What Is It?
Mountains, ice and the ocean all come together in Kenai Fjords National Park in Southern Alaska. Just southwest of Seward, Alaska, and above the Gulf of Alaska, the fjords are home to behemoth fields of ice.
Nice Ice
The 23,000-year-old Harding Icefields and its outflowing glaciers are more than 700 square miles large. The ice is thousands of feet thick, but that isn’t always enough to cover the mountains underneath. The exposed mountaintops are called nunatak, or lonely peaks.
Drive a Fjord
The fjords are not the most accessible national park, given the giant glaciers that cover it. Many drive up the east side to see Exit Glacier—the only part of the park accessible by road—and see how glaciers reshape the landscape. Open year-round, Exit Glacier is home to a few trails of varying difficulty.
Take a Boat
Much of the park is only accessible by boat. Boat tours, available in the summer, offer the ability to see tidewater glaciers—the glaciers that reach the sea. When these glaciers calve ice into the sea, the ice serves as floats for local harbor seals. The waters around the park are also home to otters, porpoises, whales and more.
More Information
Kenai Fjords National Park has no entrance fee. To plan your trip, call 907-422-0500 or visit www.nps.gov/kefj.