Over two hundred years ago, Captain George Vancouver sailed down the Pacific Coast and turned east searching for the Northwest Passage. While Vancouver remained behind ill in his cabin, First Officer Joseph Whidbey lowered a boat and set out to survey the area. Pushing through the masses of floating ice, they made their way into a large open bay, blocked at its northern end by a great wall of ice. This was the first description we have of Glacier Bay. By the late 1800's, things had changed dramatically. The massive glacier that filled what we know today as Glacier Bay had retreated 50 miles, opening up a brand new waterway. Few visitors other than Tlingit people, who hunted seal from temporary camps along the shore, had seen this new world.

The first to bring it to the attention of the outside world as a man well known for his adventuresome spirit. In 1879 John Muir rode a steamer up from Seattle to the little town of Wrangell, where he hired a canoe and four native paddlers to take him north. From a vast wilderness of ice nearly a mile thick, the bay has now emerged, and is now 65 miles long and is filled with fjords and inlets, encompassing the Park's 3.3 million acres.