Kenai Fjords

Race Point stands on the western shoulder near the mouth of Resurrection Bay, and it is the cleanest place to read the whole fjord in one look. From up here the bay stops being water and becomes what it is underneath: a single long trough with a broad, flat floor and steep parallel walls, running straight out toward the open Gulf. That shape is the tell. A river cuts a narrow V as it saws downward; a glacier is broad and heavy and grinds a wide U, planing the floor flat and steepening the sides as it goes. When the ice pulled back, the sea rose into the lowest part of that U and drowned it, which is why the walls plunge straight into deep water instead of easing into a beach. Everything else on this coast — the sheltered harbor, the cold deep water, the crowded seabird walls — sits inside a shape the ice left behind. Read the trough first, and the rest of the stops fall into place.

Across the bay from Race Point, Mount Alice rises off the eastern shore in one steep sweep, going from tidewater to high rock with barely a foothill in between. Climbing it puts you inside the fjord’s wall rather than looking at it, and the steepness underfoot is itself the ice’s work. As a glacier fills a valley it presses hardest against the sides, undercutting and steepening them, so a fjord’s walls stand far straighter than any slope rain and rivers make on their own. The rock you climb is the same dark seafloor stone as the rest of the coast, here lifted and set nearly on edge. Snow holds in every high bowl and crease well into the warmer months, feeding the streams that chute down the face. This is the fjord’s other wall — the ice’s work standing up rather than laid flat, the same story as the bay floor turned on its side.

The rock at Race Point is worth a close look, because it came from the bottom of an ocean. These dark, banded cliffs are old deep-sea sediment — mud, sand, and the rubble of underwater landslides — that was scraped off a sinking ocean floor and jammed against the edge of the continent long before any ice arrived. Squeezed and heated in the process, the layers were folded, tilted, and hardened into the tough grey stone the whole coast is built from. The ice, when it came, did not make this rock; it uncovered it, grinding away the softer cover and polishing the hard bedrock bare. Where the stone is clean you can often read the original layering — thin bands stacked like the pages of a book, sometimes bent into folds where the slow collision crumpled them. It is a strange thing to stand on a mountain shoulder above a fjord and find yourself looking at the floor of a vanished sea.

The high country on Mount Alice is where the ice did its close work. Below the summits, look for the rounded, steep-backed hollows scooped into the rock — armchair-shaped basins where small glaciers once sat and gnawed backward into the mountain, plucking rock loose and carrying it off. Many still hold snow deep into the warmer months, and a few cradle small ponds. Where one of these hollows opens toward the main valley, its floor often hangs well above the fjord below, cut off cleanly: a smaller glacier could not grind down as fast as the great trunk of ice in the main trough, so its valley was left stranded up the wall. Streams from these high basins reach the bay as steep chutes, and after rain or melt as thin falls down the rock. Every one of these shapes is the same ice at a smaller scale, still writing the same sentence into the mountain.

The last thing the ice left is the water itself. A fjord’s floor lies below sea level, so the bay holds a deep, cold, well-stirred body of water that stays rich through the year — and a rich, cold sea feeds a crowded coast. From the point, the surface below is often dotted with sea otters, which float on their backs in the kelp and rarely come ashore, and with harbor seals hauled out on the low rocks or watching from the water with just their heads showing. Along the rockier edges, small dark-and-white ducks ride the chop where meltwater meets salt. In the warmer months the steep walls become seabird cliffs, ledges packed with nesting kittiwakes and murres that fish the same cold water. All of it — the otters, the seals, the birds — is here because a valley the ice dug below the sea became a deep, cold larder that never really shuts down.