Glacier Bay National Park Trivia
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56 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 56 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
Jimmy Carter used the Antiquities Act on December 1, 1978 to protect some 56 million acres of Alaska while ANILCA stalled in Congress, adding the Alsek River lands to Glacier Bay.
Q 05Roughly how many acres do the park and preserve cover together?
3.3 million
Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve covers about 3.3 million acres (3,283,000), including nearly 600,000 acres of protected marine waters.
Q 06Mount Fairweather, the park's tallest peak, sits on the border with which Canadian province?
British Columbia
Mount Fairweather straddles the Alaska-British Columbia border; at about 15,300 feet it is British Columbia's highest peak, with Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Park on the Canadian side.
Q 07Which explorer named Mount Fairweather in May 1778, apparently for the unusually good weather he met?
James Cook
Captain James Cook sighted and named Mount Fairweather on 3 May 1778; the name is ironic, since storms and cloud usually hide a summit that gets over 100 inches of precipitation a year.
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
John Muir first reached Glacier Bay by canoe in October 1879 with the missionary S. Hall Young, seeking living glaciers to explain how Yosemite 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 Glacier Bay dispatches?
San Francisco Bulletin
Muir's letters ran in the San Francisco Bulletin (the Daily Evening Bulletin); they made the bay famous enough that steamship tours were running up the Inside Passage by the 1880s.
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 Vancouver's Discovery, found Icy Strait choked with ice; the glacier filling the bay was more than 4,000 feet thick and up to 20 miles wide.
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
The park holds about 1,045 glaciers, only about 50 of them named; most are terrestrial and have been thinning for decades.
Q 22Which is the only tidewater glacier in the bay's East Arm?
McBride
McBride Glacier is the last tidewater glacier in Muir Inlet, the East Arm, after the inlet's other glaciers retreated onto land; it lies about 40 nautical miles from Bartlett Cove.
Q 23Johns Hopkins Glacier is unusual among the park's tidewater glaciers for doing what since the 1920s?
Advancing
Johns Hopkins Glacier has been advancing since the late 1920s, unlike most of the park's glaciers; it is fed by so many tributaries that its surface is striped with medial moraines.
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
The 65-mile pullback between 1794 and 1916 is the fastest documented glacier retreat on record, exposing the fjord system that cruise ships sail.
Q 15Which explorer was the first European to explore the Glacier Bay coast on foot, reaching Lituya Bay in 1786?
Lapérouse
Lapérouse anchored in Lituya Bay in July 1786, naming it Port des Français, and spent 26 days there trading with Native people who came by canoe each 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
The wave stripped trees to 1,720 feet (524 m) above the bay on the Gilbert Inlet spur, the highest tsunami run-up ever recorded, taller than the Empire State Building.
Q 18The Fairweather Fault, source of the 1958 Lituya Bay earthquake, is what type of fault?
Strike-slip
The Fairweather Fault is a right-lateral strike-slip fault, part of the Queen Charlotte system; the 1958 magnitude 7.8 quake on it dropped 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
Howard Ulrich and his young son rode out the wave aboard the Edrie; Ulrich turned into it, the anchor chain snapped, and the boat was swept shoreward and back into the bay, the only vessel to survive.
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 24In which year was Glacier Bay added to the cross-border UNESCO World Heritage Site?
1992
UNESCO added Glacier Bay in 1992 to the cross-border World Heritage Site first inscribed in 1979 around Wrangell-St. Elias and its Canadian neighbour; Tatshenshini-Alsek joined in 1994.
Q 25Margerie Glacier is named after Emmanuel de Margerie, a geologist and geographer of which nationality?
French
Emmanuel de Margerie was a French geographer and geologist who visited the bay in 1913; the 21-mile glacier named for him is among the park's most active calvers.
Q 26About how much of Margerie Glacier's 350-foot terminus stands above the water?
250 feet
About 250 feet of Margerie's face stands above the water and 100 feet lies below; the steep drop-off lets cruise ships come close enough to hear the ice crack.
Q 27Margerie Glacier ends in which inlet, sitting perpendicular to the Grand Pacific Glacier?
Tarr
Margerie Glacier calves into Tarr Inlet at the head of the West Arm, beside the debris-covered Grand Pacific Glacier; the two fronts touched in the early 1990s before separating.
Q 28The park's outer coast, west of the Fairweather Range, faces which body of water?
Gulf of Alaska
West of the Fairweather Range the park's Outer Coast runs along the Gulf of Alaska, where Lituya Bay and Dry Bay open onto the open Pacific.
Q 29Which inlet closes to boats in early summer so harbor seals can pup on icebergs?
Johns Hopkins Inlet
Johns Hopkins Inlet is closed to vessels from May into early summer each year because hundreds of harbor seals give birth and nurse pups on its floating ice.
Q 30The Alaska Marine Highway ferry links the park's gateway town with Juneau via which village on Chichagof Island?
Hoonah
Hoonah, the main village of the Huna clans on Chichagof Island, is the ferry's stop between Juneau and the park's gateway; its old cannery is the Icy Strait Point cruise stop.