Valdez in Alaska – snow and ice!

Continuing my stories about the recent Viking Cruise from Seward to Vancouver, we visit Valdez. You can see the rest of my Alaska stories here, and see my photos from Alaska in my online store here. You will find free shipping in North America and a 30-day money back guarantee!

Valdez is a familiar name to many and is the site of the Exxon Valdez oil spill back in 1989. But Valdez is also famous for the 1964 earthquake where the glacial silt under the town liquified with the constant shaking and started a massive underwater landslide that then created a 30 foot tsunami that rocketed down Prince William Sound. 32 men, women and children were on the town’s freight dock with the arrival of the supply ship and all were killed as the dock disintegrated and collapsed into the ocean. Following the earthquake, the original town site was declared unsafe and 54 houses and other buildings were transported to a new town site on solid ground about 4 miles away. The old town site is now derelict although haunting images of the abandoned dock still remain to this day:

We took an optional trip to the Salmon hatchery (a bit boring in June, to be honest) and to the Thomspon Pass. The rest of the images here were taken on that trip. The Thompson Pass takes Richardson Highway over the mountains and on to Anchorage and it passes through the Keystone Canyon to get there. The Keystone Canyon was the scene of various attempts to build a railway into Valdez and all that remains of that is a short length of hand-cut tunnel, but the road now climbs through the near vertical walls of the Canyon dotted with waterfalls. I believe in winter this is the scene of ice-climbing championships, but in early summer, there are still large flows of water down the mountainside. The canyon is surrounded by mountains – this view below is through the entrance to the canyon looking at two snow-covered mountains in the distance:

The two main waterfalls here are the Bridal Veil Falls:

And the other one is Horsetail Falls:

Here is a more artistic rendering of the water and its spray lit by the sun. I also wrote about waterfall photography in Valdez in an earlier story that you can find here.

The road continues up the pass until it reaches the summit near to the Worthington Glacier. This is quite close to the road and so I was able to capture both a broad panorama of the entire glacier plus some more detailed shots:

The scale of the glacier can be seen in this image taken from the top of the Thomson Pass looking towards the section of the glacier that you see above:

And the views of the mountains at the top of the pass are something to be seen. These were taken in June – you can imagine what the scene looks like in the winter!

The broader view of this shows just how mountainous this area is and how difficult it must have been to construct this road through the canyon and over the pass:

After these stops, we were off back down to Valdez and the ship and out of Prince William Sound to the next location!

The next story in this series about our cruise on the Viking Orion in June 2022 can be found here with our visit to the Hubbard Glacier.