I Hope You Still Feel Small When You Stand Beside the Ocean

Mile 6824. Tok RV Village in Tok, AK. Week 8, Day 1.

A pull through campsite where you don’t have to unhook the truck is a treat after a long day of driving. The miles aren’t commensurate with number of hours driven. It’s more the condition of the road, much of it allowing for no more than 40 miles per hour. When we crossed the border into Alaska on July 4th Mark asked the customs agent how the roads were and his reply was that these first eleven miles were the best stretch of road in Alaska. He wasn’t joking. It’s been one road construction project after another and in between frost heaves that are more like riding a mechanical bull than driving. Weather plays its part as does permafrost and glacial runoff, which is what they’re working on here by adding culverts under the road. But who can complain with views like this. 

Mark sketched out our itinerary in 2018. Valdez is a destination I requested we add 30 days prior to leaving. After reading all it had to offer he agreed, and as it turned out, his favorite stop to date. If you think you’ve heard of it you have. Valdez is the termination of the Trans-Alaska pipeline due to its being the closest ice free port to Prudhoe Bay, the source of the oil, and is the site of the infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill, the largest oil spill in North American history, in 1989. Or perhaps it was the Good Friday earthquake of 1964, the most powerful earthquake recorded in North American history, second in the world, that destroyed the original town of Valdez as well as causing damage to many other surrounding areas.

There are so many other more positive reasons to know Valdez. Homer’s mountains were far away, across the Kachemak Bay, whereas Valdez’s mountains, the Chugach mountains, hug the valley in which Valdez lies. These glacier-filled mountains, the tallest coastal mountains in North America, are big, from an average height of 4,000 feet to almost 13,000 feet. Waterfalls are more prevalent than in Hawaii. As one blogger wrote, so eloquently, “Fewer than 4,000 residents live in the port city of Alaska’s southern coast, but pretty much everything else about it is monumental in scale. Its coastal mountain topography, its access to adventure, and particularly its winters.”

Valdez gets an average 300 inches of snow annually, up to 500-600 inches in Thompson Pass, 28 miles from town. There are “snow storage” areas to house plowed snow. Often these piles don’t melt until spring. Yet Valdez has fewer “snow days” than anywhere else in the U.S. You can mountain bike in the snow or take a helicopter to go skiing. I asked a local woman that I chatted with at a tiny art shack featuring the high school teacher’s art work about the winters. She shared that most people love winter more than summer. Her son travels away during the year, but is always back for winter. You have to be wired to go outside in the winter though, she said. If not, it’s tough. 

A friend recently shared with me lyrics to a Lee Ann Womack song that went, “I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean.” I felt that on Homer Spit, but I feel it more standing in Valdez at the base of these glorious mountains. My thoughts are more and more of home and then I come here and never want to leave. Here I am humbled. 

Before turning onto the highway leading to Valdez we had our first glacier sighting, the Manatuska Glacier.

Then once on the highway, the Richardson highway, glaciers were everywhere. Remember the car in the Fairbanks museum that Robert Sheldon drove from Fairbanks to Valdez in 1913? This is that road, the first road in Alaska.

It meanders through Thompson Pass where we could walk to the base of the Worthington Glacier. 

And then through lush Keystone Canyon with its abundant waterfalls from glacial melt. Sun shined the day we arrived, and a little the day after, offering us a scenic view of the small boat harbor and the bay, a view we also enjoyed from our campsite.

But on the day we took the boat through Prince William Sound to view Columbia Glacier, the second largest tidewater glacier in North America (see, everything is big here), currently retreating for miles into the Chugach Mountains, we had low clouds and rain. While this highlighted the gorgeous blue in the icebergs it made glacier and wildlife viewing a little difficult. Still, floating through the icefields around the glacier was like floating through a gallery featuring sculptures. 

This piece of ice I’m holding in my hands is not an oversized ice cube for your Old-Fashioned, it’s an iceberg, fished out of the ocean, from a glacier whose age is unfathomable. I was giddy at the time from the novelty of it, but writing this I’m once again humbled.

