Kenai Fjords National Park Trivia
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48 free Kenai Fjords National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Kenai Fjords National Park trivia quiz covers the ice-capped park outside Seward, Alaska, where the Harding Icefield spills nearly forty glaciers into deep fjords carved below sea level. Questions cover the icefield and its snowfall, Exit Glacier at the end of the park's only road, Bear and Aialik glaciers, the plate tectonics that drown the coast, the succession of plants on freshly exposed rock, and the sea otters, Steller sea lions, puffins and whales that fill the tour-boat commentary. The history side takes in the ancient villages drowned by a medieval earthquake, the Nuka Bay gold mines, the 1968 icefield crossing that named Exit Glacier, Jimmy Carter's 1978 monument and the 1980 ANILCA park, the Exxon Valdez oil that reached the coast in 1989, Barack Obama's 2015 visit, and Seward itself, from Baranov's fur post to the Alaska SeaLife Center. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is marked on every question, so it works for a boat-tour game or a serious park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our Glacier Bay and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Kenai Fjords is the closest national park to which Alaska city, linked to it by the Seward Highway?
Anchorage
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.
Q 02Roughly how much of Alaska's Kenai Mountains lies buried under the Harding Icefield?
About 700 square miles
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.
Q 03President Harding, namesake of Kenai Fjords' great icefield, visited Alaska in 1923 to mark the completion of what?
The Alaska Railroad
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.
Q 04About how much snow falls on the Harding Icefield in an average year?
About 60 feet
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.
Q 05The word 'fjord' in Kenai Fjords National Park came into English from which language?
Norwegian
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.
Q 06Which is the largest glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park?
Bear
Bear Glacier wears two dark stripes down its length: medial moraines, bands of rock debris that formed where tributary glaciers flowed together.
Q 07Why is small Exit Glacier one of Kenai Fjords' most visited glaciers?
It is reachable by road and trails
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.
Q 08How did Exit Glacier get its name?
A 1968 expedition came off the icefield there
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.
Q 09Why does the dense ice of Kenai Fjords' glaciers look blue?
It absorbs red light
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.
Q 10Which president hiked to Exit Glacier with Bear Grylls to talk about climate change?
Barack Obama
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.
Q 11Which Kenai Fjords mammal keeps warm with the densest fur of any animal instead of a layer of blubber?
Sea otter
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.
Q 12Which president proclaimed Kenai Fjords a national monument when Congress stalled?
Jimmy Carter
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.
Q 13Under which 1980 law did Kenai Fjords go from monument to park?
Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act
Q 21The old mine sites documented around Nuka Bay in Kenai Fjords were dug for which metal?
Gold
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.
Q 22In spring 1989, oil from which grounded tanker reached the coast of Kenai Fjords?
Exxon Valdez
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.
Q 23Which small black-and-white cetacean of Kenai Fjords throws up a 'rooster tail' of spray as it races beside boats?
Dall's porpoise
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.
Q 14Bedrock beside Kenai Fjords' Exit Glacier shows fine parallel scratches called striations; what do they tell scientists?
Which way it flowed
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.
Q 15Rising seas helped drown Kenai Fjords' glacial valleys, but what makes the land itself sink?
A plate sliding beneath it
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.
Q 16The glaciers that carved Kenai Fjords' inlets left valleys with what characteristic cross-section?
U-shaped
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.
Q 17Which Kenai Fjords bay, about 33 miles south of Seward, is where Holgate Glacier meets the sea?
Aialik Bay
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.
Q 18Kenai Fjords National Park covers about 88 percent of the area of which California national park?
Yosemite
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.
Q 19Which 'whale' seen on Kenai Fjords boat tours is really the largest member of the dolphin family?
Killer whale
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'.
Q 20What is the term for a tidewater glacier shedding blocks of ice into the sea, a highlight of Kenai Fjords boat tours?
Calving
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'.
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.
Q 24Which marine mammal rescue facility in Seward, partly funded by an oil-spill settlement, works with Kenai Fjords National Park?
Alaska SeaLife Center
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.
Q 25Kenai Fjords' Steller sea lions are named after the naturalist who sailed to Alaska with which explorer?
Vitus Bering
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.
Q 26Tufted and horned puffins nest in Kenai Fjords; what do these birds do better with their wings than fly?
Swim underwater
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.
Q 27Which plants are first to colonise land freshly exposed by retreating glaciers in Kenai Fjords?
Lichens and mosses
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.
Q 28Which nitrogen-fixing shrub enriches raw glacial soil in Kenai Fjords for the trees that follow?
Sitka alder
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.
Q 29Many whales that feed in Kenai Fjords each summer spend the winter breeding off Hawaii; which species are they?
Humpback whales
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.
Q 30What colours the water at the foot of Kenai Fjords' glaciers and feeds its unusual estuary ecosystem?
Rock flour
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.