My first glimpse of Valdez in 1954 inspired not only awe for the surreal beauty of the valley but a boding premonition of danger. At the time, Valdez Glacier extended halfway across the valley floor and dominated the view as we dropped out of the hills on our approach. My four-year-old, unfettered imagination pictured a sinuous ice dragon slinking from between steep-walled mountains. The dragon’s tongue snaked across the valley close enough to taste the town which was built on the glacial moraine. With time, my premonition would prove prescient. In 1964, eight years after we left Valdez, the strongest earthquake ever recorded in North America shook the unstable sand and gravel like flour in a sifter, resulting in the loss of the entire settlement and thirty-two lives.
Driving into the valley six decades after leaving, its beauty impacted me as strongly as it had the first time, but I was shocked at two changes. The town had moved to more stable land four miles away, and the glacier was no longer visible. The dragon had retreated over two miles since my childhood, and the only way to view the ice was to drive across the valley to Valdez Glacier Lake, which didn’t exist until the 1980s.
Digging deeper into Valdez’s history uncovered the glacier’s portentous role in the town’s founding. Although he had probably never actually walked it, in 1884, US Army Lt. William Abercrombie described a trail traversing the glacier and allegedly allowing access to the interior of Alaska. With the discovery of gold on the Klondike in 1896, four thousand gold stampeders arrived in Valdez to attempt the trek over the treacherous glacier. An expansive tent city sprang up on the flat glacial moraine to support the endeavor. Of over 3500 who ventured the route inland, many died, and less than 200 reached their destination. Of those who turned back or stayed behind, far too many perished that winter from malnutrition or suffered from scurvy. Though the Gold Rush boom busted the following summer, enough hardy folk stayed behind to build a town where the tents were pitched on the unstable terrain.
When we lived there in the mid-1950s, false-fronted stores, saloons, and wooden sidewalks still spoke of the town’s gold rush origins. Even today, the citizens celebrate Gold Rush Days in late summer.
The dragon, now a shrunken shadow of its former self, recedes relentlessly into the mountains, leaving an indelible imprint on the story of Valdez from birth to destruction.
