Hike up Mineral Creek Canyon

On August 1, 2019, we had a free day before our Columbia Glacier Cruise on the Lulu Belle, so we decided to take a hike up Mineral Creek Canyon, north of Valdez.  The canyon is very picturesque, with a snaking creek tumbling down through rocky terrain, dotted by fireweed:

We had to drive 5 miles up a gravel road, first crossing Mineral Creek on an old wooden bridge:

Eventually, we reached the trailhead -- a wide spot in the road where, if one tried to drive further, it would be impossible to scale the large boulders in the road.  We found that others were there for the hike, too.  A lot of people seem to like their Jeeps:

Mineral Creek flows down through the canyon, and we got many picturesque views of it as we hiked further up the old gravel road from our trailhead:

Our path took us up past a hanging garden.  It's no wonder that scientists call this area a northern rainforest, because the moisture has nurtured so many types of green plants along the cliffside:

We even found lots of bushes of black raspberries, golden raspberries and cloudberries.  Here are some black raspberries we found.  There were enough to eat, but not to harvest, because the Ursine Harvesters preceded us through the berry bushes.

The canyon boasts several dramatic waterfalls.  This waterfall treated us to a view of spray coming off of one of its spillways.  We would have liked to get closer, but that was not on the itinerary today:

Toward the end of the old road, things got rocky.  We could see our path proceeding along the hillside up the canyon --

-- but, first, we had to cross a shale rockslide.  Here David gloats over his pathfinding skills that conquered the rockslide:

Still, it was daunting to look down the sheer face of the rockslide to the creek far below:

Eventually, we got to our destination -- an old concentrator for gold mining:

It perched high above the cliff, where some old prospectors had diverted the creek to sluice dredged materials and then sort them in the concentrator:

We poked about the old ruins and the creek until we had gotten our fill of archaeology for this day.  We ran into some other hikers -- from the other Jeeps -- and informed them of our discoveries.  On our way back, we spotted a riot of fireweed looking down the canyon, that, somehow, we missed on our hike up the canyon:

This was a wonderful discovery and little bit of an offbeat feature of Valdez that we were happy to explore.  We got back to our campground with enough time to plan and look forward to our glacier wildlife cruise tomorrow on the Lulu Belle!