Each winter deep snows accumulate in Alaska’s mountains, over decades becoming the tidewater glaciers which flow like a river in incredibly slow motion down the valleys to the sea. There they break up into pieces, some small enough to put into your glass and some large enough to sink large vessels. When the snows are heavy year after year, or when some quirk of geography forces the ice down some particular valley, the glacier advances. Sometimes the advance can be rapid - as much as a hundred feet a day but generally a lot less.
According to Alaska Native legend and geologic evidence, the ice sheet in Glacier Bay had a cataclysmic surge forward around 1750 - some accounts have the ice moving as fast as a dog could run, forcing the Huna Tlingit out of the Bay where they had lived for hundreds of years. Four decades later, the first white explorer, British Captain, George Vancouver arrived to find what is now Glacier Bay a solid mass of ice all the way out to Icy Strait. Then the Bay disappeared into the mists of time for about 90 years until naturalist John Muir explored by canoe with native paddlers in 1879. By then the ice had made a huge retreat - hundreds of cubic miles of ice had simply disappeared, and the ice front was almost 50 miles further north from where Vancouver found it.
Influenced by global warming which is especially noticeably in Alaska, the glacial retreat has accelerated in recent years. Normally geologic features like glaciers change slowly, but at Alaska’s great tidewater glaciers the change is rapid and remarkable.
My first trip to Glacier bay was in 1997, when Grand Pacific Glacier at the head of Tarr Inlet was actively calving all the way across its two mile front. Since then I had visited regularly, often once a year, when it was obvious that Grand Pacific had slowed dramatically, with little calving. The maybe two years passed before I went again in 2019. I was stunned: in just those several years - just the blink of an eye in geologic time, Grand Pacific had totally stopped, its front melted away, revealing the dark dirt of the moraine underneath.

The face of a tidewater glacier can be hundreds of feet high, towering over visiting cruise ships. Calvings - when icebergs fall off the face - are dramatic events, but seemingly less frequent than they once were when Glaciers were actively moving. Passengers on the old steamer Queen that started going to Glacier Bay in the 1890s recalled that the Muir Glacier was calving off big icebergs at the rate of 10 or 15 an hour! Visitors today would be thrilled to experience even two calvings an hour. And sometimes they can be very dramatic. In 1997, I was on the Dawn Princess in front of Margerie Glacier and the Captain alerted us to what looked like a five story apartment building of ice beginning to lean noticeably. We watched it for an hour and were finally rewarded with a thunderous boom and a splash hundred of feet high when it finally broke free. See photo below: calvings this dramatic are uncommon. But.. keep your eyes peeled: some of the fronts of tidewater glaciers are hundreds of feet high, and even a chunk of ice the size of an icebox makes a pretty good commotion when it falls a couple of hundred feet!

Most people visiting the great tidewater glaciers do it from the comfort and safety of a big cruise ship, where no matter how big an iceberg falls off the face, there is no danger to the ship or passengers.
But visitors in smaller craft face a very real danger. Once the filmmaker that I frequently work with, Dan Kowalski, had anchored his 42’ fishing boat in a cove around a bend in the fjord from Dawes Glacier, at the head of Endicott Arm, south of Juneau. He and his wife had taken their aluminum skiff ashore and were exploring in the nearby forest, when they heard a deep rumble followed by a crash, and through the trees, could see a breaking wave sweeping into their cove, where it quickly sank their skiff - and only way to get back to their boat. Dan was an experienced Alaska hand and had stashed a waterproof bag in the skiff with emergency supplies and equipment - a radio, etc. Fortunately the skiff had sunk in shallow water and Dan was able to strip and dive down to retrieve it. And also very fortunately a small cruise ship, the Sea Lion, operated by Lindblad Expeditions chose that moment to approach the glacier Face, and Dan was able to radio them with the radio he’d retrieved from the skiff. The Sea Lion crew were happy to warm Dan and Melissa up and take them over to their anchored boat. But…if the Sea Lion hadn’t been there, Dan would have had to build a fire to warm up and wait until someone came into range of his little radio. It could have been days.
Remember the picture of the gal and the dog in the rowboat in front of that big iceberg on the home page. “What’s wrong with this picture?” might be a good caption for it. First.. she - my first wife - wasn’t wearing a life jacket; we were too casual back then. But the biggest danger was simply that berg - they are unstable - the underwater part (7/8 of the berg is underwater) is melting faster than the part in the air, changing the center of gravity, so bergs like that can topple over without warning! And even it missed you when it toppled, it could create a wave that could easily capsize a small boat.

This is actually a pretty embarrassing story…. That is Dan, the filmmaker I work with, and that is a big iceberg we encountered jammed into the narrow entrance to Fords Terror, a tight little inlet near Mile 900. You have to remember that between us Dan and I have probably fifty years of experience up and down the Alaska coast and I’d even written a book that mentions the dangers of getting too close to bergs in small craft - like the inflatable he (and I) are standing in..
Sooo… we assumed, from the position of the berg, which is a lot bigger - like 30 feet tall with an arch in the middle - that it was resting on the gravely delta, and therefore stable.
Besides, it was such a gorgeous day - blue sky, waterfalls tumbling down the sides of the inlet, seals popping up that the beauty of it all was almost like a zen-like experience. Anyway.. there we were, standing up in this little inflatable boat, cameras up taking pix when there was this rumble, more felt than heard..
“That’s the ice, talking to us..” said Dan, nonchalantly.
About ten seconds later the big berg broke in half right in the middle of the 30’ high arch, everything happening in slow motion - one half slowly rolling toward us and the top of the arch just missing the back of the boat. The other half toppled the other way and the part that was previously underwater came up, rolling water into the inflatable. Only then did we have the presence of mind to start the motor and get the hell away.

