Icy Bay USACruise Port Guide

Icy Bay is one of Alaska's most extraordinary geographical stories — a place that simply did not exist as open water a century ago. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the entire bay was filled from wall to wall by a single massive tidewater glacier. Between 1900 and the present, the Guyot, Yahtse, Tsaa, and Tyndall glaciers have retreated so dramatically and so rapidly that they have collectively opened up more than 35 miles of navigable water where a ship could not have sailed in 1900. The bay is, in a very real sense, still being born — the land recently freed from ice is rebounding (a geological process called isostatic rebound), young vegetation is colonizing the exposed rock and gravel, and the ecology of the bay is in a state of active establishment that gives it an aliveness quite different from landscapes that have been stable for millennia.

Icy Bay lies within the coastal fringe of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, the largest national park in the United States at 13.2 million acres. The backdrop is dominated by Mount St. Elias, rising 18,008 feet directly from near sea level in one of the most dramatic mountain-to-ocean profiles anywhere on earth, and by the towering peaks of the Chugach and St. Elias ranges. The blue-green water, studded with floating ice in shades from white to deep sapphire, surrounded by glaciers on three sides and mountains that fill the horizon, creates a visual environment of jaw-dropping intensity.

For cruise passengers, Icy Bay is an extraordinarily remote and rarely visited destination, typically found only on Gulf of Alaska itineraries run by expedition and small-ship operators. Larger cruise ships occasionally make scenic transits. A shallow sandbar at the bay's entrance complicates access for deeper-draft vessels, making this one of the last genuinely pristine, rarely-seen places on the Alaska cruise circuit.