National Park of Katmai

Location: Alaska
Established: December 2, 1980
Size: 4,725,188 acres (1,912,216 hectares)

Volcanoes and bears—powerful, unpredictable, and awe inspiring—embody the wild heart of Katmai. Within the borders of the national park and preserve are 15 volcanoes, some of them still steaming, and North America's largest population of protected brown bears—about 2,000 of them.

You can hike, kayak, and canoe here. You can fish waist-deep in rivers as clear as glass. And you can watch the best fish catcher of all, the great Alaskan brown bear, sometimes diving completely under the water for its prey, sometimes catching fish in midair. At the end of the day you can relax in a rustic yet sumptuous lodge on the shore of a sapphire lake and recount the day's enchantments.

In 1912 a volcano here erupted with a force ten times that of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Suddenly news of Katmai, a place hardly anyone had heard of, was on front pages around the world. Ash filled the air, global temperatures cooled, acid rain burned clothing off lines in Vancouver, British Columbia, and on Kodiak Island, just across Shelikof Strait from Katmai, day became night.

Leading a 1916 expedition sponsored by the National Geographic Society, botanist Robert Griggs ascended Katmai Pass from Shelikof Strait. "The whole valley as far as the eye could reach was full of hundreds, no thousands—literally, tens of thousands—of smokes curling up from its fissured floor," he wrote. The smokes were fumaroles steaming 500 to 1,000 feet (150 to 300 meters) into the air. Griggs, who named the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, spearheaded the campaign to include Katmai in the National Park System.

Today, the smokes are gone from the valley. But steam vents still appear elsewhere in the park.