Glacier Bay National Park Travel Guide

Backpacking in the park is a rewarding experience for those who are willing, and have the knowledge, to explore off-trail. Though Bartlett Cove has four maintained day-hike trails, the rest of the park is a glorious blank slate of wilderness and beach.
Sign up with Glacier Bay Sea Kayaks in Glacier Bay National Park for one-day guided and unguided kayak adventures and for kayak rentals and outfitting. The outfit offers both double and single fiberglass sea touring kayaks, provides daily camper/kayaker orientation and instruction programs, and arranges for drop-offs and pick-ups on the tour boat. Experienced campers who bring all their own camping and cooking equipment can enjoy a low-cost kayaking trip throughout the inlets and waterways of Glacier Bay. Camping trips range in length from three to ten days.
Glacier Bay stands at farthest possible remove from the tiresome clamor of the modern world. So, at least for a little while, trade in your cell phone's jangle for the pop, crackle, and finally thunderous boom of a building-size berg calving into the sea from a vast river of ice.
Most of the fishing in Glacier Bay is saltwater; the park's water has excellent runs of silver, king, and pink salmon as well as Pacific halibut, the largest sport fish in Alaska.
Watch for the Steller sea lion as well as whales. With a lion-like roar, bulls weigh in at 1,800 pounds, are up to 11 feet long, and are plump from a diet of pollock, cod, herring, salmon, squid, and octopus.

Glacier Bay is a work in progress; the boat ride to its head is a chance to see creation unfolding. The bay John Muir discovered in a canoe in 1879 didn't exist a century earlier. Eighteenth-century explorers had found instead a wall of ice a mile thick where the entrance to the branching, 65-mile-long fjord now opens to the sea. Receding faster than any other glacier on Earth, the ice melted into the ocean and opened a spectacular and still-unfinished land. The land itself is rising 1 1/2 inches a year as it rebounds from the weight of now-melted glaciers. As your vessel retraces Muir's path—and then probes northward in deep water where ice stood in his day—the story of this new world unravels in reverse. The trees on the shore get smaller, then disappear, then all vegetation disappears, and finally, at the head of the bay, the ice stands at the water's edge surrounded by barren rock, rounded and scored by the passage of the ice but not yet marked by the waterfalls cascading from the clouds above. And there, still doing their landscape-shaping work, are the great, blue glaciers, the largest among them the awesome Grand Pacific Glacier. Read More

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