“Well,” said Dan after we’d motored away and began to breathe again. “So what’s the worst that could have happened if that berg had flipped the inflatable? Our cameras would be shot, but we could have flipped the boat back over, and paddle back to the Sue Anne, and warmed up..” Or, I thought, the berg might have whacked us silly and hypothermia would have taken care of the rest.
The first place the ice actually reaches the salt water is at Le Conte Bay, Northeast of Petersburg which was settled by Norwegian fisherman immigrants who wasted no time using the ice that drifted into the harbor from Le Conte to ice their fish. Off the main cruise ship route, it is an exquisitely private place - probably the only tidewater glacier in SE Alaska that you can almost count on having to yourself. On one trip, I remember we had wanted to anchor for the night near the ice, but then worried, that a big berg would dislodge our anchor in the middle of the night, we steamed at last light to the anchorage, with the last of the light making the bergs shine eerily around us as we picked our way through them. It was a magical experience.

The next ice is east of Mile 900, about 40 miles south of Juneau, Dawes Glacier at the head of Endicott Arm, and Sawyer Glacier at the head of Tracy Arm. Both are major glaciers and often frequented, especially Tracy Arm, by large cruise ships. Both of these glaciers are receding back up the canyons that they first started flowing down thousands of years ago. What is shown on charts as solid ice is now deep water in places, showing the speed at which these glaciers are retreating.

However, it is Glacier Bay that gets the most attention: the “Highlight of your trip to Alaska.” etc. Personally I feel that Tracy Arm, Hubbard Glacier, and the glaciers in College Fiord in Prince William Sound are equally or even more splendid. I feel the most spectacular spot in Glacier Bay is John Hopkins Glacier. But in that seals calve on the ice in front of the glacier there, so ships are allowed in during most of the season.
Ships have to get a permit to visit Glacier Bay, so on occasion a ship without a permit will go to Hubbard Glacier, 150 miles north in Yakutat Bay, instead. If this is you, don’t worry that you have been short-changed because you didn’t get to Glacier Bay. Hubbard is totally gorgeous and often actively calving as well.

College Fjord, in Price William Sound, NE of Whittier is the other frequently visited collection of tidewater glaciers. Within an eight-mile stretch at the upper end of this fjord five major tidewater glaciers reach the salt water. While Glacier Bay has emerged from the ice so recently that substantial trees have not gained foothold close to the ice, College Fjord is a place where the forests and glaciers have coexisted for centuries.
The result is a perspective on the great rivers of ice not seen in Glacier Bay. To see a glacier towering above the 100-foot-tall trees of a spruce forest, like Wellesley Glacier is really impressive.
Study the hillsides here. The upper slopes of these big glacial fjords, stripped of trees and covered with many berry bushes, are excellent bear watching territory. What you are looking for are brown or black dots that appear to be moving—these will be bears foraging for berries. Look also for white dots, often found in small groups—these will be mountain goats. You will see goats in places that an experienced rock climber would probably have trouble on.
Bears are also found down on the beach, especially if the tide is low. They are pretty good clammers, despite a crude technique. It goes like this: they look for the telltale water spurts of clams, dig them up with a big paw, smash them open with their other paw, and press the whole mass, shells and all, up to their mouth.

So where are the really big icebergs? By the time most of this ice gets to the salt water, it has been fractured so much by those twisting mountain valleys, that most of the ice that breaks off is fairly small, say the size of a small apartment building at the most.
Remember that roughly 7/8 of an iceberg is below the surface of the water, so that something that looks small on top, like the size of a garage, still poses a significant danger to ships. Small icebergs and so-called “bergy bits” are notoriously difficult to see on radar.
Calving bergs: Before Alaska cruising got so popular, few big ships penetrated right up close to the glaciers here and in other places. The captains of those ships that did discovered that if the glacier wasn’t actively calving when they were there, they could often dislodge some ice with a blow of the ship’s steam whistle. Today such practices are prohibited, so it’s just a waiting game. Often major calving is proceeded by small bits breaking off.
College Fjord is also the place you are most likely to see sea otters. Almost the definition of cute, they are easily recognisable by their habit of laying on their backs in the water with their lunch - crabs or shellfish - on their stomachs. We are lucky they are still around - when the Russian explorers arrived on the coast in the 1700s, they quickly discovered that sea otter furs were highly prized in China, and built an colony, based in Sitka, determined to catch every last sea otter. They basically did, forcing local natives to hunt from the Aleutians all the way down to Northern California.
Luckily a few remote populations survived spearheading a real success story of species recovery. Not everyone thinks this is a good thing - protected by law they are making dungeness and sea urchin fishermen pretty unhappy as they chow down on these valuable critters.
There are still a lot of tidewater glaciers in Alaska. But… They are also retreating a lot faster than most geologists had expected. So.. if you want to see them in all their glory… visit soon!
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