The rotor wash lifts spray from Resurrection Bay and the town of Seward shrinks into a scatter of roofs and docks. Within minutes you’re above a carved coastline of black rock and snow—coves cut by centuries of ice, waterfalls hurling off cliffs, and floes of blue ice drifting like broken glass. The pilot banks and the helicopter threads a corridor of sea and mountain until Bear Glacier fills the windshield: a swollen river of ice spilling into a gray lagoon. You land on the coarse, pebble beach beside the glacier, step out with the pilot, and feel the scale of the place: crevasses yawning inland, house-size icebergs calved into the lagoon, and gulls sizing up the shoreline.