Muir Glacier

I might end up at Alaska’s Muir Glacier in 1890 with Mrs. Septima M. Collis, who had this to say upon viewing the massive expanse of ice for the first time from aboard a ship of tourists: “I pray heaven that neither age nor infirmity may ever efface from my memory the sight and the sensation of that moment.”

The Muir Glacier has now retreated more than 30 miles from the sea up into the mountains.

In Glacier Bay national park, the Muir Glacier melted 640 meters between 1948 and 2000.

Within a few years, West Coast steamships were hawking Alaska sightseeing trips to the “frozen Niagara” of the Muir Glacier, a spectacular river of ice — today located in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve — discharging massive bergs from its 300-foot-high face.

We motored slowly past a chunk of rock swarming with bald eagles on top and sea lions below, and approached the spot that, in the 1890s, had marked the terminus of Muir Glacier.