Prince William Sound carries more tidewater glaciers than any other body of water on earth. A single afternoon's sailing reaches twenty-six of them. That arithmetic is the entire premise of the Whittier 26 Glacier Cruise, a 5.
25-hour circuit through fjords that were still buried under ice when Captain James Cook charted this coast in 1778.
Whittier itself was an accident of war. The U.S. Army built the port in 1943, choosing the site for its deep, ice-free water and the low cloud that hid it from aerial reconnaissance. Freight moved inland by rail through tunnels blasted under Maynard Mountain. The town that remained is unusually compact: most residents live in Begich Towers, a fourteen-storey former army barracks. For half a century the only land route was the railway. The Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel opened to vehicles in June 2000 — 4.1 kilometres of single-lane roadbed shared with the Alaska Railroad, still alternating direction on a published schedule.
The water beyond the breakwater belongs to Chugach National Forest, the northernmost coastal temperate rainforest in North America. Phillips Cruises & Tours has sailed day boats from this harbour since 1959. Its catamaran, the Klondike Express, measures 137 feet and ranks among the fastest passenger vessels in Alaska. That speed is what makes a Whittier 26 Glacier Cruise tour geometrically possible: hours are spent inside Blackstone Bay, Barry Arm and Harriman Fjord rather than in transit between them. Surprise Glacier calves on a near-constant schedule. Rock flour turns the meltwater an opaque turquoise. Kittiwake rookeries stack the cliff faces by the thousand.
The Sound also keeps a longer record. The 1964 Good Friday earthquake, the second-largest ever measured, lifted and dropped sections of this shoreline by several metres; drowned forests still stand in the shallows. The Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in March 1989, and the recovery of its otter and herring populations remains under study. Glacier retreat is legible here at a human scale: Barry Arm was blocked by ice within living memory, and its walls now carry a fresh, unvegetated trimline. Alaska glacier cruises elsewhere show ice from a distance. Whittier 26 Glacier Cruise tours travel far enough inside the fjords to read the whole sequence — advance, retreat, and the bare grey rock left between.
11 hr
