Royal Caribbean will not be taking passengers through Tracy Arm Fjord this summer. Neither will MSC Cruises, Carnival Cruise Line, Holland America Line, Virgin Voyages, or regional tour company Allen Marine.
In total, at least 163 scheduled visits to one of southeastern Alaska’s most celebrated natural destinations have been wiped from 2026 itineraries across five major cruise lines and eleven ships, not because of political instability or a public health concern, but because a mountain collapsed into the ocean.
On the morning of August 10, 2025, at approximately 5:30 a.m., a landslide originating high above the toe of the South Sawyer Glacier sent debris crashing into the water at the head of Tracy Arm Fjord.
The water surged more than a quarter-mile up the mountain wall on the opposite side of the fjord. The event was one of the largest tsunami-generating landslides on record in the region.
No cruise ships were in the fjord at the time. No one was killed. Kayakers camped near where Tracy and Endicott Arms meet had much of their gear swept away by the rushing water.
Nine months later, the fjord remains off-limits for the ships that have carried millions of passengers past its twin tidewater glaciers over the decades.
Scientists say additional slides, and the tsunamis they could trigger, remain a real possibility. The cruise lines have made their calculations accordingly.
What Is Tracy Arm?
Tracy Arm is a roughly 30-mile fjord located approximately 45 miles southeast of Juneau, carved into the Tongass National Forest and part of the Tracy Arm-Fords Terror Wilderness.
It is named after Benjamin Tracy, the United States Navy Secretary in the 1890s. For most of the people who visit it, the name is background trivia, what matters is what you see when a cruise ship turns into the narrow inlet and the mountains close in on either side.
The fjord features two tidewater glaciers, the North and South Sawyer, that reach directly into the water. The walls rise steep enough that sunlight arrives at angles.
Waterfalls drop from heights that make the ship feel small. The glaciers calve, releasing chunks of ice into the water, and seals climb onto the floating pieces to rest.
It is not a port stop where passengers disembark and walk around. It is a scenic cruising experience, viewed from the deck, best understood as a stretch of time when ordinary life stops and the scale of the natural world becomes difficult to process.
Travel agent Nate Vallier, who has been selling Alaska itineraries for years, described it plainly, “Tracy Arm is the majestic princess, you know, she is the queen of fjords.”
The alternative that cruise lines are now offering passengers, nearby Endicott Arm, is “still beautiful by any means,” he said. “But it’s just not the same.”
What Happened On August 10, 2025?
The landslide that changed the 2026 Alaska cruise season originated on a slope that, according to Gabriel Wolken, manager of Alaska’s climate and ice hazards program, had not previously been identified as an active hazard.
That is part of what makes it significant beyond its immediate scale. The slope was not flagged. It was not being monitored as a known risk. And then it failed, catastrophically.
The debris that entered the water has been estimated at as much as 100 million cubic meters.
The energy of that material displacing the fjord’s water was enough to send a surge more than a quarter-mile up the opposite mountain wall.
The wave that traveled out of the fjord swept through the area where Tracy and Endicott Arms meet, stripping kayakers of their gear on a nearby island. No deaths. No injuries among cruise passengers, because no cruise ships were there. But the message from the mountain was clear enough.
Steven Sobieszczyk, a spokesperson for the U.S. Geological Survey, has been direct about what scientists expect going forward:
“Continued rockfall and small-scale sliding from the exposed landslide scar are expected and could impact the water, potentially causing a future localized tsunami.”
Steep landslide areas continue to change for years after an initial slide, Sobieszczyk has said, the exposed scar creates new instability that can persist for a long time.
Mike West, Alaska’s state seismologist and director of the Alaska Earthquake Center, framed it practically:
“Anytime you collapse the side of a mountain, I think it’s a safe assumption to assume that you’ve got an unstable mountainside. It is perfectly reasonable, or geologically reasonable, that there could be follow-on activity.”
Scientists are still working to understand what caused the original collapse and to assess what other hazards may exist in the broader Tracy Arm fjord network.
