Glaciers, slow rivers of ice, have scoured and shaped Cook Inlet and Kachemak Bay. Unlike their dynamic sidekicks, the violent and unpredictable earthquakes and volcanoes, glaciers are patient earthmovers. These blue giants begin with the fall of snowflakes. Winter upon winter, ice age cold prevented melting. Under pressure, snowflakes compacted to become millions of interlocking ice crystals. Over time their own weight causes glaciers to flow downhill, bulldozing as they go. As glaciers retreat, they shrink in size because more ice is melting, but the ice continues to flow downhill.

Since the first ice mass crept southward several million years ago, the waltzing advance and retreat of glaciers have sculpted Kachemak Bay. Their movement contoured mountains, set the course of rivers, left bench lands, deposited the Homer Spit, and gouged U-shaped valleys, such as Tutka Bay and Sadie Cove.

In October 1967, a huge landslide collapsed into the lake below Grewingk Glacier. It carried enough mountainside to fill eleven million dump trucks - a wedge of earth and rock 2,000 feet tall, half a mile wide, and more than 600 feet deep. A forceful wave roared across the glacial flats toward Humpy Creek - knocking down trees and tumbling icebergs.

The whole flood plain was full of icebergs. Some were Volkswagen sized. A lot of them had been rolled so that they were round.
-Al Davis, Homer

Thousands of trees and bushes went into the bay. It messed up the whole Inlet. Fishermen caught them in their nets. Dead wood, alders, spruce - everything went into the bay.
-Yule Kilcher