Bartlett Cove: the Tlingit Trail and Forest Loop

Welcome to Bartlett Cove, in Glacier Bay National Park. Most people see this park from the deck of a ship. This cove is the one place in it with a lodge, a dock, park headquarters and trails you can walk on your own.

Just two hundred and fifty years ago, the snout of a glacier about a hundred miles long stood right here. The ice has since pulled far back up the bay, and the forest and shoreline you're about to walk through grew up in its place.

Long before that ice arrived, this was a homeland. The clans of the Huna Tlingit lived in villages on the broad valley floor that is now the bay. In the 1700s, during what scientists call the Little Ice Age, a glacier advanced over those villages, and the people fled to other places. When the ice retreated, they came back. Most of their descendants live today across Icy Strait in the village of Hoonah, and Glacier Bay remains their spiritual homeland.

Today's walk is about a mile and a quarter. It follows the shoreline trail past a whale skeleton to the dock, then a stretch of beach, then climbs into the rainforest on the Forest Loop and finishes at the lodge. Roots, boardwalks and rocks get slippery here, and the forest trail crosses the park road once, so take your time. Bears and moose live here too, so stay alert and give them plenty of room. I'll tell you a story at each stop and stay quiet in between.

This is the Tribal House. Its name, Xunaa Shuká Hít, roughly means Huna Ancestors' House. When it was dedicated on August 25th, 2016, it became the first permanent clan house in Glacier Bay since the glacier destroyed the villages here more than two hundred and fifty years ago. It honors the clan houses that once lined the shores of this cove.

The house took almost twenty years of planning by the National Park Service and the tribal government, the Hoonah Indian Association, working together. On dedication day, hand-carved dugout canoes came out of the mist and landed on the shore in front of the house, while more than eight hundred people gathered at the water's edge.

Look at the carved and painted house front, and the totem poles on either side, added in 2017. Inside are four massive carved cedar house posts, and a house screen that tells the stories of the four clans. One figure on that screen is Kaasteen, a young woman of the Chookaneidí clan. In many tellings, she called out to the distant glacier, and the glacier came. As the people fled in their canoes, someone had to stay behind with it, and in many versions it was her.

This is a working clan house, used for ceremonies, language retreats and tribal gatherings, so its visiting hours depend on tribal use and staffing. When the doors are open, visitors are welcome to come in and learn.

This is Snow, also known as Whale Number Sixty-eight. She was an adult female, and park researchers had seen her in Glacier Bay regularly since 1975. In July 2001 she was found dead at the mouth of the bay, after being struck by a cruise ship.

The park collected her entire skeleton. Over the years that followed, volunteers from the community, including high school and college students, worked beside park staff to clean and preserve her bones. Then professional whale articulators took over, and the bones traveled three thousand miles each way, to Maine and back, to be cleaned and assembled.

What you see in this pavilion is forty-five and a half feet of whale, about thirty-seven hundred pounds of bone. When the exhibit opened in 2014, the park called it the largest humpback whale skeleton on public display in the United States. Huna families came home for the opening and held a spirit ceremony, giving her a name that means Whale Beneath Mount Fairweather.

Walk the length of her, from the great skull to the tail, and then look out at the cove, where her living relatives still come to feed every summer.

Here at the head of the public dock is the Healing Totem, Yaa Naa Néx Kootéeyaa, carved from twenty feet of yellow cedar. The formline design in its lower section is the spirit of the glacier that overran the villages around 1750. Elders say it advanced as fast as a running dog. Elsewhere on the pole you'll find the canoes the people traveled in and the fish racks that once lined this shore; chains, for being barred from homeland; and tears, for everything that felt lost. At the top, two figures hold up the Tribal House together, one in a woven cedar hat and one in a ranger's flat hat. Footprints run the length of the pole, for the clans returning again and again to walk in the footsteps of their ancestors.

Near the Visitor Information Station rests a sea otter hunting canoe, carved by a team of Native carvers in 1987. And out on the water, the tide here can rise and fall by twenty feet, twice a day. In summer the park's day boat leaves from this dock for the tidewater glaciers, about fifty-five miles up the bay.

Look closely at the beach rocks, and you may see lichen growing on them. Lichen is among the first life to come back after the ice melts away. Its spores ride in on the wind, anchor to bare rock and slowly break down the surface, so mosses can take hold. Moss makes soil, then flowering plants move in, then alder, which puts nitrogen into the ground, then fast-growing willow and cottonwood, and later spruce. Each one prepares the land for the next. Scientists call it succession, and these rocks are where that story begins.

At low tide this shore uncovers a whole world of intertidal life, so step carefully. Keep an eye on the water, too. You might hear the breath of a humpback whale, see a sea otter floating on its back, or hear a bald eagle. Sea otters had disappeared from Glacier Bay entirely, and in recent decades they've come back by the thousands, which scientists expect to change the underwater world of the bay.

This is the spruce and hemlock rainforest of Bartlett Cove, the far end of Cooper's story. A trip up the bay runs that story backward, from this mature forest to bare rock at the farthest reaches of the fjords. In between, the park describes each stage: a dark crust of algae on the silt, then moss, horsetail and fireweed, then dryas, willows and alder, then spruce, and finally hemlock. Spruce eventually shades out the alder, and a forest begins.

Listen for red squirrels. In summer they collect green spruce cones and store them in middens, mounds of cones at the base of a tree, and one squirrel can harvest twelve to sixteen thousand cones in a year. Somewhere along this loop, look for a Tlingit trail marker carved into a living spruce, one of two near the lodge that serve as reminders of ancient ties to this land. And leave the berries alone, because baneberry, which grows here, is poisonous.

Quiet water like this is a good place to stop and listen. Moose feed on aquatic plants, as well as willow leaves, grasses and herbs, and they are newcomers here. The first moose was spotted in Glacier Bay in the late 1960s. A bull can weigh sixteen hundred pounds, yet a moose can appear and disappear in thick brush with surprising stealth, so if you meet one, give it plenty of room. Toward evening, you might hear a porcupine. They make a whole repertoire of grunts, whimpers and screams, as if talking to no one in particular.

There are two benches along this loop, so if you find one, sit for a moment and take in the sights and sounds of the forest before walking on.

Here is Glacier Bay Lodge. It opened in 1966, the same year Mission 66 came to an end. The Seattle architect John Morse designed it in what became known as Park Service Modern: heavy timber posts from the older rustic tradition, set in a modern cedar building with an enormous, asymmetrically pitched roof, three offset triangular dormers and wide windows. Inside the main lodge, exposed carved wooden beams were meant to recall traditional Tlingit clan houses. Boardwalks lead from the lodge through the forest to the guest cabins, and the park visitor center is upstairs.

That's the end of our walk. Over this mile and a quarter of shoreline and forest, you've crossed two and a half centuries: from where the ice once stood, to the first lichen on the beach rocks, to a forest that grew up after the glacier left, and a homeland its people never stopped coming back to. Thank you for walking Bartlett Cove with me today, and enjoy the rest of your time in Glacier Bay.