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.
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.
