The photo shown here features two valleys, one superimposed on another, that were formed in very different ways. It was taken from a cruise ship at Glacier Bay, Alaska. Compare the raw V-shaped, stream-cut canyon with the U-shaped glacially-modified valley. As depicted in the illustration, the meltwater stream has cut through an old moraine, creating a gorge that has subsequently never been subjected to glaciation. As a result, it has a considerably sharper profile. Photo taken on September 1, 2013.

Glacier Bay, Alaska Coordinates: 58.7, -136.15

Wild, Resilient, and Sacred

From the bottom of the deepest glacial fjord to the summit of its highest peak, Glacier Bay encompasses some of our continent's most amazing scenery and wildness. It is a land reborn, a world returning to life, a living lesson in resilience. If ever we needed a place to intrigue and inspire us, this is it. Glacier Bay is a homeland, a living laboratory, a national park, a designated wilderness, a biosphere reserve, and a world heritage site. It's a marine park, where great adventure awaits by boating into inlets, coves and hideaway harbors. It's also a land park, with its snow-capped mountains, spectacular glaciers, and emerald-green forests. From the summit to sea, Glacier Bay's wildness is remote, dynamic and intact

A Place of Homeland

For the Huna Tlingit, Glacier Bay is a place not just of new discoveries, but of reconnection with the lifeways, knowledge, and ancestors of the past.

It is a land that sustained them with a rich abundance of fish, wildlife, and plants, but more importantly a place that continues to sustain them through stories, songs, dances, and ongoing traditional practices. Although most Huna Tlingit today live across Icy Strait in the modern village of Hoonah, Glacier Bay remains their spiritual homeland. Their ancient stories and place names speak eloquently of the history of their beloved bay.

Discovering the Essence

Most visitors approach Glacier Bay with an eye to capturing something new - perhaps a first glimpse of an ice-blue glacier, a few days of solitude in wilderness waters, or peaceful moments walking through the towering forests of Bartlett Cove. Even those who return again and again have the opportunity to experience some new sight or sound, to reflect on some newly awoken feeling.

But for the Huna Tlingit, Glacier Bay is a place not just of new discoveries, but of reconnection with the lifeways, knowledge, and ancestors of the past. It is a land that sustained them with a rich abundance of fish, wildlife, and plants, but more importantly a place that continues to sustain them through stories, songs, dances, and ongoing traditional practices. Although most Huna Tlingit today live across Icy Strait in the modern village of Hoonah, Glacier Bay remains their spiritual homeland. Their ancient stories and place names speak eloquently of the history of their beloved bay.

Traditionally, four Huna Tlingit clans occupied territories in and around Glacier Bay. When Glacier Bay became a National Monument in 1925, its borders encompassed much of the traditional Huna Tlingit homeland. New federal laws severely curtailed Native activities within the monument boundaries. So began a painful period of strained relations between the Huna Tlingit and the National Park Service.

But time has brought much healing. In recent years, the National Park Service and Hoonah Indian Association, the tribal government, have worked cooperatively to reinvigorate those traditional harvest activities that are compatible with current regulations, develop educational programs for Huna youth, sponsor summer culture camps, and collect and preserve oral histories. Each year, the park sponsors a range of cultural trips which allow Hoonah youth, elders, and other tribal members the opportunity to reconnect with Glacier Bay and share their knowledge of, and experiences with, this place that figures so prominently in their spiritual lives.

But perhaps the most significant cooperative venture now graces the shores of Bartlett Cove. Xunaa Shuka Hit, roughly translated as "Huna Ancestor's House," is the first permanent clan house in Glacier Bay since Tlingit villages were destroyed by an advancing glacier over 250 years ago. Dedicated on August 25, 2016, this long awaited dream serves as a gathering place where tribal members can reconnect with their treasured homeland through ceremonies, workshops, camps, tribal meetings and other events. It also provides thousands of park visitors with opportunities to learn about Huna Tlingit history, culture, and life ways.

A Place of Hope

Glacier Bay is a globally significant marine and terrestrial wilderness sanctuary.
A place that offers human solitude and a remote wildness that is rapidly disappearing in today's world.
A place of hope--for the continued wisdom, restraint, and humility to preserve a sample of wild America, the world as it was.
It is part of one of the largest internationally protected Biosphere Reserves in the world, and it is recognized by the United Nations as a World Heritage Site.

A Place of Inspiration

Long before there were written records of Glacier Bay, there were stories.
Glacier Bay is a powerful place that also inspires cultural expression in the scientist, the artist, the resident, the traveler, and those who make their livelihood from the sea.
Glacier Bay continues to offer inspiration as we each endeavor to explore our connections to this dynamic landscape.

Enter Glacier Bay and you cruise along shorelines completely covered by ice just 200 years ago. Explorer Capt. George Vancouver found Icy Strait choked with ice in 1794, and Glacier Bay was a barely indented glacier. That glacier was more than 4,000 feet thick, up to 20 miles or more wide, and extended more than 100 miles to the St. Elias Range of mountains. But by 1879 naturalist John Muir found that the ice had retreated 48 miles up the bay. By 1916 the Grand Pacific Glacier headed Tarr Inlet 65 miles from Glacier Bay's mouth. Such rapid retreat is known nowhere else. Scientists have documented it, hoping to learn how glacial activity relates to climate changes.

In 1794, as the mother ship H.M.S. Discovery, Captained by George Vancouver, lay at anchor in Pt. Althorp, a survey crew under the command of Lt. Joseph Whidbey painstakingly maneuvered their longboats through the ice-choked waters of Icy Strait.

The remarkably accurate chart the survey produced shows a mere indentation in the shoreline, "terminated by solid compact mountains of ice," where Glacier Bay is today. The great glacier that filled the Bay was by then in rapid retreat, and was the source of the floating icepack that so hindered Whidbey. Any visitor who came by at the glacial maximum, a few decades earlier, would have found the glacier's tongue extending out into Icy Strait almost to Lemesurier Island.

A Land of Dynamic Change

Glacier Bay's story is one of dynamic change in the wake of dramatic glacial movements.
Glacier Bay collects many glaciers flowing from the tall surrounding mountains with abundant snowfall.
As recently as 1750 a single glacier thousands of feet thick filled what is now a 65-mile long fjord.
This glacial retreat has exposed a resilient land that hosts a succession of marine and terrestrial life.
Here is an opportunity to see how the physical world shapes the biological.

A Natural Laboratory

Botanist William Cooper spearheaded efforts to preserve not only a place to view glaciers, wildlife, and grandeur, but also a living laboratory to study and enjoy through the ages.

Glacier Bay offers unexcelled opportunities to study earth's most fundamental geologic processes.
A center where researchers from multiple disciplines collaborate to conduct management and ecosystem directed research.
What scientists learn at Glacier Bay may one day foretell changes to the region and the world.
There are many exciting research projects underway in Glacier Bay National Park!