As the gold rush faded, Valdez became a supply port and transport hub. In 1919 the Richardson Highway — Alaska's first road — linked it to Fairbanks, and the deep, ice-free harbor kept the town working year round: it is the northernmost ice-free port in North America. The mountains that wall it in catch staggering snow, and the Sound beyond it fills with calving ice.
Our Valdez design carries a black bear beneath an arched VALDEZ and the line Alaska Territory · Est. 1959, printed in a worn, woodcut style. The bear is the Alaska of the backcountry — the wild, mountain-and-glacier country the town is set into — and the 1959 date marks Alaska statehood. It reads like an old outfitter's stamp: not a cruise-ship souvenir, but the mark of the glacier town at the end of the fjord, the Little Switzerland of Alaska.
Why People Visit Valdez, AK
People come to Valdez for the scale of it — tidewater glaciers calving into the Sound, peaks straight off the harbor, and snow measured in feet. It is a gold-rush town turned glacier port, the Little Switzerland of Alaska, rugged and beautiful and welcoming at the end of the road from Anchorage.
