60 Fun Facts About Glacier Bay National Park

Glacier Bay National Park lies in Southeast Alaska, just west of which state capital?

Juneau is about 60 air miles east of the park; there is no road to either the park or the capital, so both are reached by air or sea.

Which president proclaimed Glacier Bay a national monument in February 1925?

Coolidge acted under the Antiquities Act after a letter-writing campaign by the Ecological Society of America, over the objections of a federal agency that wanted the minerals kept open.

Which 1980 law turned Glacier Bay from a monument into a park and preserve?

ANILCA, signed on December 2, 1980, also enlarged the monument by 523,000 acres in the same stroke.

Which president used the Antiquities Act on December 1, 1978 to expand the monument to the Alsek River lands?

Carter proclaimed fifteen National Park Service units in Alaska that day to beat a deadline imposed by the Native claims settlement while ANILCA stalled in Congress.

Roughly how many acres do the park and preserve cover together?

About 2.77 million of those acres are designated wilderness, and nearly 600,000 acres are protected marine waters.

Mount Fairweather, the park's tallest peak, sits on the border with which Canadian province?

At 15,266 feet it is the highest mountain in that province, and its summit borders Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Park.

Which explorer named Mount Fairweather in May 1778, apparently for the unusually good weather he met?

The name is ironic: the peak gets more than 100 inches of precipitation a year and temperatures around minus 50 F, and cloud usually hides the summit.

In which year was Mount Fairweather first climbed, by Allen Carpé and Terris Moore?

A 1926 attempt on the West Ridge had failed at a steep notch; the 1931 party landed supplies at Lituya Bay and went up the Southeast Ridge instead.

In which year did the naturalist John Muir first visit Glacier Bay?

Muir came to Alaska to study living glaciers so he could understand how Yosemite Valley had been carved.

John Muir's Glacier Bay dispatches were eventually collected in which 1915 book?

The book came out the year after Muir died and helped make the Inside Passage a tourist route.

To which newspaper did John Muir send his accounts of Glacier Bay in 1879 and 1880?

His reports made the bay famous enough that steamship tours from Tacoma and Portland were running up the Inside Passage by the 1890s.

When Vancouver's expedition reached Icy Strait in 1794, how thick was the ice wall blocking Glacier Bay?

Joseph Whidbey, master of the Discovery, found the strait choked with ice and the bay itself buried under one enormous glacier.

By John Muir's first visit, the ice had retreated about how far up the bay since 1794?

The retreat continued: by 1916 the Grand Pacific Glacier had pulled back some 65 miles from the mouth of the bay.

Glacier Bay's ice pulled back some 65 miles between 1794 and 1916, a record described as what?

Not every glacier followed suit: Johns Hopkins Glacier was measured growing 10 to 15 feet a day in 2012.

Which explorer was the first European to explore the Glacier Bay coast on foot, reaching Lituya Bay in 1786?

He named the fjord Port des Français and spent 26 days there, meeting Native traders who arrived by canoe every day.

What did the explorer who lost 21 men to Lituya Bay's currents in 1786 name the island at its centre?

The name means empty tomb; he built a memorial to the drowned men there. The bay's entrance is only about 500 metres wide and its currents run over five knots.

The 1958 Lituya Bay landslide wave stripped trees to what height above the bay?

That is taller than the Empire State Building and remains the highest tsunami run-up ever recorded.

The Fairweather Fault, source of the 1958 Lituya Bay earthquake, is what type of fault?

The quake was felt as far south as Seattle and as far east as Whitehorse, and dumped about 30 million cubic metres of rock into Gilbert Inlet.

Howard Ulrich and his young son survived the 1958 Lituya Bay wave aboard which fishing boat?

Ulrich turned the boat to face the wave, which snapped her anchor chain and carried her above the trees before washing her back into the bay.

Between 1854 and 1958, how many tsunamis higher than 100 feet did Lituya Bay record?

