55 Fun Facts About Glacier Bay National Park

Glacier Bay National Park lies in Southeast Alaska, just west of which city?

Juneau is the usual jumping-off point, but no road reaches the park: visitors fly or sail the last 60-odd miles, and the only road inside runs ten miles from the airfield to headquarters.

Which president proclaimed Glacier Bay a national monument in February 1925?

Calvin Coolidge acted under the Antiquities Act after a letter-writing campaign led by the Ecological Society of America, over the objections of a federal agency that wanted the bay's minerals left open.

Which 1980 law turned Glacier Bay from a monument into a park and preserve?

The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act ended decades of talk about upgrading the monument; it also took in Dry Bay at the Alsek's mouth, where the preserve now lies.

Which president used the Antiquities Act in 1978 to add the Alsek River lands to Glacier Bay National Monument?

Jimmy Carter acted because Congress had stalled on an Alaska lands bill; his proclamations that December set aside national monuments across the state, and Congress wrote most of them into law two years later.

Glacier Bay National Park is nearly one and a half times the size of which park?

Yellowstone is about two-thirds the size of Glacier Bay, yet draws many times the visitors: no road reaches the Alaskan park, which can be entered only by boat or plane.

Mount Fairweather, Glacier Bay National Park's tallest peak, sits on the border with which part of Canada?

British Columbia's highest point is a summit it shares: most of Mount Fairweather lies in Alaska, inside the park, but the border runs right over the top.

Which explorer named Mount Fairweather in May 1778, apparently for the unusually good weather he met?

James Cook named it on a fine day in May 1778, but the name flatters: Mount Fairweather stands in the path of North Pacific storms, and cloud usually hides its summit.

The dripping conifer forest at the mouth of Glacier Bay belongs to which ecosystem, found along the coast from California to Kodiak?

Temperate rainforest lines this coast because a warm ocean current keeps it mild and wet; near the bay's mouth it has grown up in barely two centuries, on ground that was under ice in the 1700s.

John Muir visited Glacier Bay to learn how which California valley was carved?

Yosemite Valley, Muir believed, had been carved by ice; Glacier Bay's living glaciers let him watch that carving in action, and his newspaper reports soon made the bay a tourist sight.

John Muir gathered his Glacier Bay dispatches into which book, published in 1915?

Travels in Alaska was still in manuscript when Muir died on Christmas Eve 1914, and it came out the next year. Alaska Days with John Muir, also 1915, is a companion's memoir.

To which newspaper did John Muir send his Glacier Bay dispatches?

Muir's letters ran in the San Francisco Bulletin before he was even home, and they made the bay famous enough that by 1883 a steamship was landing tourists beside one of its largest glaciers.

The glacier filling Glacier Bay peaked around 1750, at the height of which cold period?

The Little Ice Age drove the glacier over the villages in the bay and out past its mouth by about 1750; then it turned, and has retreated some 65 miles since.

As its glaciers shrink, the land around Glacier Bay is measurably doing what, by about an inch a year in places?

Rising: the ice was heavy enough to press the Earth's crust down, and the crust is still springing back. New islands and beaches keep emerging, and islands that were separate are joining.

Which British captain's 1794 expedition found Glacier Bay to be a mere five-mile notch in a wall of ice?

George Vancouver's men charted only a short dent in the ice in 1794; the glacier has since pulled back about 65 miles, one of the fastest retreats ever documented.

Which explorer sailed into Lituya Bay in 1786, two years before his entire expedition vanished?

Lapérouse sailed on across the Pacific; in 1788 his two ships left Botany Bay and were never seen again, wrecked, it emerged decades later, on a reef in the Solomon Islands.

What did the explorer who lost 21 men to Lituya Bay's currents in 1786 name the island at its centre?

Cenotaph means empty tomb: none of the bodies was ever recovered, so their commander raised a monument on the island to the men the bay's tidal rip had swallowed.

The 1958 Lituya Bay megatsunami stripped trees to what height above the bay?

1,720 feet is the highest wave run-up ever recorded: a fault rupture shook some 40 million cubic yards of rock off a cliff into the head of the bay, and the splash surged up the facing slope.

The Fairweather Fault, whose 1958 rupture set off the Lituya Bay megatsunami, is what type of fault?

The Fairweather Fault is a right-lateral strike-slip fault, part of the Queen Charlotte system; when it ruptured in 1958 it shook about 30 million cubic metres of rock into Gilbert Inlet.

