Katmai National Park

In June 1912 the Novarupta vent on the Alaska Peninsula blew out about 15 cubic kilometers of magma in roughly 60 hours, the largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century anywhere on Earth. Ash flows buried a nearby valley hundreds of feet deep, and when botanist Robert Griggs reached it in 1916 he found countless steam vents rising from the deposits and named it the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. His reports led President Woodrow Wilson to proclaim Katmai National Monument in 1918, and Congress enlarged it into a national park and preserve in 1980.

Today Katmai is better known for bears. The park protects an estimated 2,200 brown bears, and each summer dozens gather at Brooks Falls to catch sockeye salmon leaping upstream toward Brooks Lake, a scene broadcast worldwide by webcam and celebrated each autumn in the online Fat Bear Week contest. No road links the park to the rest of Alaska, so visitors fly in from King Salmon or Anchorage. Sugpiaq (Alutiiq) and Yup'ik ancestors lived along these coasts and rivers for thousands of years, and archaeological sites near Brooks River are a National Historic Landmark.

• Alaska
  The largest U.S. state, a sub-Arctic giant located in
• Kodiak Island
  Alaska’s Emerald Isle and home of the Kodiak brown bear near
• Lake Clark National Park
  Volcanoes, salmon lakes and Dena’ina homeland southwest of Anchorage near