When English explorer Captain George Vancouver sailed through southeast Alaska about 200 years ago, he charted only a small recess in the shoreline in the place where Glacier Bay is today. The solid mountains of ice that he described as rising perpendicularly from the water's edge have retreated 65 miles and opened a vast bay to the sea. What was bare rock at the edge of the ice in Vancouver's time is now a lush rainforest of huge Sitka spruce. Up the bay, where the ice has recently departed, low plants are beginning to take hold. At the end of the bay, tidewater glaciers still present solid mountains of ice.

Glacier Bay National Park is a domain of snow-capped mountain ranges towering to over 15,000 feet, coastal beaches with protected coves, deep fjords, tidewater glaciers, coastal and estuarine waters, and freshwater lakes. These diverse land and seascapes host a mosaic of plant communities ranging from pioneer species, in areas recently exposed by receding glaciers, to climax communities in older coastal and alpine ecosystems.

These habitats support a great variety of life including seabirds, marine mammals, and terrestrial wildlife in habitats that provide ideal conditions for wildlife viewing.

• Admiralty Island Province - x
• Glacier Bay Province - x
• Icy Strait-Cross Sound Province - x
• Outer Coast Province - x

• Kayak around the bay and its fjords to view birds and wildlife.
• Raft down the Alsek River and its major tributary, the Tatshenshini River, two swift glacial rivers that run through a portion of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve.
• Mountaineer in the coastal mountains and climb to the summit of 15,320' Mount Fairweather.