Glacier Bay National Park Trivia
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55 free Glacier Bay National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 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 55 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Glacier Bay National Park lies in Southeast Alaska, just west of which city?
Juneau
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.
Q 02Which president proclaimed Glacier Bay a national monument in February 1925?
Calvin Coolidge
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.
Q 03Which 1980 law turned Glacier Bay from a monument into a park and preserve?
Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act
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.
Q 04Which president used the Antiquities Act in 1978 to add the Alsek River lands to Glacier Bay National Monument?
Jimmy Carter
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.
Q 05Glacier Bay National Park is nearly one and a half times the size of which park?
Yellowstone
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.
Q 06Mount Fairweather, Glacier Bay National Park's tallest peak, sits on the border with which part of Canada?
British Columbia
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.
Q 07Which explorer named Mount Fairweather in May 1778, apparently for the unusually good weather he met?
James Cook
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.
Q 08The dripping conifer forest at the mouth of Glacier Bay belongs to which ecosystem, found along the coast from California to Kodiak?
Temperate rainforest
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.
Q 09John Muir visited Glacier Bay to learn how which California valley was carved?
Yosemite
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.
Q 10John Muir gathered his Glacier Bay dispatches into which book, published in 1915?
Travels in Alaska
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.
Q 11To which newspaper did John Muir send his Glacier Bay dispatches?
San Francisco Bulletin
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.
Q 12The glacier filling Glacier Bay peaked around 1750, at the height of which cold period?
Little Ice Age
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.
Q 13As its glaciers shrink, the land around Glacier Bay is measurably doing what, by about an inch a year in places?
Rising
Q 21What do paddlers call the popping of melting glacier ice releasing long-trapped air?
Bergie seltzer
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.
Q 22Glacier Bay's biologists tell individual humpback whales apart by the black-and-white pattern on which body part?
Tail flukes
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.
Q 23Johns Hopkins Glacier has stood out among Glacier Bay's glaciers for doing what since the 1920s?
Advancing
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.
Q 14Which British captain's 1794 expedition found Glacier Bay to be a mere five-mile notch in a wall of ice?
George Vancouver
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.
Q 15Which explorer sailed into Lituya Bay in 1786, two years before his entire expedition vanished?
Lapérouse
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.
Q 16What did the explorer who lost 21 men to Lituya Bay's currents in 1786 name the island at its centre?
Cenotaph
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.
Q 17The 1958 Lituya Bay megatsunami stripped trees to what height above the bay?
1,720 feet
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.
Q 18The Fairweather Fault, whose 1958 rupture set off the Lituya Bay megatsunami, is what type of fault?
Strike-slip
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.
Q 19What did fisherman Howard Ulrich do when the 1958 Lituya Bay wave bore down on his anchored boat?
Rode it out under power
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.
Q 20Which large mammal, a newcomer to the area, was first recorded in Glacier Bay only in the late 1960s?
Moose
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.
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.
Q 24Which marine mammals, whose bulls can weigh almost a ton, haul out on South Marble Island in Glacier Bay?
Steller sea lions
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.
Q 25Margerie Glacier is named after Emmanuel de Margerie, a geologist and geographer of which nationality?
French
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.
Q 26Which marine mammal, absent from Glacier Bay until the 1990s, numbered more than 8,000 there by 2012?
Sea otter
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.
Q 27Margerie Glacier ends in which inlet, sitting perpendicular to the Grand Pacific Glacier?
Tarr
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.
Q 28Glacier Bay National Park's outer coast, west of the Fairweather Range, faces which body of water?
Gulf of Alaska
The Gulf of Alaska sends its storms straight into the Fairweather Range, and the snow they drop there feeds the park's largest glaciers.
Q 29Which Glacier Bay waterway closes to boats in early summer so harbor seals can pup on its icebergs?
Johns Hopkins Inlet
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.
Q 30The state ferry to Glacier Bay's gateway town calls on the way at which village on Chichagof Island?
Hoonah
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.