Cynthia St. Charles Store

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Valdez Glacier Lake in our Tandem Kayak

 While at the Valdez visitor center, we saw some videos of people kayaking on the lake at the base of the Valdez glacier.  We brought our own kayak with us all the way from Montana and had yet to use it, so this seemed like the perfect place to try it out!  I had other kayaking locations in mind, but all of those had terrible weather.  Finally - we had some dry weather!
 It is possible to drive right up to the edge of the lake and launch the kayak from the shore of  the Valdez Glacier Lake.  However, the actual Valdez Glacier was not visible until we got in the kayak and paddled around a the big mountain that was blocking our view of the glacier.  The glacier was a good distance away, but we thought we could make it.  We really were not sure how much stamina we would have for kayaking, but we felt this was a perfect time to find out!

We saw quite a few icebergs floating around in the lake and the actual glacier has many long fingers extending into the lake creating "fjords" of glacial ice.  It is possible to paddle directly up to these icebergs!