Valdez and Thompson Pass

We had a lot of sunny weather last summer so i decided to go to Valdez one day in the hopes of finally seeing it without gloomy clouds. The forecast was good, but in the six hours it took me to drive around the Chugach mountains the weather changed back to normal, which meant permanent gloomy clouds. Apart from a few dramatic thunderstorms it had been a beautiful sunny drive until i was about 10 miles outside of Valdez.

Lodging options are poor in Valdez. I stayed in a cheap hotel and went looking for things to do. I found some bears, some salmon, and a cool gorge next to a hydroelectric plant.

This mother was busy teaching her cub the rules of the world. I'm amazed at how big the forearm of this cub was. Only a youngster but it's arm is bigger than just about any man i can think of. That's a big hand with long fingers too.

Just outside Keystone Canyon is Horsetail Falls.

Something about Valdez has always bothered me in that it just doesn't look as pretty as most small coastal towns in Alaska. I've been there three times now and this time i finally figured out why. It's because Valdez was at the epicenter of the 9.2 earthquake in 1964. The quake caused tidal waves that wiped out the town and the surrounding landscape off the map. I finally noticed, on this trip, that there are no trees anywhere near sea level (except young ones). All of the coastline and even up onto the sides of the surrounding hills and mountains are covered entirely in monotonous, ugly alders. Alders are a pioneering tree, so i assume they were the first plants to grow back after the devastation was cleared up.

Fireweed

The boat harbor

One of the original streets of Valdez.

You can still visit the old town site of Valdez. It's easy to miss because nothing is there and the roads aren't inviting. The town was wiped out but the grid of streets in grassy fields still follows the original layout. Occasionally signs along the road point out where homes of note used to sit. It seems like the earthquake may have dropped much of the town site closer to sea level, as some of the streets seem to disappear into the ocean when the tide comes in.

The home of Alaska's first governor was destroyed 50 years ago.

Some of the signs have pictures that help a lot in visualizing what it used to look like.

Outside of town I wanted to know where this road went but a flood was busy washing it away.

The water had only recently started to recede. The ground here was very squishy.

The gorge above was the most interesting surprise i found outside of town. There was a strange bridge leading to a pipe with a rickety rail on parts of it that led back towards the waterfall. I was really tempted to walk down there but the stream coming in from the side was flooding over part of the pipe, and it looked slippery. The stream was coming from a hydro electric plant about 100 yards away, and since i had already seen floods taking out that other road i didn't want to risk the water rising any higher while i was on the piping. Maybe next time.

I want to know what's back there.

Part II: Thompson Pass

Thompson Pass is a breathtaking mountain pass that connects Valdez to the rest of the road system by way of the Richardson Highway. It's a long broad pass that gradually rises from (contrary to how it feels) east to west, then turns 90 degrees and unexpectedly plummets away where a series of major fault lines begin tearing the mountains apart into steep sided valleys. The drive from Copper River to the pass feels very remote and has virtually no facilities at all. There is a new expensive adventure lodge on the east side of the pass. It would be really nice to stay there as a base for exploring the area.

Most people who drive through Thompson Pass stop to see the Worthington Glacier, one branch of which is visible here.

The other times i've been to the pass it has been very snowy and foggy, so i was dumbstruck at how kickass it looked in brilliant sunlight with no snow at all. The dreariness of Valdez made it an easy choice to head back up and after a bit of exploring some side roads i found a spot right off the highway that looked like a good place to just get out of the car and wander around.

It's just incomprehensible to me that you can stop your car and start walking through this kind of terrain right off the road!

The mysterious terrain of Thompson Pass beckons.

I have never seen the stuff above in the western Chugach or Kenai mountains, in fact, i've never seen it before anywhere i've ever been! It's an almost fluorescent matt of weird vegetation a few inches deep. It kinda looks like tightly packed alfalfa. Very soft to walk on but it grows in scattered small patches, so it seems best to avoid damaging it. I saw a picture of it for the first time shortly before this trip. The picture had been taken in a very remote part of the Alaska Range, and the color was so vivid i thought the photographer had oversaturated it. He did not.

More weird stuff were these winding rivulets of rocks all over the place. It was like the streams were turned upside down.

I just went where the terrain led me and before i knew it i was gazing in the direction of the distant Copper River, and wishing i had days of more time. After about two hours i figured i better get back to car for the long drive back home.

A large rectangular tarn with piles of gravel in it.

The pass unfolded into wide open expanses of raw parkland.

At some point i found this insanely smooth natural "road". The stones were all packed very tightly to the point that it was like a cobbled street. You could easily drive a car on it, and it went for quite some distance up the mountain.

The natural road even had a "curb" that you can see here on the left. Beyond the curb the terrain was normal but on the other side it was flat and packed. I wondered if the curb was a moraine and i was walking along the bed of a very recently melted small glacier.

I was still following the road when it started to open up into large slabs of flat glaciated rock.

The "road" eventually ended at a small snowfield with no explanations.

For a while i wandered around in a foggy no mans land.

At this point i turned around. It looked like unobstructed hiking for many miles, maybe all the way to the Copper River basin 30 miles distant! This valley looks to be part of the same fault system (not the exact fault) that created the Bagley Icefield east of the Copper River. Contrary to what i thought at the time, Thompson Pass is actually directly NORTH of Cordova. Cordova at this point is only 20 miles farther than Valdez. So close, yet so far away....