This was our only day dedicated to Seward, it is a long but enjoyable 3hr drive. The train journey is even more scenic and goes through areas of Chugach NP that are inaccessible by road. Tourism and fisheries primarily drive this town. Notable things to do are the cruises, sealife center and glacier hikes.
Kenai Fjords NP Cruise
The 6hr wildlife & glacier cruise provides ample opportunities to view wildlife and glaciers. It will get chilly once the vessel is in cruising, thus dress in layers and have a rainjacket handy. The included "lunch" was a joke for vegetarians (we got salad instead of the hummus roll since they ran out of it!). But apart from that the cruise was nice and the crew were wonderful.
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Glacier.. in perspective (see the small tiny ship?)
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I was hoping we would visit the Aialik bay & glacier, but enroute we were told that the cruise was visiting the Holgate Glacier and not Aialik (bummer!). As we went through Resurrection bay, we enjoyed the spectacular scenery and saw lot of wildlife - whales, orcas, stellar sea lions, harbor seals sea otters etc and got glimpses of Bear Glacier. The major stop was the Holgate glacier - it was enormous.
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| Wildlife |
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| Glacier wall |
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One of the crew members picked up an calved glacier ice floating in the bay. Glacier ice doesn't melt as fast as regular icebox ice - something to do with the bigger size of ice crystals and absence of air bubbles in glacier ice.
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| Glacier ice |
Exit Glacier
- Access: Harding Icefield / Exit Glacier. The park is a short distance from the town of Seward, about 120 miles south of Anchorage. There are three final destinations from the visitor center - the toe of the glacier (moraine maybe inaccessible), the edge of the glacier wall and the icefield. Although we wanted to do the icefield hike, we settled for the "edge" due to the fear of hiking without bear sprays at 7pm and the one of the return dudes said that he was the last person from the last trek of the day to the icefield. (bummer!)
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| From the vista point |
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| From the hike end point |
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| Another angle |
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