Leave behind your daily schedules while on a trip with Spirit Walker Expeditions and allow the tides and long summer sunlight to create your rhythm over the next several days. There are many amazing natural features and iconic sights to enjoy while exploring the West Arm and we will move at a pace that allows for the most intimate and untrammeled of exploration. By using strategically planned boat transportation to start and end the trip, we’ve created itineraries that focus on the highlights of the upper West Arm. These include Reid Inlet and glacier, and the deeply blue Lamplugh glacier. And no trip into the upper bay is complete without kayaking into the most stunning of fjords: John’s Hopkins Inlet. With its backdrop of snow-clad mountains, its cascading waterfalls, hanging glaciers, abundant icebergs and active tidewater glacier at its head, John’s Hopkins is not only a kayaker’s paradise, but the essence of Glacier Bay.

While Glacier Bay is a land of rock, water and ice, it’s also so much more. In this wilderness, life is emerging and taking hold. The receding glaciers left behind inlets, beaches and rocky terrain – and set the stage for a succession of flora and fauna. The West Arm of Glacier Bay National Park is now home to wild strawberries, alders and young spruce forests. As we kayak through this dynamic and evolving ecosystem, we keep an eye out for the mountain goats, moose, bear and wolves that now inhabit these shorelines and cliffs. On the water, we watch for the iconic spout of a humpback whale, the tall dorsal fins of passing killer whales, harbor seals hauled out on icebergs, rafts of sea otters and the quick surfacing of harbor porpoise. Above us, arctic terns, bald eagles and oystercatchers dive, soar and glide. Glacier Bay is fully alive!

As each new day unfolds and our adventure deepens, we feel the rhythm of the bay. We rise and fall with the tides, dine on its shores, paddle and glide on its waters, and take in its beauty at every turn. Every plant, animal and glacier we see is a part of the ever-evolving story of Glacier Bay. With each stroke, we paddle through a story carved by ice – born of ice. And at night at camp, as we stoke our inner fires with drinks cooled by glacial ice, we gather to weave those stories together – and create some of our own.

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The National Park Service, Department of Interior authorizes Spirit Walker Expeditions as a Concessioner to provide guided overnight kayaking trips within Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve.