Whittier exists because of a tunnel. The Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel, cut 4,050 metres through Maynard Mountain, remains the longest combined rail-and-highway tunnel in North America, and for decades it was the only land route into town. Traffic still alternates direction on a fixed schedule.
The port it serves sits at the head of Passage Canal, a fjord arm of Prince William Sound, where the Chugach ice field pushes seaward through more than two dozen valleys.
The US Army built the settlement during the Second World War as a secret deep-water terminus, ice-free year-round and hidden beneath persistent cloud. Two concrete towers survive from that period. Begich Towers, completed in 1957, still houses most of the town's roughly 270 residents under a single roof, alongside the post office and the clinic. The Buckner Building, once the largest structure in Alaska, stands empty. The 1964 Good Friday earthquake, magnitude 9.2, generated waves that swept the waterfront and destroyed the original rail yard. The harbour was rebuilt on the same shelf of glacial outwash.
What draws visitors now is the ice itself. Vessels running the best whittier glacier cruise routes cross Passage Canal within twenty minutes of leaving the dock at 100 West Camp Road, entering water more than 200 metres deep. Blackstone Bay holds Blackstone and Beloit, two active tidewater glaciers calving directly into salt water. Farther west lie Barry Arm and College Fjord, where nineteenth-century surveyors from the 1899 Harriman Expedition named the glaciers after East Coast colleges in order of appearance. Harvard Glacier, the largest, presents a face roughly 2.4 kilometres wide.
The sound is a working ecosystem as much as a scenic one. Kittiwake colonies nest on the cliff faces above the ice; Steller sea lions haul out on Glacier Island; humpbacks and orcas transit the deeper channels between June and September. Sea otter populations, devastated by the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, have recovered across much of the western sound.
Access costs nothing: entry to the harbour and waterfront is free, at 0 USD, with cruise fares and the tunnel toll charged separately. The waterfront itself operates 07:00–18:00 daily. Comparing Whittier glacier boat tours means comparing geography more than amenity — Blackstone versus College Fjord, small-group decks versus large catamarans. Travellers weighing a best whittier glacier cruise tour are, in practice, choosing which arm of the Chugach they want to see calve.
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