Resurrection Bay vs the Fjords: What the Shorter Cruises Cover

A common Kenai Fjords booking mistake is assuming a Resurrection Bay cruise goes into the park's tidewater fjords. It doesn't. The National Park Service's Historic Resource Study, A Stern and Rock-Bound Coast, says Resurrection Bay is "outside the boundaries of the park."

• The bay's open water is entirely outside the park.
• The park boundary meets only the bay's outer western shore, running from around Callisto Head southwest toward Bear Glacier and Aialik Cape. The eastern side of the bay is state and private land, including the state marine parks.
• Bear Glacier Lagoon straddles the boundary. In the NPS's words, "the park exists on the west side of the boundary line while state lands occupy the east side." Part of the lagoon and Bear Glacier are inside the park, but you reach them across non-park water.
• Exit Glacier is inside the park: the only part you can reach by road.

In practice, a Resurrection Bay cruise spends nearly all its time on non-park water and brushes the park's edge near Bear Glacier, seen from a distance. The exact line through the Bear Glacier lagoon and moraine appears only on NPS maps.

Resurrection Bay is a classic glacial fjord: a deep, U-shaped valley carved by Pleistocene ice from the Harding and Sargent icefields, then flooded by rising seas and sinking land. Before European contact this was the homeland of the Alutiiq-speaking Unegkurmiut, with a village, Qutekcak, near present-day Seward.

Captain Nathaniel Portlock called it "Port Andrews" in 1787. The Russian fur trader Alexander Baranov sheltered here from a Gulf of Alaska storm, and when the weather cleared on Russian Orthodox Easter, the "Sunday of Resurrection," in 1792, he named it Voskresenskaya Gavan, "Resurrection Harbor." Baranov set up a shipyard here in 1793–94, and the Phoenix, the first ship built in Alaska, was launched in the bay in 1794. The town of Seward was founded in 1903 and named for U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward. Our history and culture guide covers the wider story.

The 1964 earthquake. In the magnitude 9.2 Good Friday earthquake, according to a 2007 USGS study by Haeussler, Lee, Ryan and colleagues, "Seward was the only town hit by tsunamis generated from both submarine landslides and tectonic sources." Within 45 seconds of the start of the shaking, a 1.2-km section of waterfront, with its docks and harbor facilities, began sliding into the bay, and waves about 6–8 m high soon swept the town; the tectonic tsunami arrived about 30 minutes later. The same study estimates "the total volume of slide material to be about 211 million m³," with the seafloor near the waterfront dropping by as much as 34 m. The land sank along the coast and drowned shoreline forests, leaving the "ghost forest" of dead standing trees you still see from cruises. Accounts of the death toll in Seward differ slightly; most put it at about a dozen people.

A Resurrection Bay cruise reaches no tidewater glacier (Aialik, Holgate or Northwestern), shows no calving into the sea, does not enter Aialik Bay or the outer fjords, and usually skips the Chiswell Islands rookery. Many of these trips are sold under the "Kenai Fjords" name even though they stay in the bay, among them Major Marine's "4 Hour Kenai Fjords Wildlife Cruise" and the widely sold "Kenai Fjords and Resurrection Bay Half-Day Wildlife Cruise."

The operators' fine print is honest. Major Marine says, "This cruise does not visit a tidewater glacier," and a Kenai Fjords Tours Fox Island product page says of Bear Glacier, "Please note this is not a Tide Water Glacier." The product names are what mislead. One traveler review sums up the trade-off: "We took the half-day wildlife cruise since we had young kids… We didn't see any glaciers calving, but we saw humpbacks, sea otters, and tons of puffins." If watching ice fall into the ocean is your priority, a bay cruise will disappoint you; if wildlife and scenery are the goal, it delivers.

Calmer than the open Gulf. High mountains and barrier islands shelter the bay, which is its main advantage if you are prone to seasickness. It is not glassy, though: Alaska State Parks says the bay is "generally choppy in afternoons," and Cape Resurrection at the mouth can develop "severe confused seas… on an outgoing tide with strong winds out of Prince William Sound."

Conditions get much rougher once boats round Aialik Cape into the open Gulf, where swells of 3–4 feet or more are common. One traveler on a 4-hour cruise noted "four-foot swells when we hit the open water. Some people were seasick." Morning departures are usually the calmest. Seward sits in a temperate rainforest with more than 60 inches of rain a year, so bring layers and rain gear in every season; our safety guide covers cold water and weather.