Glacier Bay National Park

What Glacier Bay actually is

Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve covers 3.3 million acres of fjord, ice and coastal mountain in Southeast Alaska, and forms part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site that spans the border with Canada. Its significance is not simply that it contains glaciers. It is that the bay is one of the fastest documented glacial retreats on earth.

When George Vancouver's expedition charted this coast in 1794, what is now a 65 mile long bay was a wall of ice several thousand feet thick at the entrance. By the time John Muir visited in 1879, the ice had retreated some 40 miles. Today the head of the bay is over 60 miles from where the ice front stood in 1794. The forest you see near the mouth of the bay is several hundred years old; near the head, the land has been ice free for barely a century and is still bare rock and pioneer vegetation.

That is what makes a Glacier Bay day different from any other glacier viewing on an Alaska itinerary: you are travelling forward through roughly 250 years of ecological succession in a single afternoon, and the park rangers aboard are there specifically to explain it.

The permit system, and why some lines cannot enter

This is the single most consequential fact for anyone choosing an Alaska cruise, and it is poorly explained by most operators.

The National Park Service limits how many vessels may enter Glacier Bay each day during the peak season, in order to reduce disturbance to humpback whales and other wildlife. Entry for large cruise ships is allocated through a concession contract system, awarded to specific operators for multi year terms. It is not a permit you can buy on the day, and a line without an allocation simply cannot go.

What a Glacier Bay day actually looks like

Unlike a port day, nobody goes ashore. The ship enters the bay, spends the day working up to the glaciers and back out, and everything happens from the deck. Here is the typical shape of it.

1. Step 1

   Around 6:00 am: rangers board at the park boundary

   A small National Park Service vessel comes alongside near Bartlett Cove and rangers transfer aboard, along with a cultural interpreter from the Huna Tlingit, whose ancestral homeland this is.

2. Step 2

   Morning: transit up the bay

   The ship works north for several hours. This is the succession stretch: mature spruce and hemlock forest near the mouth gives way to alder and willow, then to bare moraine. Rangers narrate over the public address system and hold talks in the theatre.

3. Step 3

   Late morning to early afternoon: Margerie Glacier

   The ship holds position roughly a quarter mile from the face of Margerie Glacier, typically for around an hour, and usually rotates 360 degrees so that both sides of the ship get the same view. The Grand Pacific Glacier sits immediately alongside, darker and heavily debris covered.

4. Step 4

   Early afternoon: Johns Hopkins Inlet or Lamplugh Glacier

   Depending on ice conditions and the seasonal closure protecting harbour seal pupping, the ship may enter Johns Hopkins Inlet or view Lamplugh Glacier. Johns Hopkins is often restricted before late June or early July.

5. Step 5

   Afternoon: transit back out

   The return runs down the bay with different light and often better wildlife viewing, since animals are more active later in the day.

6. Step 6

   Around 4:00 to 5:00 pm: rangers disembark

   The rangers leave the same way they arrived, and the ship exits toward Icy Strait.

Wildlife in Glacier Bay

Glacier Bay is a protected marine environment and the wildlife density reflects that. The restriction on vessel numbers exists in large part to protect humpback whales, and it works.

Best time for a Glacier Bay cruise

There is no bad month for Glacier Bay, but there is a real trade off between the reliable warmth and wildlife activity of July and the clearer air and quieter ships of September. If photography is your priority, September repays the gamble more often than people expect.

Photography tips for Glacier Bay

• Expose for the ice, not the scene. Glacial ice fools meters into underexposure. Add half a stop to a full stop of positive exposure compensation or you will get grey ice and blocked shadows.
• Include something for scale. A glacier face photographed alone is meaningless. A tour boat, a kayak, a flock of kittiwakes, or the ship's rail in the frame is what communicates 250 feet of ice.
• Watch for the ice before you hear it. Sound reaches you several seconds after a calving event at a quarter mile. If you wait for the crack, you have missed it. Watch the face, not the sky.
• Shoot the blue. Dense glacial ice absorbs red light and reflects blue. The most saturated blue appears in freshly calved faces, deep crevasses and on overcast days, not in bright sun.
• A 70 to 200mm lens does most of the work. Wider than 24mm makes the glacier tiny; longer than 300mm loses the context. Two bodies or a versatile zoom saves changing lenses in spray.
• Batteries drain fast in the cold. Carry a spare in an inside pocket. Cold lithium cells recover when warmed, so a dead battery is often just a cold one.

Glacier Bay compared with the alternatives

Glacier Bay is the most complete glacier day available on a cruise, but it is not automatically the most dramatic, and travellers whose itinerary does not include it should not feel short changed.

If you want scale, Hubbard is more impressive than anything in Glacier Bay. If you want intimacy, Tracy Arm beats it. What Glacier Bay offers that none of the others do is a full day, several glaciers, protected wildlife, and expert interpretation from people whose job is to explain what you are looking at.

Excursions and prices

Frequently asked questions