Alaska Glacier Lodges: Glacier Bay, Kennecott, Girdwood and Princess Wilderness Lodges

A footbridge over a glacial river, a shuttle van rattling toward old red mine buildings, and the Kennicott Glacier lying right beside the buildings: that is how a stay in the Wrangell Mountains begins. Elsewhere in Alaska, a lodge can put you inside a national park, or a cruise can take you past glaciers before handing you to a train and a wilderness lodge. These are the places where you sleep within reach of the ice.

Which Alaska lodges are near glaciers?

Glacier Bay Lodge at Bartlett Cove, Alyeska Resort in Girdwood, and the Princess Wilderness Lodges offer very different stays, while McCarthy and Kennecott add glacier and mining history.

Some of these are places to sleep next to a glacier, and some are the land half of a trip that also takes you past glaciers by ship. The distinction matters when you plan, so it helps to sort them by what the stay actually feels like.

Glacier Bay Lodge, Bartlett Cove

Glacier Bay Lodge sits inside Glacier Bay National Park at Bartlett Cove, and it is the only lodging within the park. It is open from mid-May through early September.

Staying here means the park is your front yard. Bartlett Cove is also where the walk-in tent campground lies, for those who prefer a tent to a room, and where people who are prepared to wilderness camp and kayak find virtually unlimited camping opportunities in the park. The lodge suits travelers who want the park itself as the destination, not a stop on the way to somewhere else.

McCarthy and Kennecott, Wrangell-St. Elias

Kennecott stands beside the Kennicott Glacier inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, and McCarthy is the small town a few miles away where most of the services gather. The old mine buildings, the artifacts and the colorful history draw visitors during the summer months, and a good part of McCarthy’s summer population lives elsewhere in winter.

The things people do here are tied to the ice and the mine: glacier hiking, ice climbing and guided tours of the fourteen story concentration mill. Local guide services offer the hikes for anyone who wants route-finding help. It is a stay for people who like their glaciers with industrial history and a very small town around them.

Alyeska Resort, Girdwood

Alyeska Resort is in Girdwood, in the heart of the Chugach Mountains. Its name comes from an Aleut word meaning great land of the white to the east, which fits a mountain resort wrapped in snow and ice. An aerial tram carries visitors to the top of the mountain, where a restaurant, a bar and a gift shop wait.

Guests can hike the North Face trail to the top for epic views, soak in the Nordic Spa, or eat at Forte, Seven Glaciers or the cafe. The resort offers ski-in/ski-out accommodations for skiers. Guests staying two nights or more can decline housekeeping and receive a $5 per day dining voucher under the green stay initiative.

Princess Wilderness Lodges

Princess Alaska Cruisetours combine a seven-day Voyage of the Glaciers cruise with scenic rail travel and stays at Princess-owned wilderness lodges. The cruise itself includes Glacier Bay National Park, Hubbard Glacier and College Fjord, so the glaciers come by ship and the lodges come after.

An Alaska cruisetour includes three or more nights on land at Princess Wilderness Lodges, with properties in Fairbanks, the Kenai Peninsula, Copper River, and the Denali area. This is the route for travelers who want one connected trip, with glaciers from the water and mountains from a lodge.

Where are they?

They are spread across very different corners of the state, from the Inside Passage coast to the Chugach Mountains and the Wrangell Mountains, so picking one is first a question of which landscape you want around you.

Bartlett Cove and Gustavus

Glacier Bay Lodge is at Bartlett Cove within the national park. The nearby community of Gustavus has 450 year-round residents, is surrounded on three sides by Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, and is bordered by water on the fourth. Gustavus Airport lies about 9.5 miles from the lodge by road.

Gustavus feels like a village at the edge of a very large wilderness. The hardware and grocery store is called ToshCo, and most of its inventory comes from Costco in Juneau, a detail that says a lot about how supplies arrive in a place with no highway link to the rest of the continent.

The Wrangell Mountains

Kennecott is northeast of Valdez, beside the Kennicott Glacier, and about 6.5 miles north of McCarthy. McCarthy itself lies 120 miles northeast of Cordova at the foot of the Wrangell Mountains, with 107 people at the 2020 census, up from 28 in 2010.

