History of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve

The Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska have lived in the Glacier Bay region for hundreds of years. Glacier Bay's status as a national park began in 1874 when surveyor-scientist William Healy Dall led a Coast Survey party on the schooner Yukon long the outer coast. In the expedition report he describes the Glacier Bay region: "The scenery is grand; the mountains reaching 16,000 feet above the sea, are embedded in forest lowlands, and are scored by enormous glaciers. He later compared Lituya Bay to a Yosemite that retained its glaciers.

In 1879, John Muir, with Tlingit guides and missionary S. Hal Young, reached the rumored bay of great glaciers by canoe and commenced the first of four expeditions over four decades. Muir's scientific and descriptive writings brought Glacier Bay to the attention of the American public. The combination of mountains, ice, and sea produce "a picture of icy wilderness unspeakably pure and sublime."

In 1883 the first tourist steamship entered Glacier Bay and began an active schedule of visits until 1899. Among the passengers were Elizah Scidmare who began a tradition of published travel journals and descriptions of "The Wondrous Scene" that further stimulated the national interest in Glacier Bay.

In 1899, the Harriman Alaska Expedition, sponsored and paid for by the railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman, traveled to Glacier Bay. The party comprised America's scientific, artistic, and literary elite. In the field of science, Muir, Dall, Burroughs, Gilbert, Gannett, and Merriam led the expedition. The 14-volume Harriman Expedition report, which was widely distributed to libraries and scholars, described, charted, and pictured the ice rivers of Glacier Bay, along with other coastal zones and the Native peoples who lived there.

In 1916 and again in 19221, William S. Cooper, an ecologist from the University of Minnesota, made expeditions into Glacier Bay, which had been explored and made famous by John Muir several decades earlier. Cooper began a series of classic studies of plant succession in the field laboratory provided by rapid ice recession in Glacier Bay. Cooper's work began the collaboration between glaciologists, geologists, botanists, and other biologists that brought major scientists and collaborative scientific studies to Glacier Bay. These studies continue to the present day and are documented in the Bibliography of Research and Exploration in the Glacier Bay Region, 1798-1992 (published as USGS-Open File Report 92-596).

Cooper was greatly impressed with the area, and reported it at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in 1922, where interest was expressed in establishing Glacier Bay as a national park or monument. A committee, headed by Dr. Cooper, was set up to make recommendations concerning Glacier Bay, and at the Society's 1923 meeting the committee's recommendations were adopted. A resolution was sent to President Calvin Coolidge, urging him to establish Glacier Bay as a nation monument. On April 1, 1924, Coolidge ordered the "temporary withdrawal [of Glacier Bay], pending determination as to the advisability of including same in a monument." The area under consideration extended from Mount Fairweather to Lynn Canal, and included Strawberry Point, which is now Gustavus.

George Parks, who later became governor of the Territory, carried out an examination of the area for the Federal Government. Parks received letters of protest from the settlers at Strawberry Point. On February 26, 1925, Coolidge established Glacier Bay National Monument, with an area of 1,820 square miles, about half that of the temporary withdrawal. Strawberry Point was not included. (The monuments southern boundary on the east side of Glacier Bay ran approximately through Beartrack Cove, about fifteen miles north of Strawberry Point).

In 1939, Franklin Roosevelt enlarged Glacier Bay National Monument, adding more than 2,000 square miles, including Strawberry Point. The enlargement, according to a letter to President Roosevelt from his secretaries of Interior and Agriculture, was "designed to round out the area geographically and biologically, as well as from the standpoint of administration." The expansion of the Monument by 905,000 acres to the Outer Coast and Icy Strait was done largely to protect brown bears and their habitat. Protection was spurred in part by the Alaska Game Commission interpretation and loosening of Alaska brown bear hunting seasons. The expansion was supported by a broad coalition of conservation organizations, scientists, nature writers and animal humane societies. This movement coincides with a basic change in National Park Service wildlife policies, from predator control to conservation of predators as critical components of natural systems, and the adoption of an ecosystem approach to park boundaries and habitat preservation.

During the 1940s, Alaska's territorial delegate to Congress, E.L. Bartlett, and Governor Ernest Gruening, argued to no avail in Washington for the exclusion of Strawberry Point from Glacier Bay National Monument. Not until 1954, when Charlie Parker, part time resident of Strawberry Point, challenged the National Park Service and began his one-man-letter-writing campaign to Alaska editors protesting inclusion of Strawberry Point in Glacier Bay National Monument. Despite the inaccuracies and exaggerations of Parker's writings, they had the desired effect, and on March 31, 1955 Dwight D. Eisenhower excluded Gustavus and certain other lands from the Monument. The Gustavus exclusion comprised approximately 14,741 acres.

From 1971 through 1980, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 launched the "d-2" era leading to the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 (ANILCA). This period was dominated by the struggle between development interests and conservation/preservation interests. By the terms of ANILCA, Glacier Bay Monument was redesignated a National Park and Preserve and included all land and waters of the existing Monument plus additional land areas in the Dry Bay Preserve. The national park land base was designated "instant" wilderness, along with selected waters.

In 1986, Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve and Admiralty Island National Monument were jointly designated an International Biosphere Reserve as part of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) International Man and Biosphere program. The main objective of the program are to develop the basis within the natural and social sciences for he rational use and conservation of the biosphere and to improve the relationships between people and the biosphere. In part to meet these objectives, the International Network of Biosphere Reserves was established to: (1) conserve genetic diversity by maintaining the structure and functioning of ecosystems, (2) conduct research and monitoring sufficient to understand long-term change in ecosystems and evaluate possible human-caused impacts, and (3) provide for the education and information needs related to these topics. This designation made Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve and Admiralty Island National Monument part of a world-wide network of representative and protected research ecosystems.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization also adopted the World Heritage Convention in 1972, for the purpose of establishing World heritage Sites. Each member country pledges to "conserve for future generations the sites and monuments within its borders that are recognized to be of exceptional universal value." In return, the international community helps to protect these treasures. For natural sites to be included, they must have: (1) outstanding examples of natural processes, (2) containing examples of ongoing natural process, (3) contain superlative natural phenomena, and (4) contain habitats critical to threatened species.

With the support from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, in 1994 Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve was voted a World Heritage Site as an extension of the already existing Kluane-Saint Elias National Park site. Together, these parks form one the world's most outstanding protected natural treasures. Partially in response to the World Heritage designation, British Columbia designated the area between Glacier Bay and Kluane a wilderness provincial park, thereby halting a potentially destructive mine proposal, and essentially completing the world's largest protected area--close to 25 million acres.

For more information on the history of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, see:

Ted Catton, Land Reborn, A History of Administration and Visitor Use in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, National Park Service, 1995.

Dave Bohn, Glacier Bay, the Land and the Silence, 1967.