Glacier Bay National Park United States

Legendary

The park preserves over 3 million acres of Southeast Alaska.

Photo by NPS Natural Resources

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In 1794, a British ship sailed past this coastline and found no bay at all. Just a wall of ice, thousands of feet thick, filling everything.

Eighty-five years later, John Muir paddled a canoe into the same spot and found open water stretching more than 30 miles inland. The ice had pulled back that far in a single human lifetime.

Today the retreat measures more than 65 miles. It's one of the fastest glacial retreats ever recorded anywhere on Earth.

That makes the park a living laboratory. Scientists can watch bare rock turn into forest, step by step, just by traveling up the bay.

Long before any of this, the Huna Tlingit people lived here. They called the place Sit' Eeti Gheeyí, meaning "the bay in place of the glacier."

Around the 1700s, the ice advanced and pushed them out. They resettled in a village called Hoonah, and their oral histories still describe leaving.

When the glaciers retreated, the Huna Tlingit came back. But the land had changed hands, and they weren't welcomed as owners.

John Muir's writing had made Glacier Bay famous. A plant scientist named William Cooper then campaigned for years to protect it.

On February 26, 1925, President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed the area Glacier Bay National Monument. The Huna Tlingit were barred from hunting and fishing on their own homeland for decades afterward.

The park and the tribe have worked for years to repair that relationship. In 2016, a Tribal House called Xunaa Shuká Hít opened at Bartlett Cove for ceremonies.

Congress made Glacier Bay a full national park in 1980. It now covers 3.3 million acres and has just one road, about ten miles long.

Take a boat tour up the bay to watch tidewater glaciers calve huge chunks of ice into the water. Look for humpback whales, harbor seals resting on ice floes, sea otters, and brown bears along the shore. Visit the Tribal House at Bartlett Cove to hear the Huna Tlingit story told in their own words.