Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve is one of those Alaska showpieces more often seen by visitors than by the residents of the US state. When I finally got there this summer, after more than 40 years of living in Alaska, I arrived the way most people do, on board a cruise ship, in the company of a few thousand tourists from around the world.

The remote park’s lofty summits and ice-carved fjords, the humpbacks and orcas and grizzlies, lived up to what I had heard. As passengers spilled onto the upper observation deck, agog, the ship’s theatrical pirouette before a wall of blue glacial ice showed off romantic nature in all its timeless glory.