Contact Information
P.O. Box 140
Gustavus, AK 99826
907-697-2230
In the watery wilderness of Glacier Bay National Park, you can witness a landscape at its literal moment of creation. When George Vancouver and his H.M.S. Discovery explored Southeast Alaska's coastline in 1794, Glacier Bay lay buried beneath a mile-thick ice sheet extending all the way to its mouth at Icy Strait. But the ice has beaten a remarkably hasty retreat over the last two centuries, exhuming a raw, misty realm of steep-sided fjords and tidewater glaciers.The Y-shape bay is now 65 miles long. A journey up its arms is a profound regression through the life cycle of a new land, from maturing Sitka-spruce forests replete with grizzlies and wolves to thin-skinned tundra to the algae, lichens, and mosses that gain purchase on land exposed at a glacier's maw, the first beginnings of organic soil. Glacier Bay stands at farthest possible remove from the tiresome clamor of the modern world. So, at least for a little while, trade in your cell phone's jangle for the pop, crackle, and finally thunderous boom of a building-size berg calving into the sea from a vast river of ice. Swap rivers of commuter traffic for a whitewater ride down North America's wildest rivers, the Tatshenshini and Alsek. Whatever you do here - and choices range from sea kayaking to fishing for mammoth halibut to keeping an eye peeled for ambling bears or breaching humpback whales - you'll be adventuring far beyond the end of the road.
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