Park Number: 56/63

First Visited: July 5, 2019

For the last seven million years Glacier Bay had been buried under continental-sized ice sheets and then, after the Little Ice Age and glaciers retreating, the area started looking more like its current self, which John Muir had nothing to do with. He also had nothing to do with the Huna Tlingit people who lived here for hundreds of years (if not thousands), prospering from the bounty of the land, harvesting salmon and gull eggs, before Brits like Captain George Vancouver and Lieutenant Joseph Whidbey painstakingly navigated longboats into the bay in 1794 (Anglo imperialism the heaviest cargo brought with them). So when Muir got here in 1879, traveling the bay by canoe and noting glaciers that were receding as much as a mile per year, the place had long been invented and discovered, but what he did do was write about it and capture the public’s imagination (much in the ways he’d done with Yosemite and Mount Rainier and Petrified Forest). If anything, he was the first notable national publicist for the parks—just imagine the blog he’d manage today! His Alaska writing, though, inspired others to visit and defend the region, leading to Glacier Bay becoming a national monument in 1925 and then a national park in 1980.

Glacier Bay is ancestral lands to the Huna Tlingit Tribe.

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