As with many of our experiences on this trip, we’re living vicariously through the photo of others on the RVing to Alaska Facebook group – views of Denali and of this glacier notwithstanding. As you can see in the photos, there wasn’t much to see given the weather and our proximity.

But we saw some fun wildlife – a sea otter “raft”, stellar sea lions, and puffins – and the water was so calm, it released tension accumulated in our muscles from driving Alaskan roads.

It’s difficult to name a “best” in Valdez, but one that sticks out in my mind is the Solomon Gulch Fish Hatchery on Allison Point. Salmon birthed at the hatchery a year or two ago are returning now, by the thousands, and when we were there, accumulating at the entrance to the hatchery, which for some reason, was not allowing any salmon to swim up the ladder. This made for good fishing. Mark on the first day fished below the hatchery snagging his first pink salmon and on the second day above, landing three pinks and one silver.

We now have a freezer full of salmon for our trip home. But on a larger scale, the prohibited entry, at low tide, made for a feeding frenzy. Stellar Sea Lions, much larger than their California cousins, went in for the attack and Gulls (Kittiwakes) picked up the spoils. I found the scene both disturbing and fascinating. The circle of life combined with the inhumanity of not allowing the salmon to complete the journey mapped out in their DNA.

We’ve been following two “missing” stories this past week, both published on the RVing to Alaska Facebook group. A fellow camper’s cat, Leo, went missing. Several members shared very practical suggestions for helping the cat find its way “home” and one local in the group shared the post with the Valdez online community. It was a difficult story to read. I kept thinking how terrified Leo must be lost in such unfamiliar territory and with so many predators. How worried the owners must be. I got online this morning, before our departure, to see if there’d been an update and sure enough, Leo was home. I forget that cats are also adventurers. He was out having the time of his life, like the rest of us. 

The other story is both scary (because of the vicinity to our past and future travels) and tragic and as of yesterday has made national (Canadian) news. Remember our visit to Liard Hot Springs? A few weeks later authorities found the dead bodies of two visitors. Mind you this is a remote part of B.C. I get the impression that crimes like this do not happen often, if at all. The RCMP put out a bulletin wanting to talk to anyone who’d been in the area at the time, hoping a traveler had encountered these people or had a dash cam with some information. A few days ago a burnt car and two additional bodies were found at another town on the Alaska Highway, about 450 km away from Liard. A manhunt is now on for two boys who were supposedly coming to Whitehorse for work who are now running east last seen in Manitoba. These are the questions that run through my mind – did they set out with murder in mind or did something unexpected happen, prompting them to ruin their lives (and the lives of so many others). 

I experienced several consecutive sleepless nights this week, almost to the point I didn’t want to go to bed. Funny thing is, I couldn’t keep my eyes open to read, yet I wasn’t sleepy enough to fall asleep. This happens at home too, but there it’s easier to deal with. Each day is a new adventure requiring renewed energy. Some days I’m better at bringing it than others. The amount of sleep I’ve had seems to have no bearing on this. Some days it causes me to hit a wall and others I’m bouncing off that wall. Fortunately the sleeplessness passes and no doubt when it does Mark is glad too; my tossing and turning has to be disruptive.

Another valuable lesson learned this week. Don’t let the table legs roll around freely when under tow as they’ll hide themselves under the slide out and jam it up. I almost ripped off the faux paneling at the foot of the dinette bench extending the slide out. You think you have everything ironed out the first few weeks on the road. After all, this hasn’t happened before and we’ve been 7 weeks on the road. But then you change something not thinking about consequences. In this case we moved the TV to the truck for storage because we weren’t watching it and were constantly having to move it out of the way. But it also kept the legs wedged in place next to the bed when under tow. 

Today we left Valdez, fog so thick you could no longer see the small boat harbor, but revealing a haunting beauty as we drove out of town. 

The route this, our 8th week on the road, has us crossing back and forth between Canada and Alaska, on and off the Alaska Highway, finishing the last of the Alaska “must sees” before setting our sights home.