Day 11 - Seward to Valdez

Problems with connecting to the internet in Valdez so this comes to you from Copper Center instead! We'll also post pictures of the trip later when we post today's adventure

It’s cold (45F) and raining this morning, perhaps we’ll see some snow before we leave Alaska!
Getting into a rhythm with this blog now, writing it up 1st thing in the morning! Had to go down to the lobby of the hotel in Seward ‘cause they only had wifi in the lobby AND they charged me $5 for the pleasure.

It’s a little harder getting four of us now ready and on the road, but we did set off in good time to get the tunnel through the mountain to Whittier. We had to drive back on ourselves for about 80 miles to get to the tunnel, the Anton Anderson Memorial tunnel. The tunnel was built during the 1940’s to provide a communication link to Whittier which was built as a secret US base after the start of WWII. The tunnel is just wide enough for a train to run through it! So it operates one way only, every hour! It cost us $12 to drive through and you actually drive on the rails, or so it seems. Takes about 10 minutes to drive through and is very claustrophobic. The tunnel was only opened to vehicle traffic in the late 1990’s using money from the Exxon Valdez settlement.

At Whittier we boarded the Alaska Marine Highway ferry to Valdez. Whittier is a very strange place! The US military wanted a base location isolated from everything, surrounded by mountains, covered in clouds, and they found it right here! Two large blocks of apartments were built and these housed everybody, it looks very Soviet! One of the blocks is now abandoned and the other houses about 85% of the current population of 600 people, other than that there‘s not that much to be seen. Today it is also a cruise destination as there was a large cruise ship tied up in the harbour and we passed another on its way in as we steamed to Valdez. We guessed that the only reason for the cruise ships to go there is to go thru’ the tunnel and then onto the Begit, Boggs center to see the Portage Glacier.

Got onto the ferry and left on time at 12:45 and steamed thru’ Prince William Sound and arrived in Valdez at 3:34. The ferry was a modern catamaran style boat and it was celebrating the 1st anniversary of its service today, so we all the passengers got cake and sparkling cider, a nice touch. The ferry had been designed by firm in the UK, but built in Bridgeport, CT.

They also had a very interesting speaker on the boat who told us what we were seeing, or would have seen it wasn’t so cloudy and wet, and all about the teeming wild life in the waters below. He talked about the salmon runs and the many predators who like to eat salmon for lunch! In Prince William Sound it is estimated that there are 100,000 Salmon Sharks that between them eat 5 million salmon EACH year! These Salmon Sharks can run to 12 feet long! The Pink Salmon is the most prolific with runs of over 40 million salmon returning to spawn each year. Currently, the Silver Salmon are running, only 7 million of them, and we saw hundreds of fishing boats on the way into Valdez all catching lots of fish.

We also saw the spot where the Exxon Valdez went aground in 1989, Bligh Reef. At dinner we were chatting with a resident and he told us the story of grounding. As we all know the captain was drunk and asleep, and the person at the wheel in trying to avoid ice ran aground on the reef. What is not common knowledge is that the passage between the reef and the mainland was still shown at that time as a navigable passage, even though as a result of the 1964 earthquake the sea bed had raised up and the passage was now too shallow to be navigated. Unfortunately, the guy at the wheel did not know that and steered for the gap but hit the reef instead! To contain the spill they eventually deployed over 1300 miles of booms, all way down to the Aleutian Islands. Even today the effects of the spill are still being felt, the herring have never returned to the sound and a recent survey along the beaches found oil in 75% of holes dug in the sand and tar and oil under many rocks.

Valdez is often referred to as little Switzerland, the location is beautiful but town itself sucks. The harbour looks ok and that’s where we ate dinner, overlooking the boats with the mountains as the backdrop. Before dinner we had walked around the harbour and seen all the boats unloading their catch and then and cleaning filleting them. We also saw 2 salmon sharks that had been caught, about 350 lbs each.

Dined on Halibut cheeks, the meat between the eyes, very tasty!

Tomorrow we have a short drive to Copper Center, about 100 miles, so we’ll visit the Valdez museum before we leave and find out everything about the 1964 earthquake, the largest earthquake ever in the US. Hope that we don’t have another one while we are here!!