Seniors Visit Glacier Bay

Glacier Bay is called Alaska’s Greatest Treasure and awaits senior citizens’ visits. 1000 years in the making, Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve – a World Heritage Site in the United States – is a 3.3 million acre treasure of natural wonders and wildlife near Juneau, Alaska: magnificent glaciers, towering snow-capped mountains, abundant birds and wildlife and mile after mile of pristine coastline.

There are an estimated 100,000 glaciers in the state, covering three percent of the landscape, creating most of its rivers and home to 16 active tidewater glaciers. Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve is located in the southernmost spur of the towering St. Elias Mountain Range, the site of the largest permanent snow fields in the world outside of the polar ice caps.

Commonly-sighted wildlife include whales, black bears, mountain goats, Steller sea lions, tufted puffins and hundreds of bald eagles. Glacier Bay National Park is a terrestrial and marine sanctuary. This huge World Heritage Site is one of the world’s largest international protected areas.

If you’ve ever dreamed of the ice age and wondered how our planet might have looked as it emerged from the grip of massive glaciers, pondered how a river of ice could carve mountains into flour, or wanted to watch the birth of an iceberg, then Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve is the place for you.

Glacier-Crowned Maritime Wilderness Intices Seniors

Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve commands a glacier-crowned, maritime wilderness that stretches northward from Alaska’s inside passage to the Alsek River, encircling a magnificent saltwater bay.

The Park derives its name and much of its biological and cultural significance from this great bay, which harbors spectacular tidewater glaciers and a unique assemblage of marine and terrestrial life.

The Bay proper opens to the north off Icy Strait and branches for over 60 miles through increasingly deforested mountains to terminate in bare rock and glacial ice. The heart of the present Park, Glacier Bay was hidden under a vast ice sheet when the earliest Europeans paused briefly to chart the adjacent waters in the late 18th century.

Glacier Bay is the most active glacial calving area in coastal Alaska, and senior visitors are almost guaranteed to be in for a great show on your visit.

In case you aren’t familiar with the term, calving is the process by which huge chunks of ice break off from the face of glaciers, plunging into the waters below, and no place in Alaska has better spots to view active calving than does Glacier Bay.

While the park has no roads, it is not difficult to get to and over 430,000 people visit it each year. The Park is open all year, but services during the winter are extremely limited. July and August are the most popular months for a visit as the whales have arrived, are breaching, playing and feeding and the flowers are in full bloom.

Enjoy your adventure. jeb