Valdez-Land of Water Falls, Ice & Oil

People kept telling us to go to Valdez, so we added a day to our schedule & it was worth it.

There was "Old Valdez" before Valdez.  The 64 earthquake & tsunami destroyed the old town.  So they moved a few miles down & built on granite.  There is literally nothing left.  A few people moved their houses & most rebuilt as well as the harbor.  After everyone was relocated, they burned the old
place to the ground to avoid squatters.

We visited 2 museums

The old lighthouse light above

All acreage in Valdez was in 9 glass
cases done in complete detail on "N"
scale .  The oil storage in these tanks,
 all the businesses & individual homes.

Steve is going to hunt some huge bear!

We headed for outside, & saw 2 beautiful
waterfalls right off the road.

 Bridal Veil Falls

Horsetail Falls

Downtown Harbor

 An oil tanker came in. This is where all the oil in the pipeline comes in.

We went out the Dayville road & saw Sea Lions & a salmon fish hatchery.  They fertilize about 400,000 eggs every month.

The babies are sent out after a year down the river. They come back the 2nd year by memory to spawn.

The fish are jumping

 This was exciting.  We actually saw
Icebergs at Valdez glacier that were on
The lake

 Valdez Glacier

Here's the sea lions

We stopped at the sign on the way
out& got a pic of a small waterfall.

Back to Anchorage & Beyond

On our way up from Homer,  we stopped at the old Russian Orthodox community of Ninilchik. Not much to see except the old church.

We stopped at Clam Gulch to eat & spent the night in Anchorage.

The next day we went to Eklutna.
The guide at this State Historic Park was actually Russian Orthodox.  This area is where the Russian Fur traders & their families first settled.

These are pics of the old church & the newer one.

 The bottom line of paintings are bible stories.  The next line up are the 12 apostles.  They believe in the original church (sound familiar) not as the Catholics & protestants have turned it into.  Their missionaries turned a lot of natives into Orthodox all over Alaska.

These next pics are "spirit houses" which the native Alaskans believed housed the spirit for 1 year. They would put a blanket & food & drink into them.This was a native tradition not Orthodox. Orthodox had the crosses.

A couple of pics of older houses in the area.

Our next stop was Matanuska Glacier.
We took a mile nature walk which went a little closer to the area.

We ended this day in Glenallen.

Something I finally noticed!!

I was paging through the blog & I knew I have 14 posts this month & yet I couldn't.      see all of them by just clicking archive.  You have to click "older posts"  to get them all & you have to keep doing it to go back further.

The older post link is down at the bottom o f the page.  So please check them all.  9 in June & 15 in July!! Linda

Homer

When I posted last, we were on our way to Homer.  We camped out on the "spit" which is surrounded by beach on 3 sides

There are huge mountains, glaciers, & volcanos across Kachemak Bay.  We walked
over to the shops, restaurants, & the Fisherman Memorial.

Outside our restaurant window we saw an otter & this boat

We checked out the Salty Dawg saloon, where people hang money all over. It

was actually one of the original buildings, over 100 years old.

Today, we took a trolley tour of Homer.  We

went to the Pratt Museum where we learned all about the settling of Homer, the Kachemak Bay & Aleutian Islands.  Here is another quilt for you ladies.

On our way to lunch, I snapped a couple of pics of a few buildings in Homer.

We went to the Islands & Oceans Center. It is part of the National Wildlife Refuge. We took a little path out to where some cranes were nesting.

A couple of other pics of the reserve & the mountains

An extra special treat was a bald eagle mother & babies nesting atop this tower right by our campsite!! Steve got a picture later of both parents.

We head back to Anchorage tomorrow