Kenai Fjords national park glacier cruise: which boat reaches which ice

Most national parks have a road through them. Kenai Fjords has one short spur, to Exit Glacier, and that is all. Everything else — every tidewater face, every seabird colony, every sea lion rookery — sits on a coastline that the road network never reached, because the mountains go straight into the sea.

What sits behind that coastline is the Harding Icefield: roughly seven hundred square miles of ice up on the plateau, deep enough to bury whole mountain ranges with only their summits showing through. Some forty glaciers flow off it. The ones that make it all the way down to salt water are called tidewater glaciers, and they are the reason the boats exist.

A tidewater face is not a glacier you look at across a valley. It is a wall of ice standing two to four hundred feet out of the water, with the fjord in front of it full of floating brash and bergy bits, and harbour seals hauled out on the larger pieces. The boat noses in as far as the ice allows, stops, and shuts the engines down. What happens next is silence, and then, without warning, a noise like a rifle shot from somewhere inside the wall.

That is the product. Everything on this page is a variation on how long you get to sit there and which face you sit in front of.

Holgate Glacier. The closest of the three to Seward and the one the six-hour boats most often reach. It sits at the head of Holgate Arm with steep walls on both sides, which means the boat can get relatively close and the sound carries. A good first glacier.

Aialik Glacier. Wider and more active than Holgate, in a bay open enough that the boat can stand well off and still have the whole face filling the view. Most of the longer six-hour sailings and the seven-hour captain’s-choice trip aim here when conditions allow.

Northwestern Glacier. The furthest, and the reason the eight-hour trip exists. Northwestern Fjord is a long, narrow inlet with several glaciers visible at once from the same spot, and it takes most of a day to reach and return. If you want the longest time in front of ice that any day boat offers, this is it.

And one that no boat reaches: Bear Glacier, whose terminus ends in a lagoon full of icebergs behind a moraine. It is the most photographed ice on the peninsula and the only way to see it properly on a day trip is from a small aircraft — which is why a thirty-minute flight on this page costs more than a six-hour boat.

A word of honesty about naming. Operators do not always commit in advance to which face they will reach, because ice conditions, swell and wind all decide it on the morning. The captain’s-choice sailing simply makes that explicit rather than pretending otherwise, and on an uncertain forecast it is often the better booking.

Check in an hour before departure at the desk on Fourth Avenue, a short walk from the small boat harbour. An hour sounds excessive and is not: in July the queue is real, and boarding is by group.

The first hour is Resurrection Bay, and it is the sheltered part. Sea lions on the rocks off Caines Head, bald eagles on the channel markers, and mountains on both sides going straight up out of the water. Nobody is looking very hard yet.

Then the boat rounds the headland and the Gulf of Alaska starts. This is where the motion changes from a gentle roll to ocean swell, and where anyone who was going to regret skipping the tablet begins to regret it. Puffins flush off the water ahead of the bow in small panicked groups.

Between the ninety-minute mark and the turn into the glacier arm is the whale water. The crew watch for blows and for birds working the surface, and the boat will divert for a humpback without asking anybody. Orca sightings change the plan entirely.

Then the ice. The boat slows, the water fills with floating pieces, the air temperature drops noticeably, and the engines stop. Most operators stay somewhere between twenty and forty minutes at the face, which is longer than it sounds when you are watching a wall for movement.

The run home is lunch on the boats that include it, and a long stretch of fjord wall on one side. Back at the same dock six hours after you left. The Alaska SeaLife Center is five minutes’ walk if you have anything left.