Trip Update #5

Our trip to Valdez started out rainy so we visited some museums in town and learned about the earthquake of ’64 and the Exxon Valdez spill in ’89. The 8.6 earthquake destroyed the old town of Valdez which was built on glacier deposits. The town was later rebuilt nearby on a bedrock foundation. The town of Valdez gets 20-30 feet a snow a year. The town is surrounded by snow covered mountains that receive several times more snowfall than that.
The history of the spill is somewhat whitewashed in Valdez. This is definitely an “oil town”. The oil companies pay them well to keep it that way. The town has so much extra money they built a container handling facility and a port with 8 grain silos. Although more than a decade old, both are still waiting for their first shipment. “Build it and they will come” has it limits. They are still trying to figure out what to do with the extra school they built.
If you didn’t know there was a spill, you couldn’t tell by visiting the town or by going out in a boat. Although the visible signs are gone, the long term effect on the wildlife is still being evaluated. Changes have been made to make a similar spill much less likely. There are pilot boats for each tanker and the tankers are smaller and double hulled. During the cleanup, many pristine beaches that were covered with oil were cleaned with hot water and pressure washed. Some believe that this actually was more damaging to the beach than the oil, because all of the natural growth was destroyed and the oil was pushed deeper into the beach. To give you an idea of the size of this spill, if 10.8 millions barrels of oil were spilled on the Atlantic coast, the beaches from Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod would be covered in oil.
Despite all this, Valdez is a pleasant place to visit. We took a cruise to the Columbia Glacier and along the way we saw sea otters, sea lions, horned puffins, eagles, Dall porpoise, a humpback whale and a herd of mountain goats.
I was asked if there were any glaciers left in Alaska. The good news is that there are 100,000 glaciers in Alaska and one is the size of Rhode Island. The bad news is that 90% are retreating, some up to 9 miles in the last 100 years.
From Valdez we headed over to Homer, the most beautiful town in Alaska. We knew this from a previous visit - good thing, because clouds covered the mountains that surround Homer while we were there. A canoeing trip on the Moose River gave us a good dose of Alaska liquid sunshine. A local told us “It never rains THAT hard”. We took a boat trip to Portage Glacier which we noted had receded considerably since our last visit 20 years ago.
Back in Anchorage, we finally got our refrigerator replaced. Next stop Denali National Park.