What did fisherman Howard Ulrich do when the 1958 Lituya Bay wave bore down on his anchored boat?

Rode it out under power: unable to raise the anchor, he paid out all the chain and started the engine. The wave snapped the chain and swept the boat shoreward and back, and he and his son, 7, motored out that night.

Which large mammal, a newcomer to the area, was first recorded in Glacier Bay only in the late 1960s?

Moose seem timeless in Alaska, but here they are recent arrivals: rangers logged the first confirmed tracks on the bay's east shore, a cow and two calves, in February 1967.

What do paddlers call the popping of melting glacier ice releasing long-trapped air?

Bergie seltzer is air that was caught between snowflakes and squeezed into the ice under pressure; as a berg melts, each bubble pops free, and kayakers can hear it fizz.

Glacier Bay's biologists tell individual humpback whales apart by the black-and-white pattern on which body part?

Tail flukes carry markings as individual as fingerprints, so one photograph of a diving whale is enough to name it; the park has tracked its humpbacks this way every summer since 1985.

Johns Hopkins Glacier has stood out among Glacier Bay's glaciers for doing what since the 1920s?

Advancing since the 1920s makes Johns Hopkins a rarity: heavy snowfall high in the Fairweather Range feeds it faster than it melts, while about 95% of Alaska's glaciers thin or retreat.

Which marine mammals, whose bulls can weigh almost a ton, haul out on South Marble Island in Glacier Bay?

Steller sea lions use the island as a bachelor haul-out for young and losing males; their numbers are growing here even though the western Alaska population has collapsed since the 1970s.

Margerie Glacier is named after Emmanuel de Margerie, a geologist and geographer of which nationality?

A French geographer, Emmanuel de Margerie visited the bay in 1913; the glacier named for him held nearly steady through the 1990s while most of the park's glaciers shrank.

Which marine mammal, absent from Glacier Bay until the 1990s, numbered more than 8,000 there by 2012?

Sea otters went from none to thousands in about twenty years, growing by some 42% a year; they eat so many crabs and clams that biologists expect the bay's seafloor life to change.

Margerie Glacier ends in which inlet, sitting perpendicular to the Grand Pacific Glacier?

Tarr Inlet is where the great retreat ended up: the Grand Pacific, the glacier that once filled the entire bay, had pulled back to the inlet's head by 1916, and Margerie now calves beside it.

Glacier Bay National Park's outer coast, west of the Fairweather Range, faces which body of water?

The Gulf of Alaska sends its storms straight into the Fairweather Range, and the snow they drop there feeds the park's largest glaciers.

Which Glacier Bay waterway closes to boats in early summer so harbor seals can pup on its icebergs?

Johns Hopkins Inlet is closed to all vessels in May and June by federal rule; up to 1,700 seals gather on its ice to pup and mate, and even afterwards boats must keep a quarter mile off.

The state ferry to Glacier Bay's gateway town calls on the way at which village on Chichagof Island?

Hoonah, whose name means 'lee of the north wind', is where the Huna clans settled after a glacier pushing down the bay drove them from their villages there.

What is the small gateway community at the mouth of Glacier Bay, excluded from the park boundary?

Gustavus has only about 650 residents but an airfield long enough for jets, because the Army built it during the Second World War; a ten-mile road links town and park headquarters.

Before the Post Office forced a name change in 1925, Glacier Bay's gateway town was known as what?

Strawberry Point stayed the name on local lips long after 1925; the first lasting homestead there was the Parker family's in 1917, and many residents today are their descendants.

Which Native people regard Glacier Bay as their spiritual homeland?

The Huna Tlingit lived in villages inside the bay until the glacier surged forward and overran them around 1750; they came back as the ice withdrew and still call the bay their homeland.

The Huna Tribal House in Glacier Bay opened on the 100th birthday of which agency?

The National Park Service once barred the Huna from traditional harvests in their homeland; the house it helped build is the first permanent clan house in the bay in over 250 years.

Which conifer, Alaska's state tree, shares the young forests of lower Glacier Bay with western hemlock?

Sitka spruce moves in where alder thickets have enriched the raw ground the ice left behind; near the bay's mouth, bare two centuries ago, it now stands in tall, mossy forest.

Glacier Bay shares a transborder UNESCO site with Wrangell-St. Elias, Tatshenshini-Alsek and which Canadian park?

Kluane, across the border in Canada, was listed with its neighbours for wildlife as well as scenery: their glacier country is prized habitat for caribou and Dall sheep.

