The Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve Stamp

Where Glacier Bay is

Glacier Bay, for people who count parks

The bay un-froze within recorded history. Vancouver found the ice front near the mouth in 1794. When John Muir came by canoe in 1879, it had fallen back roughly 48 miles; by the early twentieth century the Grand Pacific Glacier sat about 65 miles up-bay, near where it is now. Geologists get excited about retreats measured in millennia. This one happened in about a century, and it is the standard textbook case.

The Huna Tlingit watched the ice come, not just go. This was their homeland first. During the Little Ice Age the advancing glacier overran their villages in the bay. The oral histories describe an ice front that moved faster than people could believe, and the clans resettled across Icy Strait at Hoonah. In 2016 the tribe and the Park Service dedicated Xunaa Shuká Hít, a carved cedar tribal house at Bartlett Cove, the first permanent clan house in the bay since the glacier pushed the people out.

The scientific case was made by an ecologist counting plants. William S. Cooper, a student of the same Henry Chandler Cowles who invented succession ecology on the Indiana dunes, realized that a retreating glacier leaves a perfect natural experiment: bare rock near the ice, older and older plant communities the farther down-bay you go. He set out permanent study plots in 1916 (still monitored today) and then led the Ecological Society of America's campaign that persuaded Calvin Coolidge to proclaim a national monument in 1925.

Park and preserve status came on December 2, 1980, under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, the single biggest land-protection law in American history. Glacier Bay got 3.3 million acres of it, and with its Canadian and Alaskan neighbors it now forms one of the largest internationally protected wilderness areas on the planet, a UNESCO World Heritage site spanning the St. Elias ranges.

No road reaches it. You come by boat or small plane, or you see it from a ship's rail, which is how most visitors experience the park. There is one small dock, one lodge, and a few miles of trail at Bartlett Cove. Everything else is water, ice, and country that has been out from under the glacier for less time than the United States has existed.

Official Glacier Bay park site (nps.gov)

What lives in Glacier Bay

Humpback whales, the same individuals every summer. They winter in Hawaiian waters and swim thousands of miles back to feed here, and researchers know many of them personally: the park has run one of the longest continuous whale monitoring programs anywhere, going back to 1985, identifying whales by the unique patterns on their flukes. At Bartlett Cove stands the articulated skeleton of Snow, a humpback killed by a ship strike in 2001, displayed as a plain statement of what the monitoring is for.

Sea otters came back on their own. The maritime fur trade had emptied this coast of them by the early 1800s. Descendants of translocated otters reached the mouth of the bay in the late 1980s, and within a few decades there were thousands inside it: one of the fastest marine mammal recoveries ever documented, reshaping the sea floor as they eat their way through urchins and clams.

The land itself is a time series. Near the glaciers: bare rock and silt. A few miles back: mats of dryas and fireweed, then alder thickets fixing nitrogen into brand-new soil, then cottonwood, then young spruce, and at Bartlett Cove, ice-free the longest, a closed spruce-hemlock rainforest with moss a foot deep. A boat ride up-bay runs the film backward, 250 years of forest assembly in an afternoon.

Both bears, including a blue one. Brown bears work the up-bay shorelines and black bears the forested lower bay, and this corner of Alaska is one of the few places with the glacier bear, a smoky blue-gray color phase of black bear rare enough that most rangers have never seen one.

The Glacier Bay designs

Margerie Glacier

The park's signature tidewater glacier, 21 miles long and about a mile wide at the face, standing roughly 250 feet above the water at the head of Tarr Inlet with another hundred feet below it. While most glaciers here retreat, Margerie has held its ground for decades. This is the face ships wait in front of, engines off, listening for the crack of calving ice.

Humpback Whale

The summer resident that makes the 3,000-mile commute from Hawaii worth illustrating. Humpbacks feed in these plankton-rich waters all season, lunging through schools of fish and throwing their flukes on the dive; the pattern on the underside identifies the individual, and park researchers have tracked some of the same whales here for decades. The obvious pick for anyone who saw one breach.

Beardslee Islands

A maze of low, forested islands off Bartlett Cove, the park's classic kayak water, and the newest land in it. Freed from the weight of the ice, the ground here rises about an inch a year, among the fastest uplift measured anywhere, so reefs shoal, channels close, and new islets keep surfacing. A stamp of a place that is literally still coming up.

How to record your Glacier Bay visit

Glacier Bay, asked and answered