Spanish ships charted these waters first: in 1790 the explorer Salvador Fidalgo named the port for Antonio Valdes y Basan, a Spanish naval minister. Long before that, the Chugach (Sugpiaq) and Ahtna peoples knew this coast as a trade crossroads at the edge of the Sound. The town itself was born of gold — founded in 1898 as a port of entry for prospectors bound for the Klondike, who climbed the brutal Valdez Glacier Trail toward the Interior. It was "Copper City" before it was Valdez, and it incorporated in 1901.
The town that moved. On Good Friday, March 27, 1964, the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North America struck Prince William Sound. An underwater landslide and the wave that followed swept away the Valdez waterfront, with lives lost at the dock. The ground the old town stood on was judged too unstable to rebuild, so over the next few years Valdez did something few towns have ever done: it picked itself up and moved about four miles to firmer ground, where it stands today. The story of Valdez is not the disaster — it is the rebuilding.
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.
