Valdez Glacier Tours

Valdez is a small town with a small fleet, and almost everyone arrives having heard of exactly one glacier. That is understandable — Columbia is the famous one — but it means most visitors book without knowing that the harbour offers a genuine choice, and that the less famous option is the one that delivers the photograph they came for.

The retreating one

Columbia Glacier is 32 miles of ice flowing out of the Chugach Mountains, and it has been coming apart since the early 1980s. It has pulled back more than 12 miles and lost over half its thickness and volume — a rate that has made it one of the most closely studied glaciers on Earth.

The consequence for visitors is specific. The retreat left a submerged terminal moraine across the mouth of Columbia Bay, and that ridge now traps the icebergs the glacier keeps calving. The bay is corked with its own ice, and boats work into that field as far as the day’s conditions allow rather than sailing up to a face. It is a remarkable thing to be in the middle of. It is not a wall of ice.

The advancing one

Forty miles north, at the head of Unakwik Inlet, Meares Glacier has been doing the opposite since it was first observed in 1905. Between 1996 and 2002 it advanced by roughly 15 metres a year, which makes it one of only a handful of advancing tidewater glaciers left in North America.

No moraine dams the inlet, so there is no berg field in the way. The 7.5-hour cruise runs north, holds station in front of the face with the engines cut, and waits. Calving is never guaranteed, but the odds here are good and the silence while you wait is most of the point. It is the trip Stan Stephens’ own crews steer people toward when Columbia Bay is too heavy with ice to be worth the run — advice worth taking, and a useful thing to know before you have already booked.

The third option, which is neither

The Columbia Glacier sea kayak day does not compete with either cruise so much as sit underneath them. Nine hours, a boat transfer out to the ice, and then the berg field at sea level with a paddle in your hands. It costs more than twice the cruise, demands a full day and ordinary fitness, and is the trip people describe years afterwards.

Valdez also runs shorter paddles that make no glacier claim at all — the three-hour Duck Flats tour for bald eagles and harbour seals on sheltered water, and the Gold Creek coastal day with a beach picnic and a rainforest walk. Both are good half-days and neither is a substitute for the ice.

How to plan a Valdez day

Book the glacier trip for your first full day, not your last. Weather cancels kayak departures and, occasionally, reshapes a cruise, and a spare day is the only real insurance. The season is short — roughly mid-May to mid-September — and the kayak groups cap at eight, so July and August dates go weeks ahead.

Getting here is its own decision: about 300 miles and five to six hours by road from Anchorage, 45 minutes by air, or a ferry across the Sound. The getting-to-Valdez guide covers all three, and the which-tour guide settles the booking.