Access the National Park directly from Gustavus, a 20-minute jet flight or three-hour boat ride from Juneau. Accommodations are available at several locations within the town.

Alaskan glacier facts:

• Glaciers cover approximately 28,800 square miles, or three percent of Alaska. This is 128 times the area covered by glaciers in the rest of the United States.  
• There are an estimated 100,000 glaciers in Alaska.  
• About three-fourths of all fresh water in Alaska is stored in glacier ice.  
• The greatest concentration of tidewater glaciers is in Prince William Sound, where there are 20 active tidewater glaciers. Icebergs in Prince William Sound are expected to increase fourfold in the next 20 years as the Columbia Glacier retreats.
• The largest Alaskan glacier is the Malaspina, which is 850 square miles.

FAIR-WEATHER RANGE
     The snowcapped Fair-weather Range supplies ice to all glaciers on the peninsula separating Glacier Bay form the Gulf of Alaska. Mount Fair-weather, the range's highest peak, stand at 15, 320 feet. In Johns Hopkins Inlet, several peaks rise from sea level to 6,520 feet within just 4 miles of shore. The great glaciers of the past carved these fjords, or drowned valleys, out of the mountains like great troughs. Landslides help widen the troughs as the glaciers remove the bedrock support on upper slopes.

ICEBERGS
      Huge icebergs may last a week or more. Close by, kayakers have heard the stress and strain of melting: water drips, air bubbles pop, and cracks develop. Colors betray a berg's nature or origin. White bergs hold many trapped air bubbles. Blue bergs are dense. Greenish-black bergs calved off of glacier bottoms. Dark- striped brown bergs carry morainal rubble from the joining of tributory glaciers, or other sources.

      How high bergs- favored perches for bald eagles, cormorants, and gulls- float depends on size, ice density, and the water's density. Bergs may be weighed down, submerged even, by rock and rubble. A modest- looking berg may suddenly loom enormous, and endanger small craft, when it rolls over. Keep in mind that what you see is "just the tip of the iceberg."

NEW WILDERNESS
      The world of science came to Glacier Bay to observe the great glaciers and found here the ideal natural laboratory for the study of the infant theory of plant succession. How do plants recover a raw landscape? What happens where nature wipes the slate clean and starts over from scratch? The glacier and plant studies go hand in hand. The rapid vegetation change following the glaciers' speedy retreat has enabled us to map and photograph the course of plant succession.
     
     When naturalist John Muir came to Glacier Bay in 1879 he was seeking corroboration of the continental glaciation theories of Louis Agassiz, whose controversial Etudes sur les Glaciers was published in 1840.

       Here, in the aftermath of retreating glaciers, Muir found original nature, a landscape like a thought not yet formed. It was like seeing an owl with no feathers. AT GLACIER BAY YOU WATCH A VEGETATIVE WILDERNESS BEING CREATED- and also see its culmination in coastal forest.

GLACIAL FORMATION
    Glaciers form because the snowfall in the high mountains exceeds snow-melt. The snowflakes first change to granular snow- round ice grains- but the accumulating weight soon presses it into solid ice. Eventually, gravity sets the ice mass flowing down slope, usually far less than 4 to 7 feet per day. The point at which the rate of melt equals the rate of accumulation is the glacier's terminus or snout.

      If the glacier's snout reaches tidal waters, we call it a tidewater glacier. Today's advance or retreat of a glacier snout reflects many factors: snowfall rate, topography, and climate trends. Glacial retreat continues today on the bay's east and southwest sides, but on its west side several glaciers are advancing.