I seldom post on travel days, but today was the most beautiful we have experienced on the trip. While Banff and Jasper were gorgeous, they can’t compare to the huge peaks surrounding us on all sides while we drive along the river bottom. These mountains were sculpted by glaciers, and they are craggy and rough. I tried to get pictures, but with the flat, cloudy light (yes, it clouded over again!) none of them come close to replicating what I saw. Mountains were piled upon mountains, many being 12,000-14,000’ high. They seem higher since we were only t 1000’ – 2000’. I wish I could show you.
We did see glacier after glacier again.
There we’re lots and lots of much smaller glaciers along the way plus one larger one I couldn’t get a safe spot to photograph. These two are the big touristy ones.
We also visited one of the visitor centers for Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve. This is the largest national park in the US with over 13M acres in the park and another 4.8M acres in the preserve. The park by itself makes up 15% of the total acres of the entire national park system! Sadly the native cultural center was closed, but they did have a fish wheel outside. When the salmon are running upriver to spawn, they truly just swim into the basket and get dumped into the box!
The last canyon before we reached Valdez is not far below Thompson Pass. The pass is the snowiest place in the US averaging 500” of snow a year. It had odd road markers well above our heads for plowing! The canyon is the repository of all that snow, and is deeply carved by the runoff. It is so full of waterfalls that you see multiples everywhere you look. The most famous are Bridal Veil and Horsetail Falls. They have huge pull offs to handle the sightseeing visitors.
Next to the pull off for Bridal Veil Falls there was this cute little spring gushing out of the wall drilled out for the road.
We are staying in the Bear Paw Adult Campground. There are only a couple dozen sites here, but they have a nearby family campground with many, many more. It is very crowded with all our big rigs parked in here. This is much quieter, and our site is right on the harbor entrance. We sat outside a while just watching the commercial and private boats move in and out of the harbor. There is separate docking for the massive oil tankers that move the 2,000,000 barrels of oil that comes from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline every day. Tomorrow we go on a wildlife/glacier cruise. I hope the weather stays dry.