None of that uncertainty has been resolved in time for the 2026 cruise season.
How Did The Cancellations Unfold?
Carnival Cruise Line was the first of the major lines to formally remove Tracy Arm from its 2026 Alaska itineraries, making the call in late March. Letters went out to booked guests telling them that “the waterways in the area are currently not suitable for cruise ship navigation” and that their sailings would instead go through Endicott Arm.
Carnival’s cancellations cover 53 individual calls across three ships, the Carnival Spirit and Carnival Miracle, both operating round-trip from Seattle with 21 calls each, and the Carnival Luminosa operating from San Francisco with 11 calls.
Holland America Line followed, cancelling 46 calls across four ships. Royal Caribbean then joined what was becoming an industry-wide consensus, notifying affected travelers by email:
“As guest safety remains our top priority and current waterway conditions are not suitable for cruise ship navigation in Tracy Arm Fjord, Alaskan itineraries will instead visit the Endicott Arm and Dawes Glacier.”
MSC Cruises became the latest to announce, confirming this week that the MSC Poesia, a 3,000-passenger ship beginning its inaugural Alaska season with a departure from Seattle on May 11, will bypass Tracy Arm for all 20 of its planned fjord visits this year.
MSC’s statement reads:
“Unfortunately, we are unable to proceed with the planned navigation around the Tracy Arm Fjord, as current ice conditions and geological instability prevent safe navigation in the area. Although this change is due to reasons beyond our control, we sincerely apologize for any disappointment this may cause.”
Virgin Voyages and regional tour company Allen Marine are also rerouting to Endicott Arm and Dawes Glacier. Norwegian Cruise Line confirmed it does not have voyages sailing by Tracy Arm, so no adjustment was needed.
The total count of cancelled Tracy Arm visits for 2026 now stands at at least 163 across five cruise lines and eleven ships.
What Do Passengers Get Instead?
Endicott Arm is the replacement that every cruise line has settled on, and the choice makes geographic sense, it is located in the same Tracy Arm-Fords Terror Wilderness as Tracy Arm itself, roughly 50 miles from Juneau (slightly further than the 45-mile Tracy Arm).
The fjord features dramatic granite cliffs rather than the ice-heavy scenery of Tracy Arm, and the 600-foot Dawes Glacier sits at its head. It is, by any reasonable measure, a spectacular destination.
It is also not Tracy Arm. Vallier’s description of the substitution captures what passengers who specifically booked Alaska itineraries for the Tracy Arm experience are likely to feel. The alternative is beautiful, but the thing they came for is gone, at least for this year.
No cruise line has indicated whether the substitution will extend beyond 2026, or whether any of them expect to return to Tracy Arm in 2027.
That question depends on scientists completing their hazard assessment, the fjord stabilising, and the cruise lines making a determination that navigation is safe again.
None of those conditions have been publicly projected to a timeline.
The Larger Picture
The August 2025 landslide at Tracy Arm is part of a pattern that scientists have been documenting across Alaska and other glaciated regions for years. As temperatures rise and glaciers retreat, the slopes that were previously supported and buttressed by ice become exposed and unstable.
The South Sawyer Glacier, like most Alaskan glaciers, has been retreating. The slope that failed last August was not previously flagged as a hazard, which is precisely the problem with glacial retreat at scale.
It creates new instability in places that were not previously mapped as dangerous.
Southeast Alaska experiences landslides with some regularity. The Tracy Arm fjord network, as a narrow inlet surrounded by steep terrain, has experienced them before.
The August 2025 event was one of the largest on record, and it happened on a slope that no one was watching.
That combination, scale, location, and the absence of prior warning, is what has made the entire cruise industry treat the fjord as a no-go zone for the 2026 season rather than simply a route requiring extra caution.
The Alaska cruise season typically runs from May through early October. For the hundreds of thousands of passengers booked on affected sailings, the summer’s itinerary through southeastern Alaska will look different than what they signed up for, still beautiful, by all accounts, but missing the destination that has been described, by people who have been there, as a queen.
