Kenai Fjords: The Glacier That Is Walking Away From You

The painted posts start at the parking lot. Each one is dated and placed exactly where the front edge of Exit Glacier stood in that year. The posts for the nineteen nineties are right where you parked your car. The posts for the nineteen fifties are a long walk up the valley. The glacier has retreated more than a mile since the nineteen fifties. The rate of retreat is accelerating. What the markers record is not a dramatic event. It is a direction.

Exit Glacier is one of more than forty outlet glaciers that drain from the Harding Icefield, a high plateau of ice sitting at roughly five thousand feet on the Kenai Peninsula, covering nearly seven hundred square miles. This is the part of Kenai Fjords National Park that a road reaches, accessible from Seward on the Seward Highway. The rest of the park, the fjords themselves, carved by glaciers that have since retreated, is accessible only by boat or small plane, with the Harding Icefield above and the Gulf of Alaska below.

The Sugpiaq people, also known as Alutiiq, have inhabited the Kenai Peninsula coastline for several thousand years. The fjords they knew were among the most productive marine environments in Alaska: sea otters, Steller sea lions, orca, humpback whales, enormous seabird colonies. The Sugpiaq built their economy on this abundance in baidarka kayaks, sleek ocean-going boats whose design was refined enough that Russian colonizers later adopted it. Their relationship to this coast predates the European concept of a national park by several thousand years.

The nineteen sixty-four Good Friday earthquake, centered in Prince William Sound, dropped portions of the Kenai coastline six feet into the sea. Tidal marshes became intertidal flats. Coastal forests drowned in salt water as the land subsided beneath them. The dead trees are still visible in some places along the shore, standing bleached and barkless in the water that killed them, an entire forest frozen in the moment the ground fell.

Exit Glacier is the one piece of this park you can reach without booking a boat. The trail leads to what was once a sheet of ice and is now a receding wall. The dated posts mark where it stood. The direction is unmistakable.