What To Do At Glacier Bay Alaska Cruise Port?

Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska is a popular destination for Alaska cruises, offering stunning scenery and wildlife. The ship travels into the Fairweather Mountains, allowing visitors to witness icebergs and calving glaciers. The best time to visit Glacier Bay is during the summer. A team of park rangers and naturalists board the ship as it enters the park. Three amazing things to do in Glacier Bay National Park include photography, kayaking, and paddling. Exploring the park by kayak offers an intimate and immersive experience, with serene waterways, rugged coastlines, and dramatic glacial landscapes. Paddling is also an option. Glacier Bay is one of the most sought-after spots on Alaska’s Inside Passage, featuring ever-changing glaciers, including Margerie Glacier. Visitors should pack a hat, gloves, wool or fleece layers, warm coat, and waterproof gear to comfortably admire the landscape from the open deck of their ship. During a Glacier Bay cruise, visitors can view glaciers, spot wildlife, and speak to park rangers.

Are there any animals in Glacier Bay?

Fall is a season of migration for many animals in Glacier Bay. Moose and mountain goats are in rut, and predators enjoy late runs of salmon.

Snowy landscapes provide some of the best opportunities to see wildlife tracks, and often force animals to coastal areas.

Can you walk on Glacier Bay?

Explore The Shore:Distance: VariesThe long stretch of shoreline south of the Bartlett Cove docks allows for a pleasant stroll. You could walk for miles. An extended hike to Point Gustavus (six miles one way) can be completed in a full day. Low tide reveals a myriad of intertidal life. (Please walk carefully!) It’s a terrific place to see land, shore and sea birds. Listen for the breathing of humpback whales, feeding sea otters, and bald eagles. Flowers are profuse in mid-summer on the beach meadows. Let the magic of Glacier Bay surround you for an hour or even a full day.

Wilderness HikingThere are no maintained trails in park wilderness, but beaches, recently deglaciated areas, and alpine meadows offer excellent hiking.

Be prepared to tangle with the alder. Sitka alder is a successional plant that grows in a mass along beach and stream edges, avalanche chutes and up mountain slopes. Hikers have been known to lose their minds attempting to hike through alder.

How to experience Glacier Bay?

Glacier Bay is a remote, unspoiled place where wildlife outnumbers roads a million to one. Visitors arrive by boat or plane. They stay at Glacier Bay Lodge or camp in one of the available Alaska campgrounds. Then hike through the rainforest and along the beaches, or kayak Alaska in the calm waters of Bartlett Cove and the Beardslee Islands. But, the best way to see the park is by high-speed catamaran. This full-day Alaska boat tour of the West Arm of Glacier Bay departs each morning from the dock in front of Glacier Bay Lodge.

Although the Park is open year-round, the park’s Visitor Center (upstairs at Glacier Bay Lodge) and most services are open from roughly mid-May to mid-September. Winter services are limited. Entrance to the park is free. For more about the park, go to National Park Service.

Don’t miss an experience you’ll cherish for a lifetime – viewing the glaciers in one of America’s premier natural wilderness areas, Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve.

What is so special about Glacier Bay?

Glacier Bay collects many glaciers flowing from the tall surrounding mountains with abundant snowfall. As recently as 1750 a single glacier thousands of feet thick filled what is now a 65-mile long fjord. This glacial retreat has exposed a resilient land that hosts a succession of marine and terrestrial life.

Wild, Resilient, and Sacred. From the bottom of the deepest glacial fjord to the summit of its highest peak, Glacier Bay encompasses some of our continent’s most amazing scenery and wildness. It is a land reborn, a world returning to life, a living lesson in resilience. If ever we needed a place to intrigue and inspire us, this is it. Glacier Bay is a homeland, a living laboratory, a national park, a designated wilderness, a biosphere reserve, and a world heritage site. It’s a marine park, where great adventure awaits by boating into inlets, coves and hideaway harbors. It’s also a land park, with its snow-capped mountains, spectacular glaciers, and emerald–green forests. From the summit to sea, Glacier Bay’s wildness is remote, dynamic and intact.

A Place of Homeland. For the Huna Tlingit, Glacier Bay is a place not just of new discoveries, but of reconnection with the lifeways, knowledge, and ancestors of the past.. It is a land that sustained them with a rich abundance of fish, wildlife, and plants, but more importantly a place that continues to sustain them through stories, songs, dances, and ongoing traditional practices. Although most Huna Tlingit today live across Icy Strait in the modern village of Hoonah, Glacier Bay remains their spiritual homeland. Their ancient stories and place names speak eloquently of the history of their beloved bay.

