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.
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.
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.
