VALDEZ , 304 road miles from Anchorage and the northernmost ice-free port in the western hemisphere, lies at the head of a fjord that reaches inland twelve miles from Prince William Sound. Known as "Little Switzerland" due to its stunning backdrop of steep mountains, glaciers and waterfalls, and a record annual snowfall of over forty feet, Valdez (pronounced val-Deez ) offers great hiking, rafting, sea kayaking, wildlife-viewing and, of course, fishing.

The 1890s Gold Rush transformed Valdez from a remote whaling station into a flourishing settlement, when thousands of prospectors arrived to head over the deadly Valdez and Klutina glaciers on the Valdez Trail to the mines in the Yukon. Only three hundred of the 3500 miners who set out made it to the goldfield - those that did not perish from frostbite and starvation gave up. Valdez came to depend on fish canneries, logging and occasional military use for its economic survival, and nature conspired to finish it off on Good Friday 1964: the epicenter of North America's largest earthquake was just 45 miles away. Shockwaves turned the ground to quivering jelly, snapping roads, toppling buildings and killing 33 residents. However, the citizens of Valdez refused to be intimidated, and moved sixty-odd buildings to the more stable present site four miles away.

The town's fortunes rose again during the 1970s, when oil was found beneath Prudhoe Bay, and Valdez became the southern terminus of the 800-mile trans-Alaska pipeline , which carries up to two million barrels of oil per day. Although winds and tides ensured that no oil from the Exxon Valdez made it into the port of Valdez, ironically the spill triggered an economic boom for the city as it was the most accessible site from which to direct the massive cleanup . The operation, which lasted into 1991, cost Exxon and the government over one hundred billion dollars, and called on eleven thousand workers in over one thousand boats and three hundred planes to scour the beaches.