What may visitors do in Glacier Bay National Preserve that is banned inside the national park?

Sport hunting is what the 'preserve' label allows: Congress used it in 1980 for Alaska parkland where hunting would carry on, here a corner of the Alsek River delta.

Most of the humpback whales that feed in Glacier Bay each summer spend the winter breeding near which islands?

Hawaii is about a month's swim away, and the whales eat nothing while they are there: they mate and calve on the fat they laid down gorging on Alaska's small fish all summer.

Ecologist William Cooper began visiting Glacier Bay in 1916 to study the return of what after the ice?

Plant life was his subject: Cooper came back for decades to watch moss, shrubs and then forest follow the retreating ice, and he persuaded fellow ecologists to campaign for the bay's protection.

Which federal agency opposed making Glacier Bay a national monument in the 1920s, citing its potential for mineral extraction?

The U.S. Geological Survey wanted the bay left open to mining; the monument was created anyway, and mining was let back in from 1936.

Whose 1939 expansion made Glacier Bay the largest unit in the national park system at the time?

Franklin D. Roosevelt more than doubled the monument in 1939, chiefly to protect wildlife habitat; it stayed a monument for another 41 years before Congress made it a park.

Which photographer, famed for Native American portraits, joined a railroad magnate's 1899 expedition to Glacier Bay?

Edward S. Curtis was then a young Seattle studio photographer; a shipmate, George Bird Grinnell, took him to photograph the Blackfeet the next year, the start of his life's work.

What shattered the face of Glacier Bay's Muir Glacier in September 1899, ending its years as a star attraction?

Earthquakes centred near Yakutat Bay broke up the ice front and choked the inlet with bergs; steamers could not get close for years, and the tourist trade moved to Taku Glacier.

Miners near Lituya Bay once worked the ocean beach itself, sifting its sands after storms to recover what?

Gold washed onto the beach with each heavy storm and had to be gathered before the tide sucked it back out; the diggings were mostly finished by 1917.

The copper-nickel deposit found in Glacier Bay in 1958, and never mined, lies beneath what?

An icefield, the Brady, hides the ore: a mining company proposed tunnelling three miles under the ice to reach it, and the fight helped bring the 1976 law that closed parks to new mining claims.

A cannery at Dundas Bay, on Glacier Bay National Park's southern edge, packed which fish from 1900 to 1931?

Salmon drew the Dundas Bay cannery, which changed hands three times before it closed; Huna families worked its lines and netted fish for it in the nearby straits.

The ice at the face of Glacier Bay's glaciers is estimated to be roughly how old?

200 years at most: the glaciers flow three to six feet a day, so snow that falls in the mountains reaches the face within about two centuries, and on shorter glaciers in as little as 75 years.

Private boaters need a permit to enter Glacier Bay during which months?

June, July and August are when the whales and the visitors both peak, so the park caps private boats at 25 a day; a permit can be booked 60 days ahead and lasts up to a week.

Glacier Bay opens onto which waterway north of Chichagof Island?

Icy Strait was living up to its name in 1794, when a British survey party found it choked with ice shed by the glacier that then filled the whole bay.

Rafters launch on the Tatshenshini River at Dalton Post, which lies in which part of Canada?

Yukon is only where the trip begins: rafts drift through two Canadian parks, cross the border mid-river, and finish days later at a ranger station inside Glacier Bay's preserve.

Which two bear species live in Glacier Bay National Park?

Black and brown bears share the bay: black bears keep to the forested lower reaches, while brown bears, once thought to stay near the glaciers, turn out to roam almost every part of it.

About four in five visitors to Glacier Bay never set foot ashore, seeing the park from what?

A cruise ship carries most visitors up the bay and back in a single day; because they never land, park rangers climb aboard to narrate, and rules cap how many ships may enter.

What is the term for a glacier, like Glacier Bay's Margerie, that flows all the way down to the sea?

Tidewater glaciers end in salt water, where waves and tides undercut the ice until blocks up to 200 feet high break away; a piedmont glacier, by contrast, spreads out over lowland.

Under the 1980 law that made Glacier Bay a national park, most of its land received which strict designation?

Wilderness area status covers the great majority of the park, some of its waters included, which is why it has almost no roads or trails; the row over fishing boats in those waters ran for years.

Which railroad executive organised the 1899 expedition that spent five days studying Glacier Bay?

Edward Harriman planned the voyage as a family adventure holiday, then filled his chartered steamer with leading scientists, artists and writers, who came home with over a hundred trunks of specimens.