driving from Glennallen to Valdez

[Newman]

This is a blog entry from a couple driving from the Copper river Valley to Prince William Sound through Thompson Pass and the Chugach mountains:

We're driving on the Richardson Highway although it should have been called the "Glacier Highway" as we saw so many big, beautiful blue glaciers. The first pic is a glacier high in the mountains along our route (sorry, did not get the name), and the second glacier shot is the Worthington Glacier which you can practically drive to, but you can walk to from the Visitors Center - this is about 30 miles from our destination of Valdez. We also spotted a young moose as we approached this area. Just prior to our descent into the village of Valdez, we had our picture taken at Thompson Pass - we hope you can get the feeling of this vast area, but truly pictures do not do this area justice. The view from up here was incredible - we could see the Wrangell-St. Elias Mountain Range, some of which were probably 50 miles away. Very close to the village was this tremendous waterfalls "Bridal Veil Falls" which flows out of Keystone Canyon into the Lowe River which flows to Prince William Sound (Valdez).

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[Newman]

P and JS travel continue into Valdez and on to Prince William Sound

While in Valdez, we decided to take a side trip aboard the "Glacier Spirit" to view Prince William Sound and the Columbia Glacier. We departed Valdez at 12:00 noon and returned to our dock, in the fog, at 7:30 PM. We encountered these fishing boats on the way out to see the glacier. The larger boat is offloading the catch from the Seine Net fishermens' enclosed net. The processing ship uses a large vacumn-like device which sucks the trapped fish from the net into the shoots which you can see on her deck which sends the fish into the holding tank. The yellow boat which you will see in the fog is a tanker tug which assists the large oil tankers to the dock for loading at the pipeline terminal. The terminal is pictured, but with the foggy conditions, you may not be able to make it out clearly. The wildlife pictured are sea otters we viewed as they lay on their backs relaxing and feeding - very cute. Among the icebergs, we saw a variety of birds (Puffin, Gulls and Eagles). The large brown mammals seen along the rocky coast are colonies of Sea Lions - we got so close, we could hear them, and fortunately, not close enough to smell them! We also saw a couple Humpback Whales, one of which can be seen in front of our sistership.

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follow the link for some great photos!