Valdez

You can never predict what's going to happen when you wake up in the morning, can you? Some days you think are going to be special end up quite ho-hum, and other days that you have no particular expectations of blow your socks off, and today was one of the latter.

We woke up in the mosquito capital of the world, with only a short run down to Valdez on the itinerary, but the sun was out and it was a gorgeous day, and it's probably ended up as the most spectacular day of the trip so far scenery wise.

Did you know that a mosquito weighs about 1/25,000 of an ounce, that they cause more human deaths than any other animals, and that there are about 20,000 varieties of the buggers? Neither did I, but last night after dinner, and again this morning as we emerged from our cottages, all 20,000 varieties were waiting to pounce on us. We exhausted two cans of 'bug spray' as they call it, but the natural stuff was pretty useless and it really needed the can with 40% DEET to have any affect. There were so many of them that they even sat on the camera lenses and made photos hard work.

However, the sun was glistening off the snow, the mountains were out in all their splendor, and with 22 hours of sunlight there was plenty of time to admire them, so we just braved the mosquitoes and moved on.

Started off visiting the Copper Centre visitors centre for the Wrangle-St Elias National Park, spent some time in the cultural centre and the visitors centre itself, and then walked one of the circuit trails down to the nearby river. Poor Rachel swatted a couple of mosquitoes, freaked out when there was a bit of blood, and trotted off down the track in a rather futile attempt to outrun the swarm following her.

Back in the car we headed further south, stopping at lots of the lookouts, especially the one overlooking the Copper River near Mt Drum which was pretty spectacular, all the time looking for a lunch stop on the way. Really odd - there is just an endless stream of RVs, fifth wheelers and tourist cars up and down the highway, but nobody is out to service them with food. Everything was closed, and we ended up just completely missing out on lunch as there was a stretch of a hundred miles with nothing to offer.

We travelled for most of the day alongside the Trans Alaska Pipeline. It's about 1300km long, and pipes oil from Prudhoe Bay in the very north of Alaska to the port of Valdez in the very south. Construction began in 1977 during the oil crisis, and since completion has shipped 16 billion barrels of oil south. Unfortunately, on Good Friday in 1989 it was indirectly responsible for the disaster that Valdez is best known for when the tanker Exxon Valdez ran ashore on a reef just outside the harbour and spilt millions of gallons of oil into the sea, creating the (then) largest shipping environmental disaster ever seen.

Onwards down the Tsaina Valley into glacier country. The most accessible was the Worthington Glacier, and we stopped at several spots to photograph it, and walk to it's toe. Once across Thompson Pass it was past numbers of other glaciers, and through Keystone Canyon to the Lowe River and on to Valdez itself.

There must be something about Good Friday and Valdez. On another Good Friday in 1964, the second largest earthquake ever recorded had its epicentre just outside Valdez, and the resulting tsunami wiped the town off the map, along with several other towns that we have previously visited like Seward. They had to rebuild Valdez several miles away from it's original site, as it had been built alongside the glacier outflow into the sea, and the ground was very unstable. Even today they have clearly marked tsunami escape routes in case of the next big quake.

Once in the town we detoured to walk the Solomon Gulch Trail which wound its way up the hill on the other side of the bay to the town. It made Bear Gryll's list of top 10 day walks, so we thought we'd better do it, and the view of the harbour was spectacular.

We finally made it to our hotel, and enjoyed dinner in the restaurant overlooking the harbour with the sun glistening on the mountains, before turning in in anticipation of a very early morning tomorrow.