Falling Glacier starts from an elevation of roughly 2,100 feet (640 m) at the northwest edge of the Sargent Icefield in the Chugach Mountains and flows northwest for three miles (4.8 km), terminating 2 miles (3.4 km) from the eastern shore of Kings Bay, about 39 miles (63 km) northeast of Seward and 20 miles (32 km) south-southeast of Whittier, Alaska. The glacier was named in 1910 by a US Geological Survey team led by Ulysses S. Grant and Daniel F. Higgins—faculty at Northwestern University, for its appearance of “falling.” Kings Bay is a fjord on the eastern coast of the Kenai Peninsula that extends west and southwest for 12 miles (19 km) from the head of Port Nellie Juan. The fjord was named in 1908, also by Grant and Higgins, for a prospector named King who lived at the head of the bay near the mouth of Kings River. Port Nellie Juan trends southwest for 18 miles (29 km) from Prince William Sound to Kings Bay and was discovered in 1887 by Samuel Applegate, who commanded the schooner Nellie Juan.

Kings Bay is aligned with the Contact fault system, which juxtaposes the Valdez Group of the Chugach terrane on the bay’s north side with the Orca Group of the Prince William terrane on the south side, underlying Falling Glacier. The Chugach-Prince William composite terrane is an accretionary complex exposed for almost 1,400 miles (2,200 km) around the Gulf of Alaska and is considered one of the thickest accretionary complexes in the world. The Valdez Group developed during the Late Cretaceous, roughly 100 million to 66 million years ago, and consists primarily of sandstone, siltstone, argillite, and shale formed from turbidite deposits during subduction; these rocks were subsequently altered as they accreted onto the North American plate. The Orca Group developed in the late Paleocene to early Eocene, about 60 million to 50 million years ago, and features an interbedded sequence of sandstone, siltstone, and mudstone, altered tholeiitic basalt, and evidence of deep-sea fan deposition, faulting, and folding.

Prince William Sound is one of three districts of Chugach National Forest, an area covering 6,908,540 acres (2,795,787 ha); the other two are the Copper River Delta and the Kenai Peninsula. The land was home to the Alutiiq people thousands of years before Europeans arrived in the mid-1700s, after which Russian fur traders settled the region and trapped native sea otters. The US purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867; gold was discovered in 1888. Chugach National Forest was established in 1907 from a forest reserve first designated in 1892. Prince William Sound encompasses more than 3,000 miles (4,848 km) of shoreline along islands, bays, coves, and deep fjords. In 1980 Congress directed the Forest Service to study the area’s suitability for federal wilderness designation under the 1964 Wilderness Act. In 1984 the Forest Service recommended that most of the 2.1 million acres (849,839 ha) of western Prince William Sound be designated the Nellie Juan-College Fjord Wilderness, and agreed to manage the area as wilderness until Congress could act. Read more here and here. Explore more of Falling Glacier and Kings Bay here: