Alaska - Valdez - July 6-10

The next stop on our adventure was Valdez.  The trip into Valdez along the Richardson Highway has spectacular scenery.   We were lucky to have beautiful clear weather.  

The camper parked along Richardson Highway on the way to Valdez

Horsetail Falls along the Richardson Highway

View from Thompson Summit along the Richardson Highway

Worthington Glacier as seen from the Richardson Highway

While in Valdez, we did a day long kayak trip out to the Columbia Glacier ice field.   It involved a boat ride out to the glacier, about 4 hours of kayaking and a boat ride back to Valdez Harbor.

A purse seiner fishing boat.  The silver salmon were running so we
saw many of these boats hauling in nets full of fish.

Ice field from the Columbia Glacier.  We did not get close to the glacier as the icebergs
can be quite dangerous.  We saw several roll over and others just collapse with no
warning, sending smaller pieces of floating in all directions.

This is a bergy bit (1-5 meters above the water).
Smaller chunks are called growlers (less than a meter above the water and less than 6 meters long), really small pieces are called brash ice, and really big ones (taller than 1 meter and/or more than 6 meters long) are called icebergs.  It is pretty impressive to see them roll over or collapse.

Brett and I kayaking in front of an iceberg.  It is hard to tell the scale from this picture,
but that iceberg was probably 20 feet tall and larger than a greyhound bus.  Very large when
you remember that only about 15% of an iceberg is above the water line.

A waterfall flowing into Heather Bay. 

We visited the Solomon Gulch Salmon Hatchery.  The hatchery releases salmon from the hatchery, so when they spawn, they return here.  Many of them are caught out in Prince William Sound.  They expect a return of 10-12 million salmon.  Thousands of them make it back to the hatchery where some of them are captured to collect eggs for the hatchery but many of them just die along the banks.  Others are caught by bears (at low tide) or seals and sea lions (at high tide).  The spawning was just beginning while we were there, but the water was completely full of fish trying to swim upstream, only to be blocked by the fish weir at the hatchery.

The water was so thick with salmon that you could see their fins sticking up out of the water.

Salmon jumping up the fish weir

Another salmon jumping up the side of the weir.  The ones the made it up the jump
ran in to the weir and slid back down to try again.