Glacier Bay Wilderness is a wilderness area in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve in the U.S. state of Alaska. It consists of the park section of 3.28-million-acre (13,300 km2) Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. Surrounded by a spectacular, glaciated horseshoe rim of mountains, the bay is sheltered by the Fairweather Range to the west and the Saint Elias Mountains on the north. The highest peaks, topped by Mount Fairweather at 15,300 feet (4,700 m), stand almost three miles (5 km) above the sea and attract intrepid mountaineers. No trails exist, but backpacking is growing increasingly popular, often along numerous icy streams sometimes welcoming and sometimes choked with brush. Brown and black bears are numerous on shore. Firearms are not permitted in the park section.
Famous quotes containing the words glacier, bay and/or wilderness:
““The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“What a wilderness walk for a man to take alone! None of your half-mile swamps, none of your mile-wide woods merely, as on the skirts of our towns, without hotels, only a dark mountain or a lake for guide-board and station, over ground much of it impassable in summer!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)