Glacier View Loop

The Glacier View Loop at the Exit Glacier area of Kenai Fjords National Park provides the closest accessible view of an advancing glacier face in the American national park system, with interpretive markers tracing the glacier's dramatic retreat since the early 20th century. Exit Glacier is one of 40 outlet glaciers flowing from the 700-square-mile Harding Icefield, and the loop trail brings visitors within a few hundred feet of the active glacier terminus, where crevasses split the blue ice face and small calving events occasionally send chunks crashing to the outwash plain below. Year markers staked along the trail corridor — at 1951, 1961, 1971, 1980, 1990, 1999, 2005, 2010 — graphically illustrate how far the glacier has retreated over the past century. The upper portion of the loop reaches a moraine crest with direct sightlines to the ice face. Mountain goats are occasionally visible on the cliff bands above the glacier, and Steller's jays and gray jays haunt the spruce forest along the lower loop. The trailhead is 12 miles from Seward via Exit Glacier Road, the only road into the park.