

Worthington Glacier.  I turned up the blue color a little, still doesn't look as good in pictures as it does in person.  We hiked right up to the base.

Intrepid travelers, glacier side.

Don't try this at home!  I'm sure the ice from this glacier never breaks off in huge chunks and crushes tourists...

A pretty canyon by the salmon hatchery.  They were trying to return to this stream, though they were actually born at the hatchery just to the left out of frame.  More on that below.

The group campfire at our campsite.  It's a cement truck back end with big holes cut into it to make a fireplace.  That's our motorhome in the background.

These salmon are also from the hatchery, trying to make it back up an impossible waterfall from the stream they think they were born in.

These 2 eagles were at our campground the whole time we were here.  I caught them in an interesting pose here, cool reflection in the water.

This is the hatchery.  When they started the process, there were some salmon spawning naturally just upstream on the right.  They have a fish ladder so that some salmon climb into the blue building.  They take the sperm and eggs from some of the fish to breed a few million little salmon every year that they grow in pens just offshore until they're big enough to survive the ocean, then they release them.  The hatchery is close enough to the original natural stream that they think that's where they're supposed to go.  It might have been able to hold a few hundred, maybe a thousand salmon originally.  They grow so many roe now and release them at a maturity level where hundreds of thousands, millions now return to the area every year.  Most are caught in the bay, but these "left overs" are still trying to repeat the natural cycle.  There were dead salmon everywhere, and still thousands trying to cram their way up stream.

Land's End, Homer AK

Homer, AK is the end of the road, a port city at Land's End on the Kenai Peninsual south of Anchorage.  We had to go.  We stayed at basically a fish camp on the southernmost spit of land in this area's southernmost city.  We still have some undiscovered country to cover between Anchorage and Haines, but in Homer we basically turn around and head home.  We only stayed one rainy, foggy evening, just long enough to eat some fresh halibut and take a couple pictures.   We're back in Anchorage now, enjoying civilization's charms for a few days.

This past Sunday we went to shop for groceries at the commissary.  This moose was grazing beside the road, right by the flightline where the jets take off.

The little peninsula on the left side of this picture is the Homer Spit, where we camped at the last campground before the ferry landing.  In this neck of the woods, that's the end of the line.

An old wooden homestead on the spit converted to a famous landmark, the Salty Dog Saloon.  The lighthouse is for atmosphere, the rest of the place is original 1890's construction.

We've only been here a couple weeks and they want us to run for office.  I don't know if it's me or Laurie they want to govern this place.  They elected Palin, why not one of us?

The coastline by our campsite.  That water out there is chock full of halibut and other fish.

Seward - Kenai Fjords National Park

Seward – Kenai Fjords National Park

Seward is another cool seaside town, on the east side of the Kenai Peninsula, a few hours south of Anchorage.  We pulled into a commercial park the first night to do laundry after our blissful 2 days dry camping in Portage Valley.  After that, we moved waterfront (something about a waterfront site) for 3 nights.  It’s a city park, so only $20 a night.  No hookups, but man, what a view.  We took a day long boat tour out to Kenai Fjords National Park.  It turned out to be much more than a glacier cruise.  The glacier was epic, no doubt, I got a minute-long video of a couple hundred feet calving into the ocean.  But, the wildlife was just epic.  On one 8 hour cruise, we saw…humpback whales, Orca, fin whales, sea lions, harbor seals, sea otter, Bald Eagles, 2 kinds of Puffin, and bunch of other nesting sea birds I can’t even name.  And to boot, the weather was spectacular, absolutely the nicest day we’ve seen in Alaska.  A wise man used to tell me “Sometimes you’re the windshield, and sometimes you’re the bug.”  Today, we were definitely the windshield.  Here are some pics…

Standing at the grill cooking up some pork chops, I thought, gosh this is a lovely place to make camp. 

Intrepid travelers at the Aialik glacier.  200 feet tall and 2 miles wide.

Pictures just don't do it, even in panorama mode.  Not a cloud in the sky.  We were so lucky.

Pretty classic Bald Eagle pose, coming in for a landing.  Lucky shot.

We saw a pod of at least 3 or 4 Orca.  This young Killer Whale was showing off killer form in the jump up and impress tourists contest.  He probably jumped completely out of the water half a dozen times.  Who needs captive whales when you can see this in the wild?

An adult Orca, pretty sure it's female.  The dorsal fin is supposed to be even more prominent on the males.

Harbor seals hanging out on an ice floe from the glacier

One of several dozen seat otters we saw hanging out.  The fur is so dense they just float like a cork.  They're big too, like 4 or 5 feet long.

Humpbacks were everywhere.  Here's a cool picture of the dorsal fin right after the blow, you can still see the mist.

I got a lot of humpback tail fluke shots.  Here's a good one.

Tufted Puffin were everywhere.  Cute!

