Alaska
KATMAI
ESTABLISHED 1980
This remote national park on the Alaskan Peninsula offers a front-row seat to one of nature’s most storied hunting events. Each year, hulking brown bears converge here to feast on the running salmon.
Katmai National Park and Preserve offers a classic image of wild Alaska. In the middle of Brooks River stands a massive brown bear, poised at the waterfall’s edge. Just as a sockeye salmon leaps, the bear pounces, and “click”—the photo (if not the fish) is yours.
Brooks Camp is the heart of the salmon run, where as many as 30 brown bears may show up in a day. And, while this is the mainstay attraction of this remote 6,400-sq-mile (16,575-sq-km) national park, it’s by no means the only draw. From Brooks Camp, set out on the 5-mile (8-km) established trail into a forest that sings with the chirping of birds and provides cover for scurrying martens, porcupines, and weasels. Forty-two mammal species live here, and you stand a good chance of running across many on the trails. The bears, too, aren’t the only ones in for some great fishing—trout, salmon, and char are plentiful.
A pack of Alaska brown bears gather at McNeil River; 2,200 roam the park
Did You Know?
One million salmon journey from Bristol Bay to the Naknek lakes each year.
Into the wild
Exploring this remote and wild park isn’t easy. Intrepid travelers with good wilderness skills will be rewarded, however, with canoe or kayak trips that take you through mile after mile of river and lake. For ocean kayak adventures, extend the trip to look for sea lions, seals, and sea otters, or stay closer to home with an overnight paddle to Fure Cabin on Naknek Lake’s Bay of Islands. A rustic frontier experience in a 1926 spruce log cabin awaits.
From Brooks Camp, you can take a short, doable hike to the top of Dumpling Mountain, which offers magnificent views of this land of lakes, forest, streams, and marsh. Ranger-led treks reveal the mysterious and ethereal Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, the site of the largest volcanic eruption in the 20th century. The blast formed the bizarre-looking, ash-covered moonscape you see today, as well as the crumpled summit of Mount Katmai, which collapsed in the 1912 eruption.
July is the time to visit when the salmon are running, the wildflowers are at their perfect peak, and the bears at Brooks Falls are hungry.
700
The number of unique plant species that thrive in the park.
9,000
Years since the first human inhabitants moved here. People of Alutiiq descent still call this land home.
Sea lions lounge on rocks on the Pacific side of Katmai National Park and Preserve