Glacier Bay Alaska - By Cruise Ship

One of the hardest National Parks to visit in the United States is Glacier Bay. The marine wilderness of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve includes tidewater glaciers, snow-capped mountain ranges, ocean coastlines, deep fjords, and freshwater rivers and lakes. 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. Most visitors that visit the park come by cruise ships or small tour boats. Typically, almost an entire day for cruise ships and tour boats are spent inside the bay visiting the different inlets and glaciers. Private boats and kayakers probably spend much longer. The park service limits just how many boats can pass through the entrance to the bay as to keep it more wilderness like in their eyes.

One highlight is the Margerie Glacier. It is about one mile wide, with an ice face that is about 250 feet high above the waterline and a base about 100 feet below sea level. Even on a terrible weather day as my pictures show, you can still enjoy an impressive ice face calving into the water. If you want to visit Glacier Bay on a cruise, make sure it stops there, it is considered a shore excursion day even though you don't leave the boat.

Humpback whales are often seen near the entrance to the bay near the national park headquarters. On most visits you are very likely to come across whales.

When Captain George Vancouver saw Glacier Bay in 1794, he called it a "sheet if ice as far as the eye could distinguish." 85 years later naturalist John Muir visited with a group of Natives and the ice had retreated far back to reveal the amazing bay. Their are few places like it in the world as mountain peaks rise as much as 15,000 feet above.

Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska