Katmai National Park and Preserve
— — the river the bears stand in.
Not only on a wall.
“Four million acres on the Alaska Peninsula, set aside in 1918 around the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, the ash plain left by the 1912 Novarupta eruption. The brown bears at Brooks Falls wait shoulder-deep for sockeye salmon to jump straight into their mouths in July. The volcanoes still steam. Most of the park has no road, no trail, and no cell signal. Float planes from King Salmon do the carrying.
Katmai National Park and Preserve, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Katmai National Park and Preserve covers about 4.1 million acres on the Alaska Peninsula, roughly 290 miles southwest of Anchorage. President Woodrow Wilson set it aside as a national monument in 1918 to protect the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, the ash flow left by the 1912 Novarupta eruption, the largest volcanic event of the twentieth century. Congress redesignated it as a national park in 1980 under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. There are no roads in. Access is by float plane from King Salmon, on Bristol Bay.
Brooks Falls is a six-foot ledge on the Brooks River, between Brooks Lake and Naknek Lake. Sockeye salmon returning from Bristol Bay queue at the base of the falls in late June and July, leaping the ledge to reach their spawning gravels upstream. Brown bears stand in the seam at the top of the falls and pluck the salmon out of the air; on a heavy day a large male will eat thirty fish. The National Park Service runs the live Brooks Falls bear cam from the elevated viewing platform across the riffle.
Outside the Brooks Camp corridor, Katmai is almost entirely roadless. The park holds more than a dozen active or recently active volcanoes along the Aleutian arc, including Mount Katmai, Trident, and Mount Mageik. The 1912 Novarupta eruption ejected roughly 30 cubic kilometres of magma in three days and reshaped the upper Ukak River valley into the steaming ash plain the 1916 Griggs expedition named the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. The fumaroles have cooled. The brown bears outnumber the visitors in most parts of the park, and the wind carries from Bristol Bay.