Icy Bay is a body of water in southeast Alaska, formed in the last 100 years by the rapid retreat of the Guyot, Yahtse, and Tyndall Glacier Glaciers. It is part of the Wrangell-Saint Elias Wilderness.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the bay entrance was permanently blocked by a giant tidewater glacier face that calved icebergs directly into the Gulf of Alaska. A century-long glacial retreat has opened a multi-armed bay more than 30 miles long.
Icy Bay is popular destination for sea kayakers, and is reachable by bush plane from Yakutat.
Famous quotes containing the words icy and/or bay:
“Like to the Pontic Sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne’er knows retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont,
Even so my bloody thoughts with violent pace
Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“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)