Barry Glacier flows southwest for 16 miles (25 km) to Barry Arm of Harriman Fjord in northwestern Prince William Sound, about 33 miles (53 km) northeast of Whittier and 58 miles (93 km) east of Anchorage, Alaska. Barry Arm is a fjord extending south for 10 miles (16 km) from the terminus of Barry Glacier to Point Pakenham at Port Wells. Captain Edwin F. Glenn of the U.S. Army named the glacier and fjord after Colonel Thomas Henry Barry, a Major General at the time, during an 1898 expedition to find a route to the Klondike gold fields.

The glaciers at the head of Barry Arm were mapped with varying accuracy by several expeditions. Vancouver mapped them in 1794 and again in 1798, followed by Applegate in 1887, Glenn in 1898, and the Harriman Alaska Expedition in 1899. By the end of the 19th century, the Cascade, Barry, and Coxe Glaciers were interconnected, filling the fjord. Applegate’s 1887 sketch map depicts a glacier spanning the entire width of Barry Arm, approximately 6 miles (10 km) north of Pakenham Point.

In 1899, the Harriman Alaska Expedition arrived in Barry Arm aboard the SS Elder. When the ship reached a location just south of what is now known as Point Doran, which extends into Barry Arm from the southwest, the local pilot deemed it unsafe to proceed and relinquished control to Captain Peter Doran. However, Harriman instructed the captain to navigate through a narrow passage between the ice wall and the headland. Although the passage was dangerously narrow and intimidating, it gradually widened into a stunning icy fjord approximately 12 miles (19km) long. This led to the discovery of what would be named Harriman Fjord, an inlet previously unknown except possibly to Indigenous seal hunters. Read more here and here. Explore more of Barry Glacier here: