Public Lands: The Evolution of America's Best Idea

Katmai

National Park & Preserve

Alaska

Established:

National Park: December 2, 1980
National Monument: September 24, 1918

4,093,077 acres

Annual Visitors: 37,818 (2016)

Official Site: https://www.nps.gov/katm/index.htm

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katmai_National_Park_and_Preserve

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KatmaiNPP

Twitter: https://twitter.com/KatmaiNPS

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClod-wlDF454WZXeiHtRrhA

flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/katmainps

From Wikipedia:

Katmai National Park and Preserve is a United States National Park and Preserve in southern Alaska, notable for the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes and for its Alaskan brown bears. The park and preserve covers 4,093,077 acres (6,395.43 sq mi; 16,564.09 km²), being roughly the size of Wales. Most of this is a designated wilderness area in the national park where all hunting is banned, including over 3,922,000 acres (1,587,000 ha) of land. The park is named after Mount Katmai, its centerpiece stratovolcano. The park is located on the Alaska Peninsula, across from Kodiak Island, with headquarters in nearby King Salmon, about 290 miles (470 km) southwest of Anchorage. The area was first designated a national monument in 1918 to protect the area around the major 1912 volcanic eruption of Novarupta, which formed the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, a 40-square-mile (100 km²), 100-to-700-foot-deep (30 to 213 m) pyroclastic flow. The park includes as many as 18 individual volcanoes, seven of which have been active since 1900.

The National Geographic Society backed five expeditions to Katmai, beginning in 1915 with a trip to Kodiak Island and a short stay on the mainland. The expedition, led by Robert Fiske Griggs, a botanist who was initially interested in the study of plant recolonization. Griggs' follow-up expedition in 1916 discovered and named the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes and found Novarupta. The National Geographic Society, delighted with the discoveries, funded a larger expedition in 1917 to make a survey of the region. The subsequent articles published in National Geographic magazine brought the region to prominence in the public, and Griggs began to advocate for the protection of the area in the national park system, backed by the National Geographic Society. At this time legislation to establish Mount McKinley National Park (later renamed Denali National Park) was pending, and the idea of making Katmai a national park was discussed by National Park Service acting director Horace M. Albright and National Geographic Society president Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor. Albright advised that national park legislation was unlikely to pass, suggesting instead that the region be protected as a national monument by the President, using the Antiquities Act of 1906. After some negotiation, and after a 1918 expedition opined that the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes was a permanent feature, a proclamation was prepared to protect 1,080,000 acres (440,000 ha) around Mount Katmai, the valley, and the Iliuk Arm on the coast. Although only a third the area of the present park and preserve, the monument was nevertheless half the size of Yellowstone National Park from the outset. President Woodrow Wilson signed the proclamation of Katmai National Monument on September 24, 1918.

Following its designation, the monument was left undeveloped and largely unvisited until the 1950s. Initially designated because of its violent volcanic history, the monument and surrounding lands became appreciated for their abundance of sockeye salmon, the grizzly bears that fed upon them, and a wide variety of other Alaskan wildlife and marine life. After a series of boundary expansions, the present national park and preserve were established in 1980 under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980.