Day 5 — Wrangell-St Elias National Park → Valdez
Breakfast, departure to Valdez, The Richardson Highway is a very scenic route, offering magnificent views of the Chugach Mountains and Alaska Range, and some of the best glacier viewing in Alaska. The Richardson is a wide paved highway in fair to good condition, with some sections of frost heaves and patched pavement. This route also offers good views of the trans-Alaska pipeline, that carries oil 800 miles from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean to the terminus at Port Valdez.The Richardson Highway was Alaska’s first road, known to gold seekers in 1898 as the Valdez to Eagle Trail. Gold stampeders started up the trail again in 1902, this time headed for Fairbanks, site of a big gold strike. The Valdez to Fairbanks trail became an important route to the Interior, and in 1910 the trail was upgraded to a wagon road under the direction of Gen. Wilds P. Richardson, first president of the Alaska Road Commission. The ARC updated the road to automobile standards in the 1920s; it was hard-surfaced in 1957., You continue through green forests and majestic waterfalls to Thompson Pass, from where you can see the Worthington Glacier. In Keystone Canyon, a gorge with almost vertical walls, reaching heights of almost 200 meters in some places, you can stop at the Bride Veil and Pony Tail waterfalls., arrival at Valdez, Deep in the heart of Prince William Sound and surrounded by some of the world’s tallest coastal mountains is Valdez, a city of 5,000 residents in a remarkably picturesque setting, a 305-mile road trip east of Anchorage and 364-mile drive south of Fairbanks. The heart of Valdez is its small boat harbor clustered along its waterfront. From there, the town stretches about a dozen walkable blocks back toward the mountains and Mineral Creek Canyon while nearby Egan Drive, Valdez’s equivalent to Main Street, turns into the Richardson Highway and heads north for Thompson Pass. Scattered through the downtown area is a wide range of restaurants, accommodations, museums. Visible across the inlet from town is the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline Terminal with its massive storage tanks each holding nine million barrels of oil. Valdez’s location in Prince William Sound makes it an outdoor paradise. It lies less than 25 miles east of Columbia Glacier, a popular day-cruise destination, and all around are glaciers galore, stunning mountain scenery, an abundance of marine wildlife and opportunities for outdoor adventure, from catching giant halibut and salmon to kayaking among icebergs and seals. Valdez’s darkest moment was the Good Friday Earthquake in 1964. The tsunami that followed the earthquake destroyed the entire historic town site of Valdez. The community was rebuilt on more stable bedrock four miles to the west and flourished during the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Terminal in the 1970s.. Accommodation,
