Valdez and Haines, AK

After leaving Wrangell-St. Elias National Park I drove south to Valdez. It’s a short drive that’s packed with views of glaciers and waterfalls. 

Bridal Veil Falls

Horsetail Falls

When I got to Valdez I encountered a familiar problem--rain and fog. I really couldn’t see much of anything in town. The next day I started the drive back to Haines, where I would catch the ferry. I arrived in Haines about a month ago, greeted by a thick fog. So I didn’t spend much time around Haines the first time through. Because of the fog I had no idea what I was missing. I went for a nice one-night hike near town. A pictures from the hike are below. 

All the rain the area gets means they get some crazy looking fungus!

It was raining much of the first day of the hike, but I did get some nice views when the fog cleared. 

And on the second day it was clear and the views were gorgeous!

The following pictures are from Peak 3920 (elevation, you guessed it, 3920 feet).

And these are from Mt. Ripinski.

Looking down at the town of Haines. 

The next day I went for a bike ride along one of the roads that leads out of town, up the Lutek Inlet (which is the turquoise body of water on the left in the above pictures) to the  the Chilkoot River and Chilkoot Lake. The river is full of salmon swimming upstream to the lake, which is a major spawning area. 

The first cool thing I saw was this eagle. It was perching in a tree and started to fly as soon as I got my camera out. I had the camera on some weird setting, so it was quite underexposed, but photoshop helped me turn it into a decent shot. 

Chilkoot Lake

Salmon acrobatics. 

Birds!

And then, as I was riding back down the river toward town, I saw this guy. 

Also, notice the eagle! (This pic and many that follow are quite cropped. They were pretty far away.)

After taking a few pictures of the bear and the eagles, I finished my bike ride, then drove back up to the same area to see if there were more bears. And there were!

This time there were three in the same spot where I saw one earlier. 

This time there were three in the same spot where I saw one earlier. 

And this guy was a little further up the road in the Chilkoot State Park. He was right next to the road, along with lots of gawking tourists and a shotgun-wielding park ranger warning people not too get too close (some of the people seemed like they would have sent their kids up to pet the thing if the ranger wasn’t there).

A ferry on its way to the Haines ferry terminal. 

The next day I got on the ferry, bound for Bellingham, WA! I'm in Bellingham now. The ferry ride was fun, but I'm glad to be back on land after 4 days on the boat. More on the ferry ride in my next post. Next stop is Seattle, then slowly making my way down to Yosemite!

Thanks for reading!