RoadNotes: If it’s Valdez, it must be raining!

Allison Point Campground and Chena RV Park, Valdez, AK – August 10 through 14, 2014

Several of the Loosey Goosey group have declared Valdez too cold and rainy and have departed for more agreeable locations. We’re running about a week behind these folks and I expect that delay to increase as we begin to drag our feet about leaving Alaska.

But yes, Valdez is known for it’s rainy weather. Local folks say there might be as many as 3 or 4 sunny days in the summer. A little internet research revels that Valdez, on the average, has 10 sunny days during the period covering June, July and August. Valdez is not the place to go for balmy beach weather. But for comfortable temperatures, it’s great!

But we know that here, rain means drizzle. Not really enough to keep you indoors, but too much to sit around outside and stay dry. Armed with this knowledge, we forge ahead.

The drive once again offers some great scenery.

While we were staying in Chicken, we had heard the City run Allison Point Campground was closed. But we knew that wasn’t true since several of the LG group had been staying there. Last time we were here, we thought the place looked interesting, being right on the water and close to the salmon fish hatchery. We decided we would stay there at least one night.

The weather turned out to absolutely gorgeous as we pulled in. It turns out we were able to park right next to some other LG members that were also lagging behind the main group to catch a few more salmon. Here is a view of downtown Valdez from our campground.

As an added bonus, we have an excellent Verizon signal here, so our MiFi is happy.

After we get Big Guy set up, we go exploring and find the Valdez Glacier and lake.

The rest of the LG group, Kim, Jim and Mark are moving to the Valdez Glacier RV park tomorrow so we go check it out to see if its someplace we might want to stay. Turns out our phones don’t work there and it had a minimal Verizon signal so we’re thinking we might stay in Allison instead.

View of the marsh on our way back to BG.

We stopped at the salmon spawning overlook on the road into town. They have a camera set up in the water and a TV screen in the Visitors Center. Unfortunately they are closed, so we’ll come to see it another day.

While watching the salmon, EJ swears she saw two bears in there. She said one would pop it’s head up over the grass and then drop back down. Just not fast enough with the camera. In the second picture if you look closely you can see the dark masses and make out the ears, nose and eyes on the one in the front. Honest!

We get together in the afternoon between our RVs for drinks, snacks and stories. We try some of the salmon Mark caught and smoked. It was quite tasty. After the smell of rotting salmon we experienced in Kenai, I wasn’t sure I would ever eat salmon again. We said our goodbyes and wondered who would be the last out of Alaska.

Tuesday morning the day starts out dreary and misty. We watch Kim and Jim leave and discuss what we want to do with our day. Staying put certainly has a strong appeal. Then our neighbor on the other side of Big Guy fires up his generator again. It’s one of the cheap ones that sounds like someone is beating on a coffee can full of rocks. We endure a couple hours of this and decide life is too short to listen to this noise.

We opt to move into town, since there is laundry and grocery shopping that needs to be tended to. In Chicken, we also heard about this small campground in Valdez that had only 10 sites, but they had full hook ups and were huge, averaging 30 feet wide. We had lost the directions to it, but Frank thought he remembered how to get there. So off we went.

There we saw Denny, the fellow in Chicken who had told us about this place, Chena RV Park, and met Judy and Everett, the owners. This little park is a well kept secret as even the town folks don’t know about it. It’s within walking distance of the whole downtown area, and the Safeway store is only half a block away. Feels like home for a few days.

Over the next several days we meander the streets, drive to see waterfalls, visit the Alaska Marine Highway Terminal and check out the salmon hatchery.

Near the salmon hatchery. all those ripples in the water are salmon.

Here is the stream the salmon are trying to reach. Appropriately it’s named Salmon Creek.

The stream is feed by Salmon Lake, which also provides the hydraulic force for the hydro-power electric generating plant. This is the discharge and you can see the power plant in the background.

Back out in Prince William Sound you can see the local boats are built to keep the crew warm and safe. Looks like this guy is setting crab traps.

We also saw this boat dispatching a long line of tubes and pulling it around. Not sure what it was for, but it was fun watching as the guy on shore realized the boat was taking off and he had to cut the line to set it free from his bobcat.

The weather was tricky, as we would get teased with sun and then rain. But today it was great and the mountains really stood out.

The Valdez harbor.

EJ did laundry and went shopping at the local Safeway and bought a head of Alaskan grown lettuce almost as big as our table.

Uh oh, the fireweed is about topped out. This means summer is almost over. Some say when the fireweed reaches this point, winter is only 6 weeks away. Some say a week and a half. Others say the height of the fireweed plant is a predictor of how much snowfall will be received this winter. Who knows? But it makes for interesting conversation.

We drove up to the Keystone Canyon to spend some time with the water falls instead of speeding by them in the motorhome.

We had also heard the story of the big avalanche snow slide that blocked the only highway in and out of Valdez in late January of 2014. We had previously seen the remains and thought it was a huge rock formation. Closer examination showed it to be a huge pile of snow and cave. The slide occurred in January and this is August giving you an idea how massive this pile was.

You may also notice the river running by the snow pile. The slide caused this river to back up flooding the highway and delaying the removal of the pile. In the following picture you can barely see an old railroad tunnel that acted as a drain for the backed up lake. The mud and debris almost plugged the tunnel.

This tunnel was just down the road from the above tunnel.

On a walk around Valdez we saw these vehicles lined up to get on the Alaska Marine Highway ferry. We had wanted to take the ferry to Cordova, but because of the ferry schedule, the round trip would take 4 days. Much too long to leave Mocha and Big Guy on their own in Valdez.

Ferry at the dock waiting to be loaded.

Wooden sculpture by Peter Wolf Toth. He has carved 74 of these “Whispering Giants” ranging from 20 to 40 feet tall. They are located in all 50 states and countries around the world. Peter never charges a fee for the sculptures, but he does require the city provide the raw material and living expenses while the sculpture is being created.