°°The "Morning Mountain" report July 11 8:30 AM

                 Valdez          Wilmington
Sunrise    4:28 AM          6:08 AM
Sunset    11:09 PM          8:25 PM
                 62°!!!!!!               82°

Yesterday's "project". Poor Blue - ouch.

There are 9 concrete grain silos in Valdez. According to our friend/landlord, John, a real 'boondoggle'. Someone got the bright idea to build these silos and Valdez would become a grain transfer giant. They have never been used. I tried to find information about them, but this was the best I could find from an article about creating a ski resort in Valdez from 'Skiing Magazine' - (sorry it's hard to read).

"There weren’t many skiers in Valdez back then—and there are still only about 200 in a town of about 4,000—but those who were around never had trouble finding time to make some turns. They called themselves the Ski to Die Club; Chet Simmons, a Vietnam War helicopter pilot who flew supplies to the Alaskan interior during the pipeline’s construction, was one of the leaders, as was John McCune, an Ohio transplant and pipeline worker with a “double-A-dominant wolverine personality” that Simmons admired, and who would become the father of Ryan McCune.

They popularized the now-famous Road Run on Thompson Pass and made dozens of first descents on the nearby peaks. (Simmons later acquired a helicopter to help with the oil-spill cleanup and used it to fly Doug Coombs, Dean Cummings, and the rest of the early renegades into their lines, thus launching the Alaskan heli-skiing movement. Cost: $25 a run.)

Realizing the potential for something bigger, Simmons, McCune, and the other long-haired hippie ski bums brought a proposal to the city government in the late ’70s to build a chairlift on Sugarloaf Mountain, across the bay near the pipeline terminal. The local officials at that time were in the midst of conjuring a way to avoid total collapse when the 20 years of oil ran out. They ordered a feasibility study, part of which involved installing a rope tow on Thompson Pass. It was later moved down to Salmonberry Ridge just outside town. Skiing’s popularity boomed in Valdez. The Road Run was jammed, kids hit the rope tow after school—it was happening.

The Sugarloaf Mountain chairlift plan never materialized after the city decided not to fund it, and in 1986, a 15-year-old girl who’d been drinking crashed off a jump at Salmonberry, paralyzing herself. She sued the city, which paid a large sum of money to the girl’s family. In the eyes of the majority of city leaders, that pretty much ended the mainstream skiing movement in Valdez."

We took those photos on our way to buy, what we were told, was the best shrimp around - B & B shrimp. You get to the fish store via Mineral Creek Loop Road - a road that goes to the original town of Valdez. On the way we passed the only original Valdez home still standing after the earthquake and subsequent demolition of Old Valdez.

Here are the shrimp - BB's Kings Spot Shrimp - $18 a pound.

Big! and delicious ('Large' egg)

On the way back from buying the shrimp we saw this vehicle and couldn't resist a photo or 2

Check back later - we're adding a couple of movies. One of "Fish Filleter Extraordinaire" Patrick 'doing his thing' and one of Jeff, "The Mighty Snow Pile Climber".