The Katmai National Park & Preserve Stamp

Where Katmai is

Katmai, for people who count parks

On June 6, 1912, a vent called Novarupta opened near the base of Mount Katmai and erupted for about sixty hours. It was the largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century, moving roughly thirty times the magma of Mount St. Helens in 1980. On Kodiak, across the strait, ash fell so thickly that at midday a lantern held at arm's length could barely be seen. Ash-fall was reported across the Northern Hemisphere, and the summit of Mount Katmai, six miles from the actual vent, collapsed into a caldera as the magma beneath it drained sideways to Novarupta. Working out that the mountain that fell in was not the mountain that erupted took scientists decades. Because the region was so sparsely settled, and villages evacuated, no one died.

The park exists because of what an expedition found four years later. Robert Griggs, exploring for the National Geographic Society in 1916, crested a pass and looked into a valley floor smoking with thousands of fumaroles where superheated ash lay hundreds of feet deep. He named it the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, and the Society's campaign led to Katmai National Monument in 1918, protected as a volcanic laboratory, with the bears an afterthought. The smokes themselves cooled and died within a few decades; the name outlived them.

The bears took over the story from there. The monument grew through the twentieth century, and on December 2, 1980, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act made it Katmai National Park & Preserve, some four million acres of volcanic coast, lakes and tundra with no road in. What the expansions mostly protected was salmon country: the lakes and rivers feeding Bristol Bay. And salmon country is bear country. Katmai today holds one of the largest protected brown bear populations on Earth, and the bears outnumber the park's year-round human neighbors comfortably.

Official Katmai park site (nps.gov)

What lives at Katmai

Brooks Falls works because of a six-foot ledge. Sockeye salmon pushing upstream to spawn have to leap it, and in July they stack up below the falls by the thousand. The bears learn positions the way tradesmen learn a job site: the lip, where a standing bear catches fish out of the air; the plunge pool; the shallows below for the ones that misjudge. Individual bears hold and defend the productive spots for years, and the park's viewing platforms let people watch from a few dozen feet away.

The whole show runs on Bristol Bay, whose watershed supports the largest sockeye salmon runs on Earth: tens of millions of fish in a season returning from the ocean to the lakes where they hatched. Katmai's lakes and rivers are the spawning grounds, and the dead and dying fish feed not just bears but eagles, gulls, otters and, through carcasses hauled into the woods, the forest itself.

A brown bear's year is an eating contest with winter, and Katmai's bears are among the biggest anywhere because the salmon let them win it. In late summer a big male can put on hundreds of pounds, entering the fall visibly changed. Since 2014 the park has run Fat Bear Week, an online bracket where the public votes on which bear best achieved autumn roundness, a joke with a serious point, since the fat is exactly what survival looks like.

The volcano country is habitat too, in a stranger way. The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes is still mostly bare, a pale plain of welded ash cut by rivers into sheer gorges, with plants working the edges a century on. In the mid-1960s NASA sent Apollo astronauts to train on it, on the theory that it was as close to the Moon as the Earth offered.

The Katmai designs

Brooks Falls Bear Catching Salmon

The most famous wildlife scene in the park system: a brown bear on the lip of a six-foot falls, jaws open toward a sockeye in mid-leap. It happens every July when the run arrives and the bears take up their stations. If you have stood on the platform and heard a fish hit a mouth, this is the stamp.

Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes

The ash-flow plain left by the 1912 eruption: hundreds of feet deep in places, cut into gorges by the rivers, still nearly bare after a century. The thousands of fumaroles that named it went out generations ago, which makes the valley a monument to its own violence. Apollo astronauts trained here because it was the closest thing to the Moon available.

Novarupta Volcano

The vent itself: a squat gray dome of lava, roughly a quarter mile across, that plugged the opening after the largest eruption of the twentieth century. Mount Katmai, miles away, lost its summit taking the blame. Choosing Novarupta as your stamp is choosing the correct answer to a question most people get wrong.

How to record your Katmai visit

Katmai, asked and answered