Did You Know? In 1899, an earthquake measuring 8.4 on the Richter Scale so shook the glaciers in Glacier Bay, the budding tourism industry nearly died. There was so much ice in the water from the shattered glaciers, visitors to Glacier Bay did not return to for over ten years. Today, sailing through Glacier Bay, you travel along shorelines and among islands that were completely covered by ice just over 200 years ago. When Captain George Vancouver charted adjacent waters of Icy Strait in 1794, he and his crew described what we now call Glacier Bay as just a small five-mile indent in a gigantic glacier that stretched off to the horizon. That massive glacier was more than 4,000 feet thick in places, up to 20 miles wide, and extended more than 100 miles to the St. Elias mountain range. By 1879, however, naturalist John Muir discovered that the ice had retreated more than 30 miles forming an actual bay. By 1916, the Grand Pacific Glacier – the main glacier credited with carving the bay – had melted back 60 miles to the head of what is now Tarr Inlet.
The land near the mouth of the bay, long-ago released from the grip of glaciers, has had the most time to recover and is now blanketed by mature spruce and hemlock forests. As you travel toward the glaciers the vegetation gets younger and smaller, until you reach the face of the ice where nothing grows at all.