They came in 1854, 1899, 1936 and 1958; the geologist who flew over the bay after the 1958 event put the odds of another at about 9,000 to 1.

The park takes its name from its glaciers, which number roughly how many?

Only a handful are tidewater glaciers; the rest are terrestrial, and most have been thinning and slowly receding for decades.

According to the National Park Service, how many of the park's glaciers reach the sea?

Eight are inside Glacier Bay itself and three are on the outer Pacific coast; some touch saltwater only at high tide.

Which is the only tidewater glacier in the bay's East Arm?

It is about 40 nautical miles from Bartlett Cove and popular with kayakers, though its inlet entrance is too hazardous to paddle into.

Johns Hopkins Glacier is unusual among the park's tidewater glaciers for doing what since the 1920s?

Its terminus is a mile wide and up to 330 feet high, fed by so many tributaries that it carries around 50 medial moraines.

Reid Glacier, which flows into Bigourdan Fjord moves at roughly what speed?

Its terminus is three-quarters of a mile wide and 150 feet high, but sediment has filled its edges so only the middle third still touches tidewater.

Margerie Glacier is named after Emmanuel de Margerie, a geologist and geographer of which nationality?

He visited the bay in 1913; the glacier that bears his name is about 21 miles long and one of the most active calvers in the park.

About how much of Margerie Glacier's 350-foot terminus stands above the water?

The other 100 feet is submerged, and the steep drop-off lets cruise ships park close enough to hear the ice crack like gunshots.

Margerie Glacier ends in which inlet, sitting perpendicular to the Grand Pacific Glacier?

The two glaciers were joined in the early 1990s but have since separated as the debris-covered Grand Pacific recedes.

The Grand Pacific Glacier at the head of the bay flows in from which neighbouring country?

It begins in the Saint Elias Mountains, loops through Grand Pacific Pass across the border and returns to reach tidewater exactly on the international boundary.

About what share of the park's visitors arrive aboard cruise ships?

Rangers board the ships to interpret the scenery, and regulations cap how many ships may enter the bay each day.

The Alaska Marine Highway ferry links the park's gateway town with Juneau via which village on Chichagof Island?

It is the principal village of the Huna clans; its name means lee of the north wind, and its old cannery is now the Icy Strait Point cruise stop.

What is the small gateway community at the mouth of Glacier Bay, excluded from the park boundary?

It has fewer than 700 residents, an airport built by the Army in World War II and a grocery store stocked largely from Costco in the state capital.

Before the post office forced a name change in 1925, the park's gateway town was known as what?

There is still a big beach full of wild strawberries there, and many residents descend from the Parker family who homesteaded it in 1917.

Which Native people regard Glacier Bay as their spiritual homeland?

Their oral history records villages inside the bay being overrun by the glacier in the 1700s and the clans resettling across Icy Strait.

The Huna Tribal House, Xunaa Shuká Hít, was dedicated at Bartlett Cove on August 25 of which year?

The date coincided with the National Park Service centennial, and the 2,500-square-foot cedar house is the first permanent clan house in the bay in over 250 years.

The clans that founded the village of Xunaa in the 1750s fled Glacier Bay because of what?

A second catastrophe, a landslide-triggered tsunami at Lituya Bay, also features in the clans' oral tradition of leaving the outer coast.

The Glacier Bay Lodge, the park's only in-park accommodation, was built in which year?

It went up at Bartlett Cove late in the Mission 66 building programme; regular cruise-ship visits began three years later.

Glacier Bay shares a transborder UNESCO site with Wrangell-St. Elias, Tatshenshini-Alsek and which Canadian park?

The site was inscribed in 1979 for its glaciers and icefields and for grizzly, caribou and Dall sheep habitat; Glacier Bay itself was added in 1992.

What may visitors do in Glacier Bay National Preserve that is banned inside the national park?

The preserve is the small Dry Bay area on the Alsek River; brown bears are common there and one big-game guide holds a concession.

Boats in Glacier Bay, kayaks included, must stay at least how far from any humpback whale?

