Day
38 – 6-18-15 Thursday Today was a slow day for us. I decided to
run the Jeep through a car wash it looked so bad. For a basic car
wash it cost $12 and got less of a wash job than it cost in Wallace
for $6 but we can see out the windows again and it will look a lot
better for a short while. The town has a water truck going through
town watering down the paved streets to keep the dust down, therefore
when you ride the streets after they have watered down the streets
your car get dirty again. Like most Alaskan and Canadian towns we
have been to most of the parking lots are gravel so there is a lot of
dust.
We
went to the town post office to pick up three packages we had sent
here to General Delivery. Two had come in. Then we went to visit the
museum for Old Valdez. On March 27, 1964 the town was hit with the
largest earthquake recorded in North America. It measured 8.4-8.6 on
the Richter Scale and 30 people died and most of the town was
destroyed. After the earthquake the ground was determined to be
unstable and the new town of Valdez was rebuilt 4 miles up the road
on ground determined to be stable. The museum had a nice film about
the history of Valdez and several nice displays, lots of photos of
the old town, several pieces of equipment used in old Valdez.
From
there we drove out to an area called Blueberry Hill where bears are
known to hang out along the river bank. We weren't expecting to see
any this time of day but wanted to find the area and may go back
later in the evening. We got a good Latte and stopped at
the small boat harbor and watched a man and his son fillet some
Sockeye Salmon they had caught. The young boy, about 12, explained to
us about how they were going to use the different parts of the fish
after they were cleaned. The father told Lena how he seasoned and
cooked the fish. The boat harbor has a nice setup for cleaning fish
and the sea gulls love it because they get the scraps after the fish
are filleted.
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| Sockeye Salmon Fillet |
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| Happy Sea Gulls |
Then
we drove out of town and briefly stopped at the site of Old Valdez
before going to Salmon Gulch, another area where bears frequent in
the evenings to feed on the fish in the river. The same road went
past a fish hatchery and on to the Alaska Oil Terminal where the
pipeline ends but the public is not allowed to enter the area so we
returned to town, stopped at the Safeway (only grocery store in town)
and got a few groceries since we plan to leave Valdez tomorrow.
About
8PM we went back to the Salmon Gulch area again to see if any bears
where out but did not see any. We did see one Bald Eagle in a tree
near the water.
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| Bald Eagle |
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| Crooked Creek |
We
depart Valdez tomorrow and work our way to Haines, which means we go
through Tok again and back into Canada over the bad part of the
Alaska Highway before we cross back into Alaska before getting to
Haines. We may not be able to update the blog for a few days
depending on where we stay each night before getting to Haines. Some
areas of the Alaska Highway don't even have cell phone coverage, so
when we are in those areas we are cutoff from any communication.
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