• Tlingit elders told of an ancestral homeland covered by advancing ice. For the Tlingit, Glacier Bay is woven into the tapestry of their lives.
• Learn about the Huna Tribal House, commemorated in 2016.

Are there moose in Glacier Bay?

The largest member of the deer family is a recent newcomer to Glacier Bay. The first moose was spotted here in the late 1960s. Despite their tremendous size (bulls can weigh 1,600 pounds and cows 1,300 pounds), they can appear and disappear in thick brush with surprising stealth. Moose are usually solitary, except for cows with calves and during the fall rutting season. Cows give birth in the spring to one or two small, reddish calves. A calf will stay with its mother for two years before the cow drives it off as she prepares to have more young. Their diet includes willow leaves, grasses, herbs, and aquatic vegetation. Only bulls grow antlers.

You may find this prickly member of the community high up in a cottonwood tree nibbling tasty tender leaves. Except for their footpads and nose, porcupines are completely covered with yellowish fur and quills, which are actually modified hairs tipped with barbs. A threatened porcupine will turn its back-end toward the source of trouble to present an intimidating display of quills that firmly suggests the would-be predator reconsider its dinner plans. This large rodent (second largest in North America behind the beaver) performs a broad repertoire of grunts, whimpers, and screams. Listen for them in the evenings “talking” to no one in particular.

Mountain goats have thick white coats of hollow hairs that help to keep them warm in extreme weather. Goats may have been among the first land animals to recolonize Glacier Bay after the ice retreated, coming over the mountains from Lynn Canal to the east. They are at home on the steep rocky cliffs in the mid-to-upper bay. The special shape and design of their hooves allows them to leap nimbly from ledge to ledge in search of grasses, herbs, and low-growing shrubs. Seen at a distance, they can be mistaken for Dall sheep, which are found in interior Alaska, rather than Glacier Bay.

How close do cruise ships get to glaciers in Glacier Bay?

The biggest glacier visited by cruise ships, the Hubbard is truly impressive. With a 6-mile wide, 400-foot tall face, the blue ice will seem to envelop your boat, especially if you can get up close. On good days, you’ll get to within 1/2 mile of the face. But ice can keep cruise ships at a distance of several miles, particularly in August and September when warmer temperatures and rainfall can cause more calving. The Hubbard is in Disenchantment Bay near the outer coast town of Yakutat, and offers large vistas on clear days, including Mt. St Elias at 18,008 feet. You won’t get the experience of traveling up a fjord to reach the Hubbard, nor will you have as much wildlife as other spots—although seals haul out on icebergs. But for a huge glacier and lots of icebergs, Hubbard is hard to beat.

Glacier Bay. Pros: Multiple glaciers, wildlife and land sculpted by glaciersCons: Not as big as Hubbard, not tight fjords.

Cruise ships spend most of a day in Glacier Bay, where you’ll visit several tidewater glaciers and explore inlets carved by the ice. Most likely you’ll visit the Margerie. It’s not nearly as big as the Hubbard Glacier, but it is an advancing tidewater glacier that calves frequently. The Margerie is almost all the way up the 65-mile Bay in the “West Arm,” and you’ll probably see the Lamplugh and Johns Hopkins glaciers en route. Ships usually spend one hour in front of one of these tidewater glacier and several hours exploring the inlets. Interpretive rangers board ships and narrate the trip. They’ll point the marks of glaciers on the land even before you see glaciers— sculpted rock walls, scratched, striated cliffs and eroded hillsides. The West Arm is narrow enough that you’ll have good views of the shoreline (from the ship), the glacier-carved land and wildlife. Bears frequent the tide line, foraging for food and mountain goats congregate near Gloomy Knob.

Do you get off the cruise ship at Glacier Bay?

While you won’t disembark from your cruise ship, it is likely that you will spend much of the day on deck capturing photos and making lifelong memories. Much like the rest of Alaska, Glacier Bay National Park may reach temperatures anywhere between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit during cruise season. So, come prepared with light sweaters and windbreakers, and dress in layers. Consider the possibility of rain as well. While May and June are the driest months of the year for this region, July through September can sometimes bring showers. Make sure you’re prepared for the experiences Glacier Bay National Park offers, whether marveling at an otter floating across the mirrored waters or hearing the roar of a calving glacier.

Princess Cruises is an authorized concessioner of Glacier Bay National Park.

Is Glacier Bay worth seeing on a cruise?