Humpbacks feed mostly in the lower bay around Sitakaday Narrows, Whidbey Passage and South Marble Island.

Which Minnesota ecologist began studying plant succession at Glacier Bay in 1916 and campaigned to protect it?

He set out nine test plots to monitor over the years and got the Ecological Society of America to lobby the White House for a national monument.

Which federal agency opposed the 1925 monument, arguing the area had potential for mineral extraction?

A land-office agent sent to survey the site recommended a boundary that took in the glaciers and little else, until a letter campaign forced the president to add mature forest.

Whose 1939 expansion made Glacier Bay the largest unit in the national park system at the time?

The enlargement doubled as a brown bear sanctuary and was preferred by the Forest Service to making Admiralty Island a national park.

The 1940s Army airfield beside the park was one of only four in Alaska able to handle which bomber?

It was finished too late for the Aleutian campaign, and in 1955 the airfield area was cut out of the monument and returned to the public domain.

Which photographer joined the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition, which studied Glacier Bay?

Railroad magnate Edward Harriman recruited scientists including John Muir and George Bird Grinnell for the specially outfitted voyage.

A magnitude 8.0 earthquake in 1899 collapsed which glacier into the bay, ending its run as top tourist attraction?

The collapse filled the inlet with ice and steamship tours shifted to Taku Glacier near the state capital; the glacier had stood nearly 300 feet tall at tidewater.

From 1894, up to 200 men mined placer gold near Lituya Bay from what kind of deposit?

Most production had ended by 1917; the Reid Inlet lode mines came later, with the LeRoy Mine running a two-stamp mill and aerial tramway until 1945.

In 1958 survey crews found a rich copper and nickel deposit beneath which icefield in the park?

Newmont proposed a three-mile tunnel to an underground mine, prompting the Mining in the Parks Act; the claim was never resolved but nothing has been mined.

At which bay in the park did a salmon cannery operate from 1900 to 1931?

During World War II the Army logged around Excursion Inlet for pier pilings and built a barge-transfer base there that was never used.

The ice visible at the face of the park's glaciers is estimated to be roughly how old?

Glaciers here move about 3 to 6 feet a day, so a snowflake that falls in the Fairweather Range takes a couple of centuries to reach saltwater.

Private boaters need a permit to enter Glacier Bay during which months?

Permits can be reserved 60 days ahead and last up to seven days, and a boater may hold only one at a time in the peak season.

Glaciers cover roughly what share of the park's total area?

That is about 1,375 square miles of ice, most of it flowing from peaks between 8,000 and 15,000 feet.

Rafters heading for the preserve put in on the Tatshenshini River at Dalton Post, in which Canadian territory?

The six-day trips pass through two Canadian parks before taking out at the Dry Bay ranger station.

Which two bear species live in Glacier Bay National Park?

Black bears keep to the forested lower bay while brown bears roam the recently deglaciated north; both forage in the intertidal zone, scraping barnacles off rocks.

Glacier Bay was inscribed as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in which year?

That came seven years after it joined a binational World Heritage Site, and in 1994 the Park Service agreed to co-manage the area with Hoonah and Yakutat Tlingit organisations.

How many recreational visitors did Glacier Bay average per year between 2012 and 2021?

No road reaches the park; the pandemic year of 2021 saw only 89,768 visitors.

In which year did cruise ships begin visiting Glacier Bay regularly?

The first Park Service ranger had only been stationed at Bartlett Cove in 1949, and the lodge opened in 1966.

The Beach Trail near Bartlett Cove extends how far along the coastline?

The park keeps only a handful of maintained trails; beyond them, travel is backcountry wilderness hiking.

How much of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve is designated wilderness?

That is the great majority of the park's roughly 3.22 million acres.

Which railroad executive organised the 1899 expedition that spent five days studying Glacier Bay?

He recruited John Muir and George Bird Grinnell aboard a specially outfitted ship, and the party noted significant glacial retreat.