Glacier Bay is a vast Y-shaped fjord on the Southeast coast of Alaska, sheltered from the ocean by the Fairweather range. Only two hundred years ago, when Captain George Vancouver sailed by its mouth, the bay was a solid sheet of nearly a mile of ice. One century later, the glaciers had shrunk back 65 miles, the fastest glacier retreat on record. To travel up the bay is to retrace the path of glacial retreat, from the lush mature spruce and hemlock rain forest near the visitor center at Bartlett cove, to the more thinly vegetated areas more recently de-glaciated, and eventually the glaciers which calve icebergs into the water with a sound described by the Tlingit Indians as "white thunder". With no road access, the park is a marine wilderness which can be explored only by water travel. While most visitors experience the park through the deck of a cruise ship or tour boat, in May 2001