Fox Pup's AK Vacation - Day 8: Bridal Veils and Horse Tails

Back on the road today… we’re now off toward Valdez, right along Prince William Sound.  More golden birch trees brighten up the hillsides, and we got to drive through the Wrangell-St. Elias mountains.  Part of this drive took us through Thompson Pass, which was absolutely beautiful!  So much of the scenery we’re seeing on this trip is so hard to put into words.  Beautiful, gorgeous, pretty, great, exciting, and awesome just don’t cut it.  The word “Wow…” comes out of our mouths quite often. 

South of Thompson Pass, we came upon a couple of awesome waterfalls… one named “Bridal Veil Waterfall” and the other named “Horsetail Waterfall”.  Surprise, surprise… photos don’t do them justice.  But the names are quite representative, actually.  We met a couple of professional photographers at Horsetail Waterfall who live between Wasilla and Palmer, and they were sharing some of their stories about Valdez with us… telling us about a road by the pipeline where you can see otters and sea lions along with some other great scenery.  Really?  We’ll have to find that!

From there, we continued on toward Valdez.  We passed by a road that had a sign saying “Old Valdez Town Site” with an arrow pointing down the road.  I had forgotten that the entire town had to be relocated after the 1964 earthquake that caused ground level to sink something like 10 feet.  Could be something to check out tomorrow.  Our first task as we got into Valdez was to find lodging for the night.  As I made reservations several months ago, I was not able to make reservations at the B&B we hoped for in Valdez because the host said she doesn’t take reservations after Sept. 15^th but we wouldn’t have trouble getting a room.  Well, of course now we can’t get in touch with her.  We called a few other places and finally settled upon an Inn.  When we were trying to figure out which direction we needed to go to get there, we realized it was RIGHT behind the parking lot we were sitting in.  Valdez sure isn’t a large town, but we didn’t realize everything was within about a 2 block radius of where we were sitting! Funny.

After dinner, we decided to roam around the harbor a bit.  As we were walking down there, a bunch of fish were suddenly jumping out of the water and we saw something brown chasing after them.  Someone told us it was an otter.  And the fish were salmon.  Those salmon continued to jump out of the water one by one the entire time we were there… I didn’t know they did that (I’m certainly no fisherman though)!  We tried to get pictures of them doing that, but our reaction time was always just a bit too slow.  We did find a local kitty named Poppy who was very friendly, and while we were giving her attention, we realized an otter was right behind us in the water.  Ooh!!  He was apparently getting muscles off the dock and totally enjoying them… making little happy noises and all.  We were following him around getting pictures of him.  A couple of times he was right near the dock as he was eating and swimming, so even though I only had my wide angle lens I could still get some good, close shots of him.

Poppy, the harbor kitty

 As he swam away from us, we meandered around the docks a bit more and eventually came across something else coming out of the water and blowing spray into the air.  Not a whale, but what is it??  It looked like a dog sticking its head out of the water.  It was a sea lion!  Unfortunately, it would only stick its head up, stay for a moment, and then go back under water.  Kind of hard to get any real photos of them that way!  It was still neat to see them though, and enjoy the scenery and sea smells around us.  As it got dark, we finally let it go and went back to our room… we have a whole other day to find more photo ops around town.

The Small Boat Harbor at Valdez