A harbor town wedged between mountains and Resurrection Bay, built around fishing boats, glacier tours, and a footrace up a mountain that seems designed to hurt.
You feel the geography of Seward before you understand it. The town is squeezed onto a narrow shelf of land between Resurrection Bay and a wall of mountains that rise so abruptly behind Main Street that the buildings on the western side seem to be leaning against them for support. I drove down from Anchorage on the Seward Highway, which is reason enough on its own — the road follows Turnagain Arm past beluga-hunting grounds and hanging glaciers before climbing over the pass into the Kenai Peninsula — and arrived to find a town that felt like a fishing village that had accidentally become a cruise port without losing its character in the process.
The harbor is where Seward actually functions. This is the launch point for most Kenai Fjords glacier and wildlife tours, and by six in the morning the docks are loud with charter captains loading coolers and clients half-asleep with coffee. I went out on a smaller boat — eight passengers instead of eighty — and we spent six hours threading between islands crowded with sea lions, watching humpbacks lunge-feed near Cape Resurrection, and finally idling in front of Holgate Glacier while chunks of ice the size of delivery trucks broke off with a sound like distant artillery. The Alaska SeaLife Center, right on the waterfront, is a legitimate research institution as well as an aquarium, and its puffin exhibit — underwater viewing of birds that fly through water rather than air — rearranged something in how I think about puffins.
Every July, Seward hosts the Mount Marathon Race, which is exactly what it sounds like: a run straight up and down the mountain behind town, gaining nearly a thousand meters in under a mile, through scree and brush and a notoriously dangerous gully near the top. I happened to be there for it and stood in a crowd of what seemed like the entire town cheering runners who arrived at the finish line bleeding from the shins, which is apparently normal and expected. It’s one of the odder pieces of small-town Americana I’ve witnessed, and I mean that as a genuine compliment.
Beyond the harbor, Exit Glacier sits a short drive out of town within Kenai Fjords National Park, and the trail to its edge is posted with small signs marking where the glacier’s terminus stood in different years — 1917, 1951, 1978 — a walk that turns into an unplanned lesson in retreat measured in decades. It’s sobering in a way that’s hard to shake once you’ve seen the numbers laid out on the ground like that.
When to go: June through August for boat tours and reliable weather, though be prepared for rain regardless. Book Kenai Fjords tours early in summer — they sell out. If you can time a visit around July 4th, the Mount Marathon Race is worth witnessing even if you have no intention of running it yourself.