Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes

In June 1912 a vent called Novarupta, on the Alaska Peninsula, produced the largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century by volume, releasing roughly 13 cubic kilometres of magma in about sixty hours. Glowing flows of pumice and ash poured down the upper Ukak River valley and filled it to a depth of up to about 200 metres, burying some 100 square kilometres of forest and meadow. What had been an unnamed corridor used by Alutiiq travellers and grizzly bears became a flat, pale, lifeless plain – the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, in Katmai National Park and Preserve.

The name comes from the botanist Robert F. Griggs, who reached the valley in 1916 on an expedition for the National Geographic Society and found its floor pierced by uncountable fumaroles, where water trapped under the hot deposit was boiling off as steam. In 1916 he counted around a thousand plumes higher than 150 metres; a survey in 1918 recorded vent temperatures above 400 °C. As the deposit cooled, the steam faded – only a few hundred vents remained by 1929 and about ten by 1940. In 1918 the area was declared Katmai National Monument to protect the landscape the eruption had created. The same eruption caused the summit of nearby Mount Katmai to collapse into a caldera, setting off more than a hundred strong earthquakes.

The smokes are gone, but the landscape still feels freshly made. Vegetation has barely gained a foothold on the ash, and the River Lethe and Knife Creek have cut narrow gorges straight through the layered deposit, exposing its bands of pumice and welded tuff in vertical walls. Volcanoes of the Aleutian Range – Katmai, Trident, Mageik and others – surround the valley, and several remain active. In 1965 and 1966 NASA and the US Geological Survey brought groups of Apollo astronauts here for geology training; among them were Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Edgar Mitchell, James Irwin, Charlie Duke, Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, all of whom later walked on the Moon.

Getting there

The valley lies in the interior of Katmai National Park, on the Alaska Peninsula, about 440 km southwest of Anchorage. The nearest airport is King Salmon (AKN), about 80 km away, where the park has its headquarters. Katmai has no road connection to the rest of Alaska: visitors usually reach Brooks Camp by floatplane, and from there the park's only road runs about 32 km (20 miles) to an overlook at the edge of the valley.