Mendenhall Glacier Ice Caves in 2026: What Is Actually Left

The caves were meltwater plumbing, not architecture

Glacier caves at Mendenhall formed the way they form everywhere: meltwater found a path under and through the low, thin ice near the terminus, carved a channel, and the channel widened until the roof was thin enough for daylight to come through it in the blue that made the photographs famous. That is a seasonal, self-destroying process. A channel that is wide enough to walk into is by definition close to the point where its ceiling cannot hold, which is why the Forest Service has never treated any Mendenhall cave as a facility, never signed a route to one, and never listed one among the attractions of the recreation area.

The best-known cave partially collapsed in July 2014 and was reported by the Forest Service as collapsed. Smaller caves formed intermittently afterwards, and in 2019 the Forest Service told visitors to understand the risks and recommended going with a guide precisely because the system was changing constantly. That is the last point at which any official body discussed Mendenhall caves as something a person might reasonably go and see.

Then the ice that held them left

The caves lived in the shallowest part of the glacier, the section that floated at and just behind the waterline of Mendenhall Lake. That is also the section that retreated fastest. Between 1998 and 2020 the ice pulled back about 148 feet a year where it terminated in the lake, against about 56 feet a year where it rested on bedrock, roughly two and a half times quicker in the water. The fastest phase ran from 2007 to 2011, at approximately the length of a football field each year.

In February 2025 the process turned violent enough to be newsworthy. On 11 February the Forest Service warned Juneau residents and visitors to keep away from the glacier face after a large crack opened, stating that a substantial portion of the Mendenhall Glacier was expected to collapse at any time. Two days later a portion of the face calved into Mendenhall Lake, and a second warning followed. The thin lake-terminating ice, the part where the caves had formed, broke apart during this phase, and on 23 November 2025 the glacier separated from Mendenhall Lake entirely. Glaciologist Jason Amundson and environmental scientist Eran Hood of the University of Alaska Southeast confirmed the separation; they note that brief seasonal contact may still happen in very wet conditions, but the glacier is no longer functionally a lake-terminating one.

What that means for a visitor is simple. The geometry that produced walk-in caves at Mendenhall does not currently exist, and nobody can tell you when or whether it will again.

What is not known, and will not be claimed here

Two things are worth stating plainly because other pages guess at them. First, there is no published fatality or injury count for the Mendenhall ice caves. No Forest Service source and no news source carries one, so this page does not print a number and you should distrust any page that does. The only quantified safety figure that exists for this area is about off-trail hiking on the West Glacier Trail, and it appears further down.

Second, the current state of any specific cave or void in the ice is not documented by anyone authoritative. That is precisely why this page uses the past tense throughout and does not tell you that a particular cave is open, closed, safe or reachable. The honest position is that the caves of the 2010s are gone, that ice near a retreating terminus is unstable, and that nothing about the present ice has been surveyed and published for public visits.

An image pack with no expiry date

Search the phrase and the results fill with the same handful of frames: a lone figure in a red jacket under a rippled blue ceiling, meltwater running over gravel, light coming through ice a metre thick. Those pictures were made in the years around the collapse, when successive short-lived openings kept appearing and photographers went in fast. Image search has no sense of time. A striking photograph from 2016 outranks an accurate paragraph from 2026, gets reposted with a current year attached to it, and reappears on itinerary pages and third-party listings that were never checked against the Forest Service.

The result is a genuine planning trap. Visitors arrive in Juneau expecting a chamber of blue ice within reach of a trail, and find a glacier that has pulled back out of its own lake. The disappointment is avoidable, and avoiding it is most of the value of reading this before you book anything.

Where the caves actually were

They were not near the Visitor Center. Nothing in the paved core of the recreation area, and nothing along Nugget Falls Trail, ever led to a cave; the formations sat in the low ice at the terminus, on the far side from the building, and reaching them meant leaving maintained trail and crossing unstable ground on foot or approaching by water. That is worth knowing because a large share of the questions people ask about this assume the caves were a stop you could add to a two-hour visit. They never were. If you are planning what to actually do with your time on the ground, the walk-by-walk breakdown is in our guide to things to do at Mendenhall Glacier.

