Welcome to the Park of the Week Newsletter for February 29, 2024. This week’s park is one of the few US national parks that protects wilderness marine waters.
Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve
Location
Bartlett Cove, Alaska, United States
Claim to fame
Glacier Bay National Park is roughly 3.3 million acres, making it about the size of the state of Connecticut, and most of that acreage is federally designated wilderness. The park, in combination with three other neighboring parks–including Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and two parks in Canada–was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994 owing to the region’s unique glaciers, icefields, and wildlife.
Glacier Bay is a finger of water that extends 65 miles into the coastal mountains of Alaska’s panhandle. Most visitors explore the park aboard cruise ships or other marine vessels.
Glacier Bay contains around a thousand glaciers–some small and cupped on mountain peaks, others massive rivers of ice tens of miles long and hundreds of feet high. The bay itself was once a glacier, which as it retreated left behind a depression that filled with water from the Pacific Ocean.
Reason to visit
Glacier Bay is a premier destination for cruise ships and other vessels that want to bring their passengers to the face of a calving tidewater glacier. (“Calving” is the name for the fracturing and falling of glacial ice when it meets water, and tidewater glaciers are typically the large ones that end at the water’s edge.)
The bay is also packed with wildlife, and common sights include sea otters, humpback whales, mountain goats, coastal brown bears, wolves, tufted puffins, and harbor seals. Less common but sometimes seen by the fortunate are orcas, wolverines, and the elusive glacier bear–a black bear with a bluish hue only found in this region of Alaska and Canada.
Visitors who arrive on land or via smaller boats (the only ones which can dock at the park’s small dock), can walk Glacier Bay’s handful of trails or kayak into the bay and camp. Glacier Bay National Preserve–where other activities like hunting and fishing are available–is situated on the outer coast adjacent to the park, and can only be reached via charter plane.
Wild Fact
Glacier Bay is the site of the largest megatsunami ever recorded. On the evening of July 9, 1958, Lituya Bay on the park’s outer coast was rocked by an earthquake magnitude 7.8-8.3 . An eyewitness account from a fishing vessel describes the quake lifting nearby mountains, shaking rock and debris from them in a torrent.
The rockslide hit the bay and launched a massive wave. The tsunami tossed one fisherman and his son in their boat hundreds of feet in the air, though miraculously they survived. Five people lost their lives and several homes and other structures were destroyed. The tsunami was determined to be 1,719 feet (520 meters) high.
Glacier Bay is still a frequent site for earthquakes. These quakes combined with loose rock situated just above narrow inlets and waterways make the park a potential spot for future dangerous megatsunamis.
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