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Glacier Bay National Park
A 65-mile fjord uncovered by retreating ice in southeast Alaska
When Captain George Vancouver's expedition charted this coast in 1794, Glacier Bay was barely a dent in the shoreline, sealed by a single wall of ice thousands of feet thick. Within 85 years John Muir found that ice retreating as fast as a mile a year, and today a 65-mile (105 km) fjord reaches north into the Fairweather Range, where tidewater glaciers such as Margerie and Johns Hopkins still calve into the sea. Mount Fairweather, 15,300 feet (4,663 m) high, rises within sight of saltwater, and humpback whales, sea otters and brown bears have moved into the newly exposed land and water.
The bay is the homeland of the Huna Tlingit, whose villages were overrun by an advancing glacier centuries ago and who now live across Icy Strait in Hoonah. In 2016 the tribe and the Park Service dedicated Xunaa Shuká Hít, a tribal house at Bartlett Cove, the first permanent Tlingit clan house in the bay in more than 250 years. President Calvin Coolidge protected the area as a national monument in 1925, and it became a national park and preserve in 1980. It forms part of a binational World Heritage Site with neighboring parks in Canada, and most visitors see it from the deck of a cruise ship.