48 Fun Facts About Kenai Fjords National Park

Kenai Fjords is the closest national park to which Alaska city, linked to it by the Seward Highway?

Anchorage lies roughly 130 miles up the Seward Highway, a National Scenic Byway that stays open all year even when winter snow shuts the park's own road.

Roughly how much of Alaska's Kenai Mountains lies buried under the Harding Icefield?

About 700 square miles of ice bury the range so deeply that only its highest summits break the surface, as lonely rock islands known as nunataks.

President Harding, namesake of Kenai Fjords' great icefield, visited Alaska in 1923 to mark the completion of what?

The Alaska Railroad was finished when Harding drove a golden spike at Nenana on 15 July 1923; he died in San Francisco less than three weeks later, before his western tour was over.

About how much snow falls on the Harding Icefield in an average year?

About 60 feet arrives on moist winter air off the Gulf of Alaska, and the summers are too cool to melt it all, so each year's leftover snow is pressed into new glacier ice.

The word 'fjord' in Kenai Fjords National Park came into English from which language?

Norwegian lent English the word but uses it more loosely at home: in Norway a 'fjord' can be any long, narrow stretch of water, including some freshwater lakes.

Which is the largest glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park?

Bear Glacier wears two dark stripes down its length: medial moraines, bands of rock debris that formed where tributary glaciers flowed together.

Why is small Exit Glacier one of Kenai Fjords' most visited glaciers?

It is reachable by road and trails: Herman Leirer Road, the only road into the park, ends near its foot, so visitors can walk toward the ice instead of hiring a boat or a plane.

How did Exit Glacier get its name?

A 1968 expedition came off the icefield there, skiing down it at the end of an eight-day traverse from Homer; two Alaskans had made the first known crossing in 1940, by another route.

Why does the dense ice of Kenai Fjords' glaciers look blue?

It absorbs red light: glacier ice is squeezed so dense that few air bubbles are left to scatter light white, so the red end of the spectrum is soaked up and blue is what comes back out.

Which president hiked to Exit Glacier with Bear Grylls to talk about climate change?

Barack Obama made the hike on a 2015 Alaska trip that opened with his administration renaming Mount McKinley, North America's highest peak, to its Native name, Denali.

Which Kenai Fjords mammal keeps warm with the densest fur of any animal instead of a layer of blubber?

Sea otters spend hours a day grooming, rubbing and blowing air into the coat, because fur that gets dirty or matted lets cold water reach the skin and the otter chills.

Which president proclaimed Kenai Fjords a national monument when Congress stalled?

Jimmy Carter used the Antiquities Act as a stopgap, shielding the fjords and icefield until Congress acted; the law it passed two years later upgraded the monument to a park.

Under which 1980 law did Kenai Fjords go from monument to park?

The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act protected more than 100 million acres at a stroke and, in that single law, created most of the national parkland Alaska has today.

Bedrock beside Kenai Fjords' Exit Glacier shows fine parallel scratches called striations; what do they tell scientists?

Which way it flowed: the scratches were gouged by stones and grit frozen into the base of the moving glacier, so they line up with its direction of travel like tracks.

Rising seas helped drown Kenai Fjords' glacial valleys, but what makes the land itself sink?

A plate sliding beneath it: the Pacific sea floor dives under this coast, and when the strain that builds up lets go, the shoreline can drop by several feet at a stroke.

The glaciers that carved Kenai Fjords' inlets left valleys with what characteristic cross-section?

U-shaped troughs, with steep walls and broad floors, are a glacier's signature where rivers cut a V; here the sea has flooded them, and their floors lie hundreds of feet below the waves.

Which Kenai Fjords bay, about 33 miles south of Seward, is where Holgate Glacier meets the sea?

Aialik Bay got its name when Russian mapmakers wrote down a Native name as 'Ayalyk'; today tour boats from Seward idle in its Holgate Arm to watch the glacier's face.

Kenai Fjords National Park covers about 88 percent of the area of which California national park?

Yosemite is slightly the larger, and ice made it too: glaciers carved its famous valley, but most had melted away by about 10,000 years ago, while those of Kenai Fjords are still at work.

Which 'whale' seen on Kenai Fjords boat tours is really the largest member of the dolphin family?

The killer whale is the biggest dolphin of all, and it hunts like a wolf: pods work as a team to run down their prey, which earned it the nickname 'wolf of the sea'.

What is the term for a tidewater glacier shedding blocks of ice into the sea, a highlight of Kenai Fjords boat tours?

Calving throws up large and often dangerous waves, which is why tour boats hang well back from the ice face; the pieces set adrift range from icebergs down to 'bergy bits' and 'growlers'.

The old mine sites documented around Nuka Bay in Kenai Fjords were dug for which metal?

Gold kept prospectors at Nuka Bay for decades: eleven mine sites are on record, and a few were still being worked in the 1980s, after the land around them had become a national park.

In spring 1989, oil from which grounded tanker reached the coast of Kenai Fjords?

The Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound on 24 March; its oil coated about 20 miles of the park's headlands, but spring meltwater pouring off the land kept it out of the fjords themselves.

Which small black-and-white cetacean of Kenai Fjords throws up a 'rooster tail' of spray as it races beside boats?

Dall's porpoise is drawn to fast vessels and rides their bow waves, surfacing so briskly that it kicks up the cone of spray that gives it away from a distance.

Which marine mammal rescue facility in Seward, partly funded by an oil-spill settlement, works with Kenai Fjords National Park?

The Alaska SeaLife Center is the state's only permanent marine mammal rehabilitation facility, so stranded and orphaned animals from around Alaska end up in its care on the shore of Resurrection Bay.

Kenai Fjords' Steller sea lions are named after the naturalist who sailed to Alaska with which explorer?