The Captain said this was a Fin Whale.  They're a lot more skittish than the others, and we were out at the mouth of the bay near the open Gulf of Alaska.  They prefer open water, so we were, again, very lucky to sight a 3rd whale species so clearly.  These are the 2nd largest, behind the Blue Whale.

Common Murre.  One of at least half a dozen nesting seabirds we saw.

A lone Puffin standing vigil.

We saw plenty of Sea Lions as well.  You can see the new pups at the left of the picture, down by the water.

A view of the RV from the water.  I put a gold star above it to make it easier to pick out.  Nice back yard, right?

Portage Valley

From Anchorage, we went down to see the Portage Glacier on a day trip.  We decided to go back and stay for a couple days.  We had a blissful two days at the Williwaw Campground, a National Forest Service campground tucked away in the woods by a stream fed by glacier melt water.  We drove through the Anton Anderson tunnel to Whittier.  It's about 2 1/2 miles straight through the mountain, the 2nd longest highway tunnel in North America.  The really weird thing is that it's also a railroad bed, so they have to tightly control traffic first in one direction, then the next, punctuated by a couple train loads of tourists every day.  Whittier is a pretty traditional sea port town, lots of commercial fishing and cruise ship port, but the passengers don't spend any time in town due to the lack of facilities.  They get off the ship and onto buses or the train to get out of town to more established places, or vice versa.  One of the strangest things was an old army building built to house a couple thousand troops during the cold war.  Back at our campsite, life was good with campfires both nights, walks along the river and a hike up toward the glacier.  We finally saw a moose in the wild that would stand still for a picture.  It had a calf that was too shy, hiding in the bushes.  More pictures from our stay in Portage Valley...

There was a hiking trail along this creek, beautiful views and good exercise

These are Coho Salmon making their way upstream to spawn.  The red coloring only happens when they're on their way upstream to spawn and die.  They say where there are salmon, there are bears.  We were very beary wary.

As I'm always saying, the pictures never do these views justice.  These two cascades were coming down from the same glacier on the mountain above our campsite.  The one on the left was probably 200 feet tall and 15 feet wide.  The one on the right, even bigger.  I hiked up here by myself one morning.

A rare selfie.  If this had been in the lower 48, there'd be 300 cars parked here.  I had it all absolutely to myself.  The boulder above my head is as big as a UPS truck.  Cascades like this are everywhere up here.

The Buckner Building was a self contained world for 2000 troops during the cold war overlooking the port in Whittier.  It took 5 years to complete, and they only occupied it for 6.  It withstood the '64 quake though, so obviously engineered well.

Lined up to drive into the mountain

A couple of the glaciers overlooking Portage Lake.  

Finally, a wild moose that didn't run away at the first sight of my camera.

Williwaw Campground.  Another glacier top center, the one that was feeding the cascades I hiked to.

Anchorage

After Denali, we enjoyed a beautiful drive down the Parks Highway toward Anchorage.  We stayed one night in a little tourist town called Talkeetna.  It had a neat little downtown, crawling with tourists from the cruise ship bus tours that must stay overnight.  After that we headed down to a nice military campground on Ft. Richardson just outside of town.  The park is great, tucked away in the woods with full hookups and spacious sites.  The only downside was listening to the Blue Angels practice for the airshow coming up this weekend.  Loud!  We took care of chores, but had one really nice day trip south of town.  We had met some fellow travelers from Maine up in Denali, and they were back in Anchorage getting ready to fly home so they went with us on the drive.  Craig and Jodi are good new friends we'll see again hopefully when we travel to the northeast.  We also got to have dinner with an old military buddy from almost 20 years ago.  Chuck Baird got out of the Air Force and makes Alaska his home now.  You can find him on YouTube if you search for Alaskan Pioneer.  We stopped in and saw the Portage Glacier, the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Park (animal rescue) and took a stunning gondola ride up to the top of the Alyeska ski resort.  No skiing going on this time of year, but spectacular views.  Our 12 volt water pump quit working, so we're at the repair shop getting a new one.  Can't sit in the woods for a couple days without running water.  Here are some recent pictures:

Typical view out of the windshield.  Good roads, great views.

The beard really completes the whole Alaskan Pioneer persona.  Chuck Beard...uh, Baird.

Two Dall Sheep were feeding on the side of the hill on our drive south to Portage.

Sometimes grizzly bears become too used to town, and they're either relocated or euthanized.   This guy was lucky and ended up at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Park.  He even learned to sit pretty with those 3 inch claws together before getting a food treat.  Cute, until he digs them into your skull...

Hard to tell from the picture, but this iceberg is floating on a lake where Portage Glacier ends.  It's as big as a house, broke off and floated across the lake until it came to rest on the bottom.

The view of 3 glaciers from the Alyeska tram.

Not wild, in the conservation park.  Moose are super flighty.

Musk Ox.  We'd have to go waaaayyy north to see these in the wild.

The tram on it's way back down the mountain.  It takes you over 2000 feet vertically to the top of the ski hill.