Starting the return trek back through Tok, AK

August 7 - 9   Day 60-62

This first picture supports the information I posted a short time ago about how the towns would post a sign welcoming you to their city, but it was posted several miles out. If you zoom in, you can see this is 22 miles out.

Valdez is not a particularly beautiful coastal town of ~2,600 people.  The Alaskan pipeline, fishing and a little bit of tourism makes its economy.  Present day Valdez is about 4 miles from original Valdez but was relocated after the earthquake of 1964 destroyed the town.  When they laid out the street plan for new Valdez, they really spread it out and made the streets real wide, allowing for growth.  A good plan in theory, but even with the pipeline, businesses came and went only to leave several vacant buildings remaining.  On the way out of Valdez, we stopped at Blueberry Lake State Recreation park for the night.  This is a popular destination for the locals, and bears, to pick wild blueberries.  However, they are not quite ripe due to a lack of sunshine.  It was cold, rainy, and windy, but the views of the mountains with the clouds clinging to the slopes were very pretty.  If you look closely at the second picture, you can see snow capped mountains above the clouds.

Below is a picture of the Wrangell/St. Elias mountain range inside the Wrangell/St. Elias National Park (a little hard to see due to the clouds). This is about 70 miles south/southeast of Tok where we spent the night.  The size of the glaciers in the park are larger than Rhode Island, and the size of the park is larger than Connecticut.

Then the big mountain in the park is Mt. Sanford.

As we continued on to Tok on the Tok Cutoff Highway, the mountain views were stunning.

We passed several places that looked like they should be moose habitats.  After viewing several small ponds with no moose, Bonnie said "I would just like to see a moose standing out in the water."  Less than ten seconds after saying that, I rounded a corner and there it was; a moose standing in the pond eating.

Then, about two miles farther down the road, another one.  This one is in a little deeper water and seemed as interested in us as we were of her.

OBSERVATIONS (and other unscientific data):
This observation was quite easy and obvious.  This has never happened to me before, but we were driving through an area that is well known for viewing bears eating salmon.  As I was driving along the bay in Valdez, Bonnie was watching one side of the road and I the other.  All of a sudden there was this loud explosion sound, and when we looked forward, a very large sea gull had flown into our windshield.  Fortunately, the windshield did not break, but the sea gull looked like something you would see on a cartoon where a bird flies into a window then slides down.  The observation was that a sea gull is no match for a 40mph rv.  The sea gull lost.