60 free Glacier Bay National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Glacier Bay National Park trivia quiz covers the roadless park and preserve west of Juneau, Alaska, where a single glacier that filled the whole bay in 1794 has retreated 65 miles in the fastest documented glacial retreat on record. Questions range across the tidewater glaciers (Margerie, Grand Pacific, Johns Hopkins, McBride), the Fairweather Range, the wildlife of the fjords and the roughly 80 percent of visitors who arrive by cruise ship. The human story is here too: the Huna Tlingit whose villages were overrun by the ice and who returned with a tribal house at Bartlett Cove in 2016; Lapérouse, Vancouver and John Muir; the ecologist who talked Calvin Coolidge into a national monument; the gold miners, cannery hands and B-29 airfield; and the 1958 Lituya Bay earthquake that sent a wave 1,720 feet up a hillside. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is shown on every question, so it suits a cruise-ship pub quiz as well as serious park nerds. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia or National Park Service pages and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our Yellowstone and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Glacier Bay National Park lies in Southeast Alaska, just west of which state capital?
Juneau
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.
Q 02Which president proclaimed Glacier Bay a national monument in February 1925?
Calvin Coolidge
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.
Q 03Which 1980 law turned Glacier Bay from a monument into a park and preserve?
Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act
ANILCA, signed on December 2, 1980, also enlarged the monument by 523,000 acres in the same stroke.
Q 04Which president used the Antiquities Act on December 1, 1978 to expand the monument to the Alsek River lands?
Jimmy Carter
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.
Q 05Roughly how many acres do the park and preserve cover together?
3.3 million
About 2.77 million of those acres are designated wilderness, and nearly 600,000 acres are protected marine waters.
Q 06Mount Fairweather, the park's tallest peak, sits on the border with which Canadian province?
British Columbia
At 15,266 feet it is the highest mountain in that province, and its summit borders Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Park.
Q 07Which explorer named Mount Fairweather in May 1778, apparently for the unusually good weather he met?
James Cook
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.
Q 08In which year was Mount Fairweather first climbed, by Allen Carpé and Terris Moore?
1931
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.
Q 09In which year did the naturalist John Muir first visit Glacier Bay?
1879
Muir came to Alaska to study living glaciers so he could understand how Yosemite Valley had been carved.
Q 10John Muir's Glacier Bay dispatches were eventually collected in which 1915 book?
Travels in Alaska
The book came out the year after Muir died and helped make the Inside Passage a tourist route.
Q 11To which newspaper did John Muir send his accounts of Glacier Bay in 1879 and 1880?
San Francisco Bulletin
His reports made the bay famous enough that steamship tours from Tacoma and Portland were running up the Inside Passage by the 1890s.
Q 12When Vancouver's expedition reached Icy Strait in 1794, how thick was the ice wall blocking Glacier Bay?
4,000 feet
Joseph Whidbey, master of the Discovery, found the strait choked with ice and the bay itself buried under one enormous glacier.
Q 13By John Muir's first visit, the ice had retreated about how far up the bay since 1794?
48 miles
Q 21The park takes its name from its glaciers, which number roughly how many?
1,045
Only a handful are tidewater glaciers; the rest are terrestrial, and most have been thinning and slowly receding for decades.
Q 22According to the National Park Service, how many of the park's glaciers reach the sea?
11
Eight are inside Glacier Bay itself and three are on the outer Pacific coast; some touch saltwater only at high tide.
Q 23Which is the only tidewater glacier in the bay's East Arm?
McBride
It is about 40 nautical miles from Bartlett Cove and popular with kayakers, though its inlet entrance is too hazardous to paddle into.
The retreat continued: by 1916 the Grand Pacific Glacier had pulled back some 65 miles from the mouth of the bay.
Q 14Glacier Bay's ice pulled back some 65 miles between 1794 and 1916, a record described as what?
The fastest documented retreat
Not every glacier followed suit: Johns Hopkins Glacier was measured growing 10 to 15 feet a day in 2012.
Q 15Which explorer was the first European to explore the Glacier Bay coast on foot, reaching Lituya Bay in 1786?
Lapérouse
He named the fjord Port des Français and spent 26 days there, meeting Native traders who arrived by canoe every day.
Q 16What did the explorer who lost 21 men to Lituya Bay's currents in 1786 name the island at its centre?
Cenotaph
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.
Q 17The 1958 Lituya Bay landslide wave stripped trees to what height above the bay?
1,720 feet
That is taller than the Empire State Building and remains the highest tsunami run-up ever recorded.
Q 18The Fairweather Fault, source of the 1958 Lituya Bay earthquake, is what type of fault?
Strike-slip
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.
Q 19Howard Ulrich and his young son survived the 1958 Lituya Bay wave aboard which fishing boat?
Edrie
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.
Q 20Between 1854 and 1958, how many tsunamis higher than 100 feet did Lituya Bay record?
Four
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.
Q 24Johns Hopkins Glacier is unusual among the park's tidewater glaciers for doing what since the 1920s?
Advancing
Its terminus is a mile wide and up to 330 feet high, fed by so many tributaries that it carries around 50 medial moraines.
Q 25Reid Glacier, which flows into Bigourdan Fjord moves at roughly what speed?
15 feet per day
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.
Q 26Margerie Glacier is named after Emmanuel de Margerie, a geologist and geographer of which nationality?
French
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.
Q 27About how much of Margerie Glacier's 350-foot terminus stands above the water?
250 feet
The other 100 feet is submerged, and the steep drop-off lets cruise ships park close enough to hear the ice crack like gunshots.
Q 28Margerie Glacier ends in which inlet, sitting perpendicular to the Grand Pacific Glacier?
Tarr
The two glaciers were joined in the early 1990s but have since separated as the debris-covered Grand Pacific recedes.
Q 29The Grand Pacific Glacier at the head of the bay flows in from which neighbouring country?
Canada
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.
Q 30About what share of the park's visitors arrive aboard cruise ships?
80%
Rangers board the ships to interpret the scenery, and regulations cap how many ships may enter the bay each day.