The glacier has a long record of uncovering things as it goes. In 2012 retreating ice exposed an ancient forest at Mendenhall, with tree stumps dated to about 2,350 years old at the oldest and 1,400 to 1,200 years old at the youngest. That is the same process that made the caves and then removed them: ice that moves, thins and lets go of what it was holding.

On the ice, beside the ice, or over it

The distinction that matters is whether you want to stand on the glacier or to be close to its face. Those are different products at different prices, and neither of them is a cave.

The helicopter landing is the only routine way onto the surface

A helicopter glacier landing at $429 flies over the Juneau Icefield, which spans 1,500 square miles and feeds 38 large glaciers, sets down on the ice and runs a guided walk at the landing site. Glacier boots are provided and the cruise-ship transfer is included; the whole thing takes about two and a half hours door to door, which makes it one of the shortest premium options in Juneau relative to what it delivers. What you get is crevasses, meltwater channels and the surface texture of a working glacier. What you do not get is a cave, and no reputable operator will tell you otherwise.

If being on the surface is not the point and being near the ice is, the water route is better value. The Mendenhall Lake canoe tour crosses the lake among the icebergs with a maximum of ten paddlers, provides full rain gear and takes about four hours, with a minimum age of 12. A longer version, the glacier ice adventure canoe and hike, adds a guided walk on the terrain at the face for around $377 and carries a 5.0 rating from more than 1,400 reviews, with transport, rain gear, boots and snacks included. Both are genuinely close-range, weather-exposed days, and both were built around a shoreline that has changed as the ice pulled back, which is one reason the operators reroute rather than publish a fixed landing point.

For a wider view of how these sit against the shuttle and combo tiers, the glacier tours that get you onto the ice are listed alongside every other way to see Mendenhall, and the seasonal picture, including the winter months when the ice is at its most photogenic and the Visitor Center runs reduced hours, is on our best time to visit Mendenhall Glacier page.

The one number that is actually published

People still set out to find ice on foot, usually from the West Glacier Trail, and the Forest Service is unusually direct about how that goes. In its own words, hiking off the West Glacier Trail has resulted in 10 to 12 search and rescue efforts annually, and 75 percent of those rescues involved injuries. The agency warns against trying to get around the rock peninsula, a detour of more than two miles through thick brush and deep rock crevices, and says that reaching the glacier itself requires backcountry experience and several hours round trip.

That figure is about off-trail hiking, not about caves, and it is the only quantified safety statistic in this area that anyone has published. It is enough. The trail itself is 3.5 miles one way, rated moderate to challenging, open year round and with no water available, and it reaches viewpoints rather than the ice. As a walk it is excellent. As a route to a cave it is a rescue statistic waiting to be updated.

Add the February 2025 warnings to that. When the Forest Service says a substantial portion of the glacier is expected to collapse at any time, the hazard it is describing is exactly the hazard of standing under or beside a terminus, which is what entering a cave means. The ice has since pulled back further and the face has moved. Nobody is monitoring it for recreational visits.

So the accurate answer to the question that brought you here is a flat one: the Mendenhall ice caves are not something you can visit, book or plan around in 2026, and the pictures that suggest otherwise are a decade old. That is not a reason to write off the glacier. It is still a 13.6-mile river of ice off an icefield that has been measured continuously since 1942, still walkable to within a lake's width on free trails, and still changing fast enough that what you see this summer is not what the next visitor sees.

Compare the ice-access tours compared against the free walks in our things to do at Mendenhall Glacier guide, and if you are weighing whether any of it justifies the ticket, our honest read on whether a Mendenhall Glacier tour is worth it works through the money.