Valdez, Alaska: a town born of a gold-rush con and moved after an earthquake
In 1898 steamship companies sold Klondike prospectors on a supposedly easier route to the gold fields via Valdez. The glacier trail turned out twice as long and steep as advertised, and many died trying. The town that grew from that deception would later be picked up and rebuilt four miles away.
The name is Spanish. On June 15, 1790, explorer Salvador Fidalgo, sailing up the Alaskan coast to assert Spain's claims and check for Russians, found a harbour and honoured Antonio Valdés y Fernández Bazán, Spain's minister for the navy, with its name. Spain gave up its claims north of the 42nd parallel in 1819. After the gold-rush swindle, Valdez was incorporated in 1901, but it only took root once the Richardson Highway linked it to Fairbanks in 1910, making its ice-free harbour the first overland supply route into Alaska's interior. A 1907 shootout between rival railroad companies killed one man and ended hopes of a rail link to the rich Kennicott copper mine.
The 1964 Good Friday earthquake liquefied the glacial silt beneath the town, and a huge underwater landslide broke off part of the shoreline. All 32 people on the main dock, watching the supply ship Chena unload, were lost when it collapsed; nobody in the town itself died. Over the next three years the Army Corps of Engineers prepared safer ground and trucked 54 buildings there, on land donated by descendants of two early leaders who had long dreamed of such a move. The old site was eventually burned.
Oil reshaped Valdez next. The Trans-Alaska pipeline, built from 1975 to 1977, ends there because it is the nearest ice-free port to Prudhoe Bay, and the first tanker filled in August 1977. In 1989 the Exxon Valdez ran aground at Bligh Reef after leaving the terminal; the spill never reached town but devastated surrounding sea life.
Valdez is North America's northernmost port that stays ice-free all year, and NOAA ranks it the snowiest city in the country, averaging over 300 inches annually. In 2014 an avalanche dammed a river, forming a lake that residents dubbed the Damalanche. The 2020 census counted 3,985 residents.
Source: Valdez, Alaska