Vitus Bering's ship was wrecked on the voyage home in 1741 and he died on the island that now bears his name, but his naturalist Georg Steller survived to describe the sea lion.

Tufted and horned puffins nest in Kenai Fjords; what do these birds do better with their wings than fly?

Swim underwater: puffins 'fly' through the sea on short, stubby wings to chase fish, and those same wings must beat up to 400 times a minute to keep them in the air.

Which plants are first to colonise land freshly exposed by retreating glaciers in Kenai Fjords?

Lichens and mosses come first because they need no soil at all: they cling to bare rock and slowly break it down, making the first thin layer of soil for fireweed and shrubs.

Which nitrogen-fixing shrub enriches raw glacial soil in Kenai Fjords for the trees that follow?

Sitka alder hosts bacteria in its roots that pull nitrogen out of the air, fertilising bare glacial gravel so well that taller trees can later take hold.

Many whales that feed in Kenai Fjords each summer spend the winter breeding off Hawaii; which species are they?

Humpback whales come north to fatten up: over a summer of heavy feeding they add inches of blubber, the fuel that has to carry them through the winter breeding season.

What colours the water at the foot of Kenai Fjords' glaciers and feeds its unusual estuary ecosystem?

Rock flour is bedrock ground to powder beneath the moving ice; it clouds the meltwater and carries minerals that feed the plankton at the bottom of the fjords' food chain.

Which tiny animals spend their whole lives inside the glaciers of Kenai Fjords, grazing on algae?

Ice worms are real relatives of the earthworm that live at about freezing point; warmed to only 5 °C, their cell membranes break down and the worms fall apart.

Which Alaska state park borders Kenai Fjords National Park to the south?

Kachemak Bay, the first state park Alaska's legislature created, meets the national park's southern edge, and a wildlife refuge wraps its western side, so the icefield sits inside one unbroken block of protected land.

Fort McGilvray, whose ruins overlook Resurrection Bay near Seward, was built to guard the port during which conflict?

World War II reached Alaska when Japan attacked and occupied part of the territory, so the Army dug in on this headland to cover the sea approach to Seward, then abandoned the fort before the war was over.

Seward, the gateway town to Kenai Fjords, is named for the Secretary of State who did what?

William Seward bought Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million, about two cents an acre, and the state still marks the handover every 18 October as Alaska Day.

Seward, the gateway to Kenai Fjords, is Mile 0 of which historic trail to Interior Alaska?

The Iditarod Trail once carried gold seekers and mail from Seward's shore all the way to Nome; the famous sled dog race named after it now starts in Anchorage instead.

What did a Russian trading company build in the 1790s where Seward now stands?

A fur post and a three-masted ship: the Phoenix was built on the spot from mainly local materials, under a Briton in Russian service, and launched into the bay in 1794.

What damaged much of Seward, the gateway town to Kenai Fjords, in 1964?

An earthquake and tsunami struck on Good Friday: the magnitude 9.2 shock, the strongest ever recorded in North America, lasted more than four minutes, and the waves it raised did damage as far away as Hawaii.

Yule Kilcher, a Swiss-born homesteader who crossed the Harding Icefield in his fifties, was the grandfather of which singer?

Jewel, born Jewel Kilcher, grew up near Homer, where the family homesteaded; her grandfather first tried the icefield in 1936, turned back within a week, and got across three decades later.

Which maritime Alaska Native people have hunted along the Kenai Fjords coast for more than a thousand years?

The Alutiiq, who also go by their ancestral name Sugpiaq, were sea hunters of the outer coast; when the park was created, their village corporations kept title to land inside its boundary.

Glaciers gouged bowl-shaped hollows into Kenai Fjords' peaks that the sea has since flooded; what are such hollows called?

Cirques are the high hollows where glaciers are born; along this coast the sea later drowned them, and the summits that once poked above the ice now stand offshore as islands.

Seward's Mount Marathon Race, run up and down the peak behind the town since 1915, is held on which holiday?

Fourth of July crowds fill Seward to watch runners scramble to the summit and back; the first organised race set the challenge of making the round trip from downtown in under an hour.

The wildlife refuge on Kenai Fjords' western border was founded in 1941 as a 'range' for which animal?

Moose gave the refuge its first name, the Kenai National Moose Range; the same 1980 law that created Kenai Fjords National Park renamed it a wildlife refuge.

Besides Kenai Fjords and Denali, which Alaska national park can be reached by road?

Wrangell-St. Elias is the largest national park in the country, yet only two roads lead into it, both of them dirt roads kept up by the state.

Roughly how long ago did the Harding Icefield first form?

About 23,000 years ago, in the depths of the last ice age, ice buried much of south-central Alaska; the Harding Icefield is a surviving scrap of that vast sheet.

Which Kenai Fjords marine mammal gives birth on ice drifting in front of tidewater glaciers?

Harbor seals turn the drifting ice into a nursery: mothers haul out on it each June to give birth and nurse their pups, on a platform that also offers refuge from predators.

Which sure-footed climber do Kenai Fjords boat tours often spot on cliffs just above the sea?

Mountain goats come down to the sea cliffs in late spring to give birth; the sheer cliff face is their defence, since wolves and other predators cannot follow them across it.

Kenai Fjords' coastal forest belongs to which forest belt that runs down the Pacific coast to California?

Temperate rainforest thrives here for the same reason the icefield does: wet air off the ocean, which falls as deep snow on the heights and as rain on the mild coast, where it feeds giant spruces.

In 1927 a schoolboy living in a children's home in Seward, the gateway to Kenai Fjords, created which symbol of Alaska?

The state flag, eight stars on blue forming the Big Dipper and the North Star, was Benny Benson's winning entry in a territory-wide contest, and Alaska kept it unchanged when it became a state in 1959.