Things to Do in Valdez Beyond the Glacier
What to book on your spare Valdez day: sheltered sea kayaking, a remote beach and rainforest walk, and the drives worth doing before you leave town.
Everyone who plans a Columbia Glacier trip properly ends up with a spare day, because a spare day is the only insurance against the weather cancelling the one you came for. The good news is that Valdez is a better town than its reputation as a boat departure point suggests, and the spare day is easy to fill.
Here is what is actually worth doing, in the order most people should do it.
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Sort the weather-sensitive thing first
Everything on this page is robust to rain. The glacier boat is not, entirely. So book the ice for your first full day and keep the rest as the flexible half — that ordering is what turns a spare day from a fallback into a bonus.
The half-day paddle everyone can do
The Duck Flats sea kayak tour is three hours on flat, protected water immediately east of town, and it is the single easiest thing in Valdez to slot into a day that already has something in it. You launch from the small boat harbour, cross past the new harbour, and follow a chain of small islands that nesting birds and hauled-out harbour seals have to themselves.
Bald eagles are close to a certainty. Arctic terns, sea otters and sea lions turn up regularly. All the waterproof gear is provided, no experience is needed, and groups are capped at eight — which keeps the paddle quiet enough for the wildlife to stay put and means it fills faster in July and August than its $109 price suggests. Our breakdown of the Duck Flats tour →
The full day that is not a glacier day
The Gold Creek coastal kayak tour is six hours along the coast of Port Valdez to Gold Creek State Park — a gravel beach with no road to it, reached by paddling past seals, sea lions and sea otters with the fjord walls above you.
The beach is the middle of the day rather than the end of it: you eat a picnic lunch there, then walk a short way into old-growth coastal rainforest to a waterfall, watching for black bears and spawning salmon in season. Then you paddle back the way you came, which sounds like a compromise until you see how completely the light in Port Valdez changes between morning and afternoon.
It is the trip for a day when the weather is not right for Columbia Bay, or when you want the fjord without the nine-hour commitment of the glacier kayak day. Our breakdown of the Gold Creek tour →
The second glacier
If your spare day comes with good weather, the honest recommendation is not a consolation activity at all — it is the Meares Glacier cruise, 7.5 hours north up Unakwik Inlet to an advancing tidewater glacier, one of the few left in North America. Unlike Columbia Bay there is no berg field damming the inlet, so the boat holds station in front of the calving face with the engines cut.
Plenty of people book both cruises across two days and rate the Meares run higher. It is covered properly on the Valdez glacier tours page.
Things that cost nothing
Keystone Canyon. Twenty minutes out of town on the Richardson Highway, with Bridal Veil and Horsetail Falls dropping onto the road shoulder. Worth driving out for even if you drove in past them.
The small boat harbour, early. Valdez is a working fishing port and the harbour at 6am is a different town from the harbour at noon.
Old Valdez. The original townsite sits about four miles from the current one; the town was relocated after the 1964 earthquake. There is not much to see, which is rather the point.
How to sequence a two-day Valdez visit
Day one: arrive, walk the harbour, book or confirm tomorrow’s boat, and take the Duck Flats paddle if you get in early enough.
Day two: the Columbia Glacier cruise or the kayak day, whichever the which-tour guide pointed you to.
If day two gets weathered: Gold Creek, or the Meares cruise, or the drive out through Keystone Canyon — in that order, depending on how much day is left.
That sequence puts the weather-sensitive thing early enough to have a second attempt, and everything else is robust to rain. Which, in Prince William Sound, is the only planning principle that reliably survives contact with the forecast.
See Columbia Glacier While It Is Still Columbia Bay
The glacier has pulled back more than 12 miles since 1980, and the bay it left behind is packed with its ice. Day boats and kayaks run out of Valdez from roughly mid-May to mid-September. Free cancellation on every tour here.
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