Valdez, AK - The Pinks Come Home

One of the cool places to visit in Valdez is the Hatchery on the other side of the bay. The hatchery raises and releases two different kinds of salmon each year. Thus, this is the place these salmon call ‘home’ and the place where they come to spawn. But the hatchery, skullduggers that they are, then take the eggs of the returning salmon and use them for the next years batch. Poor salmon, victims of their own instinct to swim home to lay their eggs. And, then they die. What kind of life cycle is this? But, boy, do we all depend upon this life cycle. Sport fishermen, commercial fishermen, gulls, seals, sea lions, eagles, bears - and tourists.

There are actually 3 hatcheries on the bay outside Valdez, each breeding its own type of salmon.

Meanwhile it’s quite a show that they all put on for tourists. We all know when they’re coming and gather here to watch them swim in. And, boy are there lots of them - although this year we heard that they expected 18,000,000 and only got 11,000,000. Lots of fish, lots of sea gulls, lots of tourists and, if we’re lucky, we might spot a bear or two stoking up for the winter. Here’s the scene. We’ve got salmon streaming home, gulls looking for an easy meal, bears cruising the wetlands and fishermen lining the banks with their lines in the water. Who knew that this would be so much fun.

First the salmon, the most important players in this little play, roiling the waters is large groups, waiting to swim up the ladders into the hatchery.

Then there were the gulls.

Watching the gulls was loads of fun. They’d float in on an incoming wave til they got under the bridge, then they’d fly back out about 30’ and ride another wave in. A carnival ride for the gulls. I watched one through 4 rides. He was having a great time. So, even if he’s full of salmon, he’s got this cool carnival ride to occupy his time. And, he wasn’t the only one. They were all doing it. So many gulls, I wondered if they had a traffic control tower or if they ran into each other. Yep, they did. Zig one way to avoid another gull and zig right into the one on the other side.

Back to the salmon to watch. They’re supposed to go up a special channel that goes up 29 ladder steps to the top and into the hatchery.

Some of them miss the mark and land on the wier here and die there. Most of them make it to the right entry and then they struggle up the ladder. They’ve got to go through the special opening in each ladder to get to the next higher rung. Then they can hide out in a corner to catch their breath and gather strength for the next opening and rung.

Today when they got to the top, to the huge 80’ tank at the end, they hit a gate because it was Sunday and the hatchery was closed. They’d all swim towards the end and, finding the gate shut, would drift back to the beginning of the tank. Then, when there were lots of them, they’d swish their tails, jump a bit, cause a stir in the water and then ‘wave’ towards the end, splashing and roiling the water as they swam. Then they’d repeat this every 5 minutes or so. I’d be watching the wave reach the end and then I’d look down into the tank and note that there were no salmon there. Sure enough, they had all drifted towards the other end for their next wave. And then it came in, splashing, roiling and surging towards the locked door.

As we walked up the ramp beside the salmon ladder, we read all kinds of informational signs about what the hatchery does. So, along with all the fun, we can learn a lot too. And, believe you me, I know little about salmon. This hatchery has two types of salmon: silver and pink.

They leave the hatchery, out through the Prince William Sound in to the Pacific where they swim around for several years and then head back to the hatchery.

I could watch the gulls or the salmon for hours. Well, maybe not - but it was so intriguing.
We saw the salmon, the gulls, the sport fishermen lining the banks around the hatchery, some seals and sea lions out in the bay but no eagles and no bears - until we left. Too many people here so we saw none here but we did espy one on our way out. It’s a wetlands along the road and lots of salmon with a poor inner GPS land here in the little river that meanders on this side of the road. When the tide goes out, they are stuck on the river bottom, squirming and dying. Some bears know this and wait for a dying salmon to ‘catch’. Here’s one. He knew we were here, but way across the wetlands (close to the open doors of the car for a quick retreat) - but he was much too busy to care about us) but he just kept eating.

Then he finished with one and found another. He kept checking around to see what we were doing. There were about 5 with us while we were watching him. But, never fear, we were well away from him.

When he finished with that one, he found another and scampered up the slope into the brush. He ate two and put a third into his mouth to go.

A fun hour - or two - at the hatchery.

Valdez, AK - Flying Over the Glacier 1

One of our adventures in Valdez is to take a helicopter up to the glacier snow field, check out the icebergs on the Columbia Glacier ‘shore’, fly around the glacier and then back to the airport. We checked the radar and the NOAA weather reports - UGH, the weather is not pretty. Rain clouds, fog, drizzle. You name it, we are going to get wet weather. We had originally scheduled a flight for next Monday since that looked the best, but that forecast changed and the weather looked even worse than today so we headed over to the airport to see what they might recommend. Should we have done this on our last day in Seward when it was sunny? Absolutely. But, it is what it is and we got a day that was not sunny and where the cloud cover was low. He had an opening for today, we headed home for a small lunch, a change of clothes and we were back at the airport and in the helicopter for our first helicopter ride.

Here we are, taking off. We were up and away, over the airport.

Gary has a GPS program which traces where we go and, when we got back, he placed our trip over the actual terrain map. Thus, here is our flight. You can see where the pilot tried 3 times to get us up to the ice field at the top of the glaciers. But, rain hit us every time.

You can see where we flew across the face of the Columbia Glacier on the left of the picture several times and across the face of Shoup Glacier closer to the town.

We flew over the Columbia Glacier, one of the largest near Valdez but which is shrinking the fastest. The Columbia Glacier was first documented in 1794 when it appeared to be stable with a length of 41 miles. During the 1980s it began a rapid retreat and by 1995 it was only about 36 miles long. By late 2000 it was about 34 miles long. The loss of a massive area of the Columbia Glacier’s tongue has generated a tremendous number of icebergs since the 1980s and the Exxon Valdez ran aground while avoiding a Columbia Glacier iceberg in 1989. Columbia Glacier began rapidly losing ice during the early 1980s. Since that time, the glacier has retreated more than 10.5 miles and lost 50 percent of its volume, mostly due to calving. As of 2015, the ice lost is estimated to be equivalent to 28 to 36 cubic miles of water.

There are several cruise boats that head out to Columbia Glacier every day but the icebergs that calve off of the glacier can be twice as big as the boats so these boats seldom go closer than a mile.
Here are Landsat satellite images of the Glacier from 1986 and 2014 showing how much it has shrunk.

We flew out over the glassy seas of the harbor.

If you look closely off to the upper left, you can see a flat island with a short round knob in the middle - looks like a hat. Well, that’s the island that the Exxon Valdez ran aground on.

We found this ice dammed lake high up.

We landed on a ‘beach’ about 2 miles from the terminus of the glacier.

Just for comparison, here is the picture of our friends on the same flightseeing tour last year.

We were intrigued by the icebergs.

I thought this one looked like a chicken.

Here’s the edge of the glacier. It’s about 200’ tall. We could hear it calve but the sound comes after the fact so never got a picture of one.

Look at those wrinkles in the glacier (the crevasses) - almost as many as I have.

Here are some seals resting on icebergs - chunks that hve broken off. You can see why tour boats don’t get too close to the face of the glacier with all this ice in the water.

I’ll have trouble publishing this blog if I write any more here so am putting the rest of our flight into another blog.