Mendenhall Lake did not exist in 1900. The ice that filled its basin has withdrawn roughly three kilometres since the middle of the eighteenth century, leaving open water, a terminal moraine, and a thirteen-mile river of ice descending from the Juneau Icefield. That icefield spreads across about 1,500 square miles and feeds some 38 named glaciers. Mendenhall is the one Juneau can reach by road, which is why Juneau Whale Watching and Mendenhall Glacier Photo Safari tours begin in a city with no highway to the rest of Alaska. The Áakʼw Kwáan Tlingit knew the valley as Sítʼ Eetí Geiyí, the bay in place of the glacier. The name records a retreat more plainly than any survey line. John Muir, visiting in 1879, called the ice Auke Glacier. In 1892 it was renamed for Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, superintendent of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, whose office worked on the boundary between Alaska and Canada. The visitor centre above the lake opened in 1962, the first purpose-built facility of its kind in the United States Forest Service system. It still frames the ice through a wall of glass at 6000 Glacier Spur Rd. Saltwater carries the other half of the story. Humpback whales cross roughly 3,000 miles from Hawaiian breeding grounds to feed in Stephens Passage and Favorite Channel each summer. The pods here practise bubble-net feeding, a cooperative hunting method documented in few places on earth. Steller sea lions haul out on the channel rocks. Bald eagles hold the spruce line above the tideline. Inland, Steep Creek runs red with sockeye in late summer, drawing black bears within metres of a raised boardwalk, while Nugget Falls drops 377 feet onto the outwash plain beside the ice face. Both halves sit inside the Tongass National Forest, at 16.7 million acres the largest national forest in the country. Together they explain why a single Juneau Whale Watching and Mendenhall Glacier Photo Safari tour has become the defining shape of a day here. Photographers come for contrast: blue ice compressed under centuries of snow, then a fluke against grey water twenty minutes down the road. Roughly 700,000 people reach the recreation area each year, most arriving from berths in the downtown channel. The glacier gives up a little more ground each season, so the Mendenhall Glacier photo tours of 2026 record a landscape that will not repeat itself.