Kenai Fjords National Park website

You might want to consider bringing some Dramamine as people can experience sea sickness or nausea while on a fjords tour!  

Note: I am including pictures of all three times I have visited the national park.

Kenai Fjords National Park is a place where you can see ocean, glaciers and mountains all mixed together.  I have visited Kenai Fjords National Park three times now and find it more and more fascinating every visit.  Since Kenai Fjords National Park is mostly near the ocean and highlights, you guessed it, all of the fjords, you are going to need access to a boat!  Or if you simply want to visit Exit Glacier then you can drive up to it (I’ll post about Exit Glacier in a different Trek).

I’m not going to post the name of the boat guiding service that we used for our trips into the national park but we used the most popular guiding company.  We simply called their business number and made reservations for the next day.  You may want to call or book online in advance as many of these tours fill up quickly!

Our first trip into the national park we were taken to Aialik Glacier via a boat with the capacity to hold about 100+ people.  The boats are large, comfortable and very enjoyable with seating for every person – they also provide life vests too.  They had large windows and one of the crew gave narration the entire way.  Please keep in mind that these cruises can be 4-6+ hours long and you will be travelling 100+ miles round trip.

Our tour departed at 8am and we quickly began our journey with a safety speech and other important information regarding our visit into the park.  You can see the Seward Harbor in the picture below.

We very slowly made our way through Resurrection Bay and we were given the history of Seward and how important the bay is for fishing, cruising and other industries.

Resurrection Bay is incredible!  We could still see large glaciers at the tops of the mountains.

Many of the places inside the bay featured steep cliffs that quickly climbed thousands of feet.  It would be neat to go ashore some of these places and explore around.  But at least for our trip we were simply scenic cruising.

The open ocean in the distance.

On this particular day, it had been pouring rain the night before so we could still see the rivers and creeks flowing down into the ocean.

We made a quick stop at Fox Island to pick up a few guests.  Fox Island is still close to Seward and the seas were still very calm to this point.  

The journey is a long one and it took a few hours before we got to the glacier.  So just relax and enjoy the ride!

Sea lions

Puffins and many other types of birds were along the shores of some of the islands we went by.  Puffins are very interesting and fun to watch because they are very playful and they can dive and actually swim under the water for short distances to catch fish.

Here are some very cool rock formations!  I don’t remember where this is located but we had the chance to come very close to this rock archway.

More of the waterfalls and water slides from the recent rains.

On this particular visit into the national park, the ocean was pretty rough for about 15 minutes.  The captain sped up to try and make the journey more enjoyable but I started to get a little sea sick so I went to the stern of the boat where it was much smoother of a ride.
Our journey went into the Aialik Bay and we saw the Holgate Glacier.

This glacier was massive! It was several hundred feet high and every now and then you could hear a loud crack and a piece of the glacier would calve into the ocean.

I think this glacier was called Surprise Glacier.

On our way back to Seward we saw a few whales breaching the surface.

More sea lions doing what they do best.

There were islands with tall mountains all over the place.

Several times along the way to the glaciers and coming back to Seward, several porpoise were swimming in our boat’s wake.

On a different trip, we visited the Aialik Glacier which is also located in Aialik Bay.  I think I liked this glacier better because it was larger and it was calving almost every few minutes.  The boat we were on spent about 20 minutes watching the glacier and enjoying the nearby scenery. One of the crew even picked up a big piece of glacier ice and brought it on board for people to touch and feel.

Aialik Glacier calving.

Notice all the seaguls swarming around the fallen ice.

Aialik Glacier from a distance.

Humpback whales making an appearance.  They surfaced a few times then disappeared.

On our way back to Seward we stopped at this very cool rock spire area.  There were several rock spires that looked amazing with the fog and mist.