Riding the Ice: The 26 Glacier Cruise from Anchorage

Turnagain Arm wakes early, the tide flexing like a muscle as your coach slides south from Anchorage. Dall sheep pin themselves to cliffs, white commas against gray rock. Ahead, the mountains step closer and the road squeezes along the water’s lip, as if daring you to keep going. The Sound is calling. The road ends (as many good Alaskan roads do) at a hole in the mountain—the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel, a one-lane, 2.5-mile passage where cars and trains take turns. When the light goes green, you roll into the dark and come out in Whittier, a tiny port tucked into a glacier-cut bowl. The air is salt and spruce. The catamaran waits, engines purring like a patient predator. You step aboard and the deck crew’s grin says it all: today the fjords are open for business. The 26 Glacier Cruise is Alaska in a single long inhale: sleek, fast catamarans built to slice flat wakes through narrow passages; a route that threads past hanging valleys, granite headwalls, and tidewater faces that breathe, grind, and sometimes roar. As you clear the harbor, Prince William Sound sprawls—an amphitheater of peaks and ice. The catamaran surges, stable and sure, two hulls negotiating chop with the poise of a mountain goat. The water nudges you forward; the fjords beckon. On deck, you feel the temperature drop as the boat noses toward the first glacier, a turquoise wall that hums with its own electricity. Glaciers have moods. One growls quietly, sending off small brash-ice sighs; another throws a tantrum, dropping refrigerator-sized chunks with a cannon-boom that echoes down the fjord. Harbor seals lounge on ice like silver commas; kittiwakes scribble the air; a raft of sea otters holds hands against the current, grooming and watching you as if you’re the entertainment. The captain reads the water like fine print, shifting course to wherever the day is best—Harriman Fjord’s tight amphitheaters, Surprise Glacier’s thunder, College Fjord’s roll call of Harvard, Yale, Wellesley, and Bryn Mawr. The boat edges close enough for the glacier’s breath to frost your cheeks, yet keeps a respectful distance dictated by safety, ice, and wildlife. Behind the scenes, geology runs the show. These fjords are the work of Pleistocene ice—slow knives carving bedrock into U-shaped valleys, leaving striations like signatures. The 1964 Good Friday earthquake wrenched shorelines here, lifting harbor bottoms and re-routing streams. The result is a landscape that looks carved yesterday. Nature is still at it: glaciers creep forward, calve, retreat. The Sound is alive and unapologetic. Human history has always orbited this water. The Chugach and Eyak peoples navigated these passages long before charts, reading currents and cloud lines like stories. In World War II, Whittier became a secretive port; its monolithic Buckner Building—the “city under one roof”—is a concrete relic visible from the harbor. Most residents now live in Begich Towers, another all-in-one high-rise that turns winter logistics into a community art form. In 1899, the Harriman Expedition swept through College Fjord and named its glaciers for East Coast colleges—men’s names on one side, women’s on the other—a whimsical bit of cartographic culture that stuck. Part of the cruise’s appeal is how easy it is. You leave Anchorage by coach with a guide who narrates Turnagain Arm’s tidal bores, bore tides that sometimes carry surfers like punctuation marks across the water. You pass Girdwood and Portage Valley, then time the tunnel’s schedule like a secret handshake. In Whittier, the crew makes boarding seamless; the catamaran is warm, the seating comfortable, the ride steady—Phillips Cruises operates high-speed, dual-hull boats and backs them with a no-seasickness guarantee. Onboard, hot drinks steam in your hands, and the galley serves hearty fare that actually hits the spot. Step outside for the show, then slip back in to thaw. Repeat for hours. The day is long in the best way: 10 to 11 hours round-trip, with the lion’s share spent roaming the Sound. The captain adjusts the route to chase visibility and wildlife—one day a humpback blows off Esther Passage, another day a pod of Dall’s porpoises stitches white V’s along the bow. The mountains play with light, drawing shadows across faceted ice. At a rookery, hundreds of black-legged kittiwakes turn the cliff face kinetic, their voices sharp as sleet. The glaciers feel close and personal without ever being reckless. That’s the line here—intimacy without intrusion. Practicalities sharpen the experience, not distract from it. Wear layers you can shuffle quickly: a windproof, waterproof shell; a warm midlayer; hat and gloves, even in July. Binoculars turn distant wildlife into crisp moments. The bow gets the splash and the drama; the stern can be calmer and excellent for framing wide shots. The window seats inside are cozy, but the deck is where the action lives. Keep your camera ready with a fast shutter speed—1/1000 for ice calving, higher if the light allows. And watch the small stuff: wet decks are slick; handrails are your friends; a lens cloth saves the day when the glacier exhales mist all over your gear. When it’s over, the Sound exhales you back to Whittier. The tunnel swallows the evening and returns you to Turnagain Arm, where belugas sometimes shimmer like ghosts in the tide. The coach hums north, and you carry a day that feels bigger than its hours. This is the difference between looking at a map and living in it for a while—the fjords and ice, the wildlife and history, all stitched into one comfortable, well-run, utterly Alaskan adventure. If you want a single day that captures the scale of this place without demanding expedition toughness, the 26 Glacier Cruise is your move. The Sound will dare you, the glaciers will talk back, and you’ll glide home with salt on your jacket and ice in your memory, the best kind of souvenir.