Drive to Valdez

Robert, Friday, July 18

Today we drove to Valdez. Thankfully, the rain of yesterday stopped and the sky had broken clouds. We packed things up and were on the road by 10:30. The road to Valdez from Glennallen is one of the prettiest drives in the state. It winds through mountains with snow fields, glaciers, and waterfalls. Periodically you can see the pipeline that runs from Prudhoe Bay. Then about 15 miles before Valdez is a glacier that we stopped to see. Just after the glacier is a mountain pass. Approaching from the north as we were, the grade to the pass is very gentle. The elevation of the pass is only about 2,500 feet. On the south side of the pass, the road goes down to sea level and it does so in one long hill. This is one where you down shift and coast. I didn’t check it but it seems the downhill side was almost ten miles of constant downgrade. When we got to Valdez, we checked the first campground where we were interested in staying. They actually have two campgrounds, one for adults and a second for families. The adults-only was filled and we could only get three nights in the family campground. As our plans were to be here four and maybe five days, we checked our second choice. This one is right on the water and while they had spaces, we decided not to stay there. The downside to this one is that it doesn’t have sewer hookups and it is located next door to dormitories that are used by the workers at a fish processing plant. The people we saw hanging around the dormitories made it look like a homeless shelter. So we drove to our next choice. Where we are staying is a big, gravel parking lot but they do have full hookups with free Wifi and cable TV. After we settled in, we drove around town and ate dinner in a Chinese restaurant. The evening entertainment was provided by a group of about twelve people setting up tents. If they had been teenagers, we would have thought that it was a bunch of scouts, but these guys looked to be 30ish. There was a stiff wind blowing and some of them looked like they didn’t have a clue how to set up a tent. After that I watched a little TV and went to bed.