The park around them is larger than Vermont and New Hampshire combined and is divided into five areas with visitor services. Travel times between those areas are long.

The main visitor center is the Wrangell-St. Elias Visitor Center at Park Headquarters in the Copper Center Area, and the official newspaper and guide is called K’elt’aeni, after the Ahtna Athabaskan word for Mount Wrangell. Along the coast, the Yakutat and Coast area has Hubbard Glacier flowing into the Gulf of Alaska. The climate is subarctic, with cold winters and short, mild summers, and the swing between day and night is large in spring and summer.

Girdwood and the Chugach

Alyeska Resort is about 45 minutes outside Anchorage, which makes it the easiest of these lodges to pair with a city stay. The mountains rise straight behind the resort, and the tram and the North Face trail both lead up into them.

Denali and the cruisetour lodges

Denali Princess Wilderness Lodge is 1 mile from the entrance of Denali National Park and overlooks the Nenana River. Mt. McKinley Princess Wilderness Lodge is within Denali State Park near the Chulitna River and offers views of Denali. The other cruisetour lodges are in Fairbanks, on the Kenai Peninsula and at Copper River.

How do you get to one?

Each lodge has its own way in, and for several of them it is not a road trip from the lower 48: planes, shuttles, footbridges and trains do the work.

Gustavus and Bartlett Cove

Gustavus is not connected to the contiguous highway system. Gustavus Airport and the Alaska Marine Highway provide access. From the airport, Glacier Bay Lodge is about 9.5 miles by road.

McCarthy and Kennecott

By road, you drive the Edgerton Highway to the McCarthy Road, an unimproved gravel road that runs from the town of Chitina to the Kennicott River, a half mile from McCarthy. By air, McCarthy has a 3,500 foot gravel runway.

The road ends at the river, and a footbridge carries pedestrians across. Visitors can walk to McCarthy in about 15 minutes from the end of the road, and shuttle vans and buses run during the tourist season from the bridge to both McCarthy and Kennecott. From McCarthy it is 4.5 miles to Kennecott, and shuttles are available. A private vehicle bridge built in 2004 is limited to residents, businesses and the National Park Service.

Girdwood

Alyeska Resort is about 45 minutes outside Anchorage, so you arrive from the city and the stay begins in the Chugach Mountains.

Princess cruisetour lodges

The Voyage of the Glaciers cruise travels from Anchorage (Whittier) to Vancouver, B.C., stopping in Ketchikan, Juneau and Skagway. Princess’s Direct-to-the-Wilderness rail service takes guests from the ship directly to a Denali-area lodge.

The cruisetours come in several lengths. The Denali Explorer lasts 10 to 15 nights and includes a Denali Natural History Tour. The Denali Escorted runs 12 to 17 nights with a Tundra Wilderness Tour. The Denali Essentials lasts 10 to 12 nights and includes a seven-day Voyage of the Glaciers cruise, an overnight in Denali, and rail travel in Alaska.

Good to know before you go

Season shapes everything. Glacier Bay Lodge is open from mid-May through early September, and McCarthy and Kennecott are a summer story, with shuttles running during the tourist season. In Gustavus, summer temperatures run from 52 to 63 °F. Bartlett Cove’s campground allows a maximum stay of 14 days. Alyeska’s $5 daily dining voucher for guests who decline housekeeping applies to stays of two nights or more.

Sources

National Park Service, Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve, plan your visit: eatingsleeping (https://www.nps.gov/glba/planyourvisit/eatingsleeping.htm), checked October 11, 2026
Wikipedia, Gustavus, Alaska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavus,_Alaska), checked October 11, 2026
National Park Service, Wrangell – St. Elias National Park & Preserve, plan your visit (https://www.nps.gov/wrst/planyourvisit/index.htm), checked October 11, 2026
Wikipedia, Kennecott, Alaska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennecott,_Alaska), checked October 11, 2026
Wikipedia, McCarthy, Alaska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthy,_Alaska), checked October 11, 2026
Alyeska Resort, Girdwood (https://www.alyeskaresort.com/), checked October 11, 2026
Princess Cruises, Alaska wilderness lodges (https://www.princess.com/en-us/lodges), checked October 11, 2026