Katmai National Park and Preserve
United States National Park and National Preserve in southern Alaska
Katmai National Park and Preserve is a United States national park and preserve in southwest Alaska, notable for the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes and for its brown bears. The park and preserve encompass 4,093,077 acres (6,395.43 sq mi; 16,564.09 km2), which is between the land areas of Connecticut and New Jersey. Most of the national park is a designated wilderness area. 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.
Initially designated because of its volcanic history, the monument was left undeveloped and largely unvisited until the 1950s. The monument and surrounding lands became appreciated for their wide variety of wildlife, including an abundance of sockeye salmon and the brown bears that feed upon them. After a series of boundary expansions, the present national park and preserve were established in 1980 under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.
The public source identifies “Katmai National Park and Preserve” as united States National Park and National Preserve in southern Alaska. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Katmai, National and Park.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Katmai National Park and Preserve”, the useful work is to connect “united States National Park and National Preserve in southern Alaska” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q609902. VIAF identifies the subject as 135234407. The Library of Congress control number is no2006008324. Authority coordinates are 58.500, -155.000. 5 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1918, 1912, 1900 and 1980.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Katmai National Park and Preserve” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.