The pristine landscape of Alaska’s Glacier Bay stretches as far as the eye can see. Heading out from the serenity of Bartlett Cove, the bay opens into a wide waterway dotted with islands, and flanked by snow-capped mountains that disappear into the clouds, and thick forests of spruce and hemlock, cottonwood, and alder. The bay fills a basin carved out by the Grand Pacific Glacier, which has retreated north over the last two hundred fifty years, leaving behind a frigid bejeweled body of water fringed by a series of tidewater glaciers.