Whittier exists because a mountain stood in the way. In 1943 the U.S. Army needed an ice-free port close to Anchorage but shielded from potential Japanese attack, so engineers bored a rail tunnel through Maynard Mountain and built a deepwater terminal on Passage Canal.
The town that grew around it—never more than 220 residents today—became the unlikely threshold to Prince William Sound, a 15,000-square-mile labyrinth of fjords, islands, and active tidewater glaciers that rivals any coastal wilderness on Earth.
Boat tours from Whittier Alaska depart from a single concrete wharf on Prince William Sound Drive, where the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel disgorges visitors who have driven through the longest combined vehicle-rail tunnel in North America. The 2.5-mile bore opens on alternating schedules, so arrival and departure windows dictate the rhythm of every shore-based business. Most glacier cruises leave between 8:00 and noon, returning by late afternoon to meet the tunnel's outbound slots. The 26 Glacier Cruise, the signature full-day route, threads through College Fjord and Blackstone Bay, tallying named glaciers that spill from the Chugach and Kenai ranges. Harriman Fjord and Surprise Glacier lie to the west; Barry Arm and the shattered face of Columbia Glacier anchor the eastern sector.
The Sound's fame rests on ice and recovery. The 1989 Exxon Valdez spill coated 1,300 miles of shoreline, including waters toured today. Humpback whales, sea otters, harbor seals, and bald eagles have returned in numbers that justify the term "wildlife corridor," though herring and marbled murrelet populations remain below pre-spill baselines. Cruise vessels range from 90-passenger catamarans with heated cabins to smaller rigid inflatables that trade comfort for proximity. Onboard naturalists narrate tectonic history, glacial mechanics, and the presence of nunataks—rocky peaks that pierce the Sargent Icefield above. Calving events occur without warning: a vertical face shears away, the rumble arrives seconds later, and the wake rocks the hull a quarter-mile distant. No two sailings yield identical ice or animal encounters, a fact operators state plainly and visitors confirm in shipboard logs.
11 hr