If you’re planning on visiting Alaska I recommend you take a cruise that comes to Glacier Bay. I also recommend s cruise in May so you can see the snow which makes it more beautiful. We sail on Princess which has a permit to visit Glacier Bay, The captain will do a couple 360’s in the bay.

Are there polar bears in Glacier Bay?

If you want to see bears in the wild, Alaska is about the safest bet you can make. There are about 30,000 brown bears, or grizzlies, in America’s northernmost state, which is to say 98 percent of the total. And about 100,000 of the smaller black bears. Then there are polar bears, with around 5,000 thought to wander Alaska’s Arctic coastline. In Glacier Bay National Park in southeast Alaska, you’ve got glacier bears, which are a subspecies of black bears, with silvery or grey hair. And in the Kodiak Archipelago you can find the Kodiak bear, which is the biggest of the grizzlies. Bears roam vast Alaskan national parks such as Denali and Wrangell St Elias, as well as the Kenai Peninsula, and Lake Clark which, along with Kodiak Island, is among the best places in Alaska to watch the thrilling salmon spawn.

You can see bears in Alaska on a specialist photography tour led by expert naturalist guides. You can see them foraging for clams on the beach from the observation deck of a cruise ship going up Tracy Arm fjord. You can see them off in the distance while hiking the backcountry in Denali. And in Arctic communities, such as Kaktovik, you can see polar bears constantly on the outskirts, scavenging for whale meat. Alaska is bear country, but if you want to maximise your chances of seeing them, and do it safely, then join an organised tour.

The bear necessities. Lake Clark National Park and Preserve lies just southwest of Anchorage and is one of the best places in Alaska to see bears. Cornelia Kinley joined a brown bear photography holiday there in 2019. “We spent almost every available hour looking for, finding and photographing bears. Being able to be so close to them, to watch their behaviour and get such good pictures in the process was amazing. It felt safe, yet the bears were in their normal habitat, and we were not confined to a hide or platform which made the experience incredibly special.”

Is Glacier Bay National Park worth visiting?

Immerse yourself in a world of glacially-carved fjords, dynamic tidewater glaciers, and abundant wildlife in Glacier Bay.

Lofty mountain peaks, ice-sculpted fjords, an abundance of marine wildlife, and massive tidewater glaciers have made Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve one of Alaska’s most spectacular settings. The 3.3-million-acre park is a must-stop for every cruise ship sailing through theInside Passage.

THINGS TO DO in Glacier bay. More than 90 percent of the park’s visitors arrive on cruise ships, which typically spend a whole day exploring the park’s stunning scenery and abundant wildlife, stopping in front of tidewater glaciers to watch for calving. While in the park, National Park Rangers board cruise ships to give presentations and answer questions. Independent travelers access the park through the village ofGustavusand the park headquarters atBartlett Covefor a variety of adventures into the park.

In addition to glacier viewing, Glacier Bay offers a range of outdoor activities. Hiking trails crisscross the park, offering opportunities to explore the rugged terrain and stunning vistas. Wildlife watching is another popular activity; you’ll find the bay teeming with activity, from breaching humpback whales to playful sea otters and majestic bald eagles.

Can you see whales in Glacier Bay?

StartFragment Sanctuary For Whales. Glacier Bay is a Humpback Whale sanctuary. In the park’s waters, Humpback Whales benefit from some of the strongest protections found anywhere on our planet. Once in rapid decline, the number of whales spotted in Glacier Bay is growing every year. What’s more, scientists have been studying Humpback Whales in Glacier Bay for decades. Thanks to this research, we continue to learn more about the fascinating life of this magnificent, endangered animal. EndFragment.

Is there a town in Glacier Bay?

Gustavus is considered the gateway to Glacier Bay National Park and is located 48 air-miles (approximately a 30 minute flight) west of Juneau, in Southeast Alaska. Gustavus spreads across a large plain created by receding glaciers and is completely surrounded by the distant mountains and icefields of Glacier Bay National Park on three sides and the ocean on the fourth.

As the glaciers that covered the area 200 years ago have receded, the land in Gustavus has risen quickly – over an inch each year – and longtime residents have witnessed phenomenal changes. Land that once was within the tidal zone is now high and dry. Where grasses once predominated, spruce trees now tower. Early settlers called the town Strawberry Point.

Historically, the area was used by the Tlingit people for seasonal harvesting and smoking of salmon. The first successful homestead patent was issued in 1923, although settlers were present here as early as 1917. According to historical records, through “hope and hard work,” several families successfully homesteaded here. The U.S. Postal Service renamed the town in 1925, when the first Post Office was established here.