Built to Welcome America to Its Wildest Places
When the National Park Service celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1956, it faced a problem: two decades of war and lean budgets had left America’s parks without the facilities to welcome the postwar surge of visitors arriving by the millions. The response was Mission 66, a ten-year, nationwide building program that gave the parks their first visitor centers, lodges, and roads built specifically for the American public. Glacier Bay Lodge, completed in 1966 at Bartlett Cove, was one of its signature achievements. As America marks 250 years, Aramark Destinations invites you to stay in a building that was constructed to mark a national milestone and to experience one of the most extraordinary glacial landscapes on Earth from the only hotel inside the park.
Designed by Seattle architect John Morse, Glacier Bay Lodge uses heavy timber, asymmetrical rooflines, and walls of glass to frame the views of Bartlett Cove and the Fairweather Range, a showcase of Park Service Modern architecture connected to its cabins by boardwalks that carry guests through the surrounding temperate rainforest.
Glacier Bay: A Landscape Still Being Born
When the H.M.S. Discovery surveyed this coastline in 1794, Glacier Bay did not exist: the area was a wall of ice more than 4,000 feet thick, up to 20 miles wide, extending more than 100 miles to the St. Elias Mountains. By 1879, naturalist John Muir found that the ice had retreated more than 30 miles, revealing an actual bay. By 1916, the Grand Pacific Glacier - the glacier partially credited with carving the bay - had melted back 60 miles to the head of what is now Tarr Inlet. Few places on Earth allow visitors to witness geological time moving at a pace fast enough to see within a single human lifetime. Glacier Bay is one of them, and its tidewater glaciers are still actively calving; the Johns Hopkins Glacier releases ice blocks up to 200 feet high with such force and frequency that it can affect vessel approach distances.
Muir’s early advocacy helped lead to Glacier Bay’s designation as a national monument in 1925 thanks to the efforts of William Cooper and the Ecological Society of America, and the park was expanded and elevated to national park status in 1980. In 1986, the Glacier Bay–Admiralty Island Biosphere Reserve was established under the United Nations Biosphere Program, and in 1992, Glacier Bay became part of an international World Heritage Site, placing it among a small number of places worldwide recognized as part of the largest internationally protected ecosystem on the planet. The Huna Lingít have lived in and around this landscape for generations, with a relationship to the bay and its glaciers that long predates any of these designations and continues through cultural programs and storytelling that guests encounter at the lodge today.
Experience History in New Ways
- Guided interpretive tours and activities
- Glacier Bay Theater Showings
- Red, White, and Blue Burger or the Sparkler
- Open House at Xunaa Shuká Hít (Huna Ancestors’ House)
Our Promise to These Places, and to You
Landmarks of Legacy connects our destinations through three shared commitments.
Stewardship
Caring for What Endures: Glacier Bay Lodge & Tours operates as an authorized concessioner of the National Park Service. Stewardship here means operating tours and lodging in a way that minimizes impact on tidewater glacier environments and the marine ecosystems of the bay, supporting the research and monitoring that tracks one of the fastest-changing landscapes in the National Park System, and maintaining a Mission 66 lodge whose architecture itself reflects a philosophy of building lightly within a wild place. Sixty years after it was built to welcome Americans to their parks, the lodge’s role is the same, and so is the responsibility that comes with it.
Stories that Shape Our Destinations
Every Landmark Has a Voice: The story of Glacier Bay is, in a very literal sense, a story still being written by the landscape itself. It’s the story of John Muir, whose advocacy helped establish the monument in 1925, and of the Huna Lingít, whose ancestral homeland this is and whose oral histories describe the glaciers and the land beneath them across generations. And it is the story of Mission 66, a national initiative, that built the infrastructure allowing ordinary Americans to experience places like this one. Three stories, three timescales, one bay.
Experiences of Legacy
Not Spectators. Participants. The Glacier Bay Day Tour aboard the lodge’s catamaran puts guests within sight of tidewater glaciers calving into the bay, with humpback whales, sea otters, and mountain goats often visible along the way. Guided kayaking carries that encounter to water level, paddling secluded inlets beneath the same coastal mountains that have shaped this landscape for millennia. Ranger-led programs at Bartlett Cove and evening storytelling from Huna Lingít tradition-bearers connect the glacial landscape to the people who have known it longest. And the lodge itself is where every one of these experiences begins and ends.
Give Back to the Places You Love
Through our Round Up program and other philanthropic initiatives, guests can support preservation, education, and community programs around the places we call home — helping protect these landmarks for generations to come. Because honoring legacy also means investing in the future.
Join the Journey
Landmarks of Legacy is more than a campaign. It is a movement across America's most meaningful places — a shared commitment to the destinations that shaped our nation and continue to define who we are. Learn more at landmarksoflegacy.com.