Prince William Sound is a must-see if you believe that “big things come in small packages.” Roughly the size of Puget Sound and three times the size of San Francisco Bay, Prince William Sound stretches nearly 70 miles both across and from top to bottom. Sailing the Sound brings visitors up-close and personal with centuries-old glacial ice, from small cirque glaciers(shallow bowls on high mountain peaks) to large tidewater glaciers (glaciers that end with their faces in water). It’s exciting to watch these large rivers of ice drop huge pieces into the water right in front of you! Listen for the sound of the mass moving along; large fissures crack like rifle shots as the plummeting chunks of ice smack the water. As the glacier calves, it creates a chain reaction in the water, moving ice bits, bergs, and the sea life with it.

This area is steeped in history, with a diversity of names that indicate the people who left their mark here. You’ll find Native, Russian, English, and Spanish names reflecting the pioneers who explored and lived in this area. Because the rugged and tall Chugach and Kenai Mountains cut off Prince William Sound from the interior, it’s easy to pretend you are one of these first explorers to sail in these waters.

One of the shaping forces of Alaska is out in the Sound, the collision deep in the Earth of the Pacific Plate with the North American Plate. It has lifted up the world's greatest coastal mountains, the Chugach. The highest peak in the Chugach Range, 13,176-foot Mount Marcus Baker, towers above Harvard Glacier in College Fjord. It’s no wonder that copper, gold, and silver ores, among others, was found aplenty.

The incredible scenery -- narrow waterways, forest-covered islands, sea caves, marine mammals, and sea birds -- keeps visitors busy photographing, and with a maximum 19 hours of daylight around the summer solstice, there is plenty of time in which to do it. This is definitely color photography at its best. The color of the water changes from an eye-popping copper sulfate blue to the violet blue of the deep ocean. Close to glaciers the water turns a turbid gray from the glacier “flour” or silt that occurs as glaciers grind the rock on which they slide. We are able to get very close to these spectacles, making the experience richer, more poignant, and the photographs more spectacular: like being in a movie instead of just watching it. This is one place you shouldn’t forget to bring plenty of film.

About 12,000 years ago, the glaciers that created this area began to recede, leaving 3,000 highly convoluted miles of shoreline surrounded on three sides by the Chugach Mountains and the Kenai Mountains to the west. The glaciers scoured the Earth's crust down to the granite roots of the Chugach range and dug out deep fjords, glacially-carved valleys filled with seawater, creating the Sound and the rugged, sculpted Chugach Mountains. There are more breathtakingly beautiful tidewater glaciers surrounded by precipitous mountain peaks here than in the rest of Alaska. In all, there are over 20 glaciers terminating at sea level; numerous others cling to precipitous mountainsides. Of these, we see over half up-close and personal.