Novarupta
— — the small dome the largest eruption of the last century left behind.
Not only on a wall.
“Novarupta is the lava plug that capped the largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century, on a remote shoulder of the Alaska Peninsula. In 1912 it pushed roughly thirteen cubic kilometres of ash and pumice into the sky and filled the valley below to depths of two hundred metres. Today it is a low grey dome above a wide ash plain. The bears at Brooks Falls are an hour's flight away. Hardly anyone walks here.
Novarupta, 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.
Novarupta sits inside Katmai National Park and Preserve on the Alaska Peninsula, about 470 kilometres southwest of Anchorage. The vent lies at the head of the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, a sixty-square-kilometre plain of pyroclastic flow deposits that filled the upper Ukak River drainage in 1912. The lava dome itself is small, about 90 metres across and 65 metres tall, rising from an ash plain ringed by the Buttress Range and Mount Katmai to the east. The site is reached only on foot or by floatplane out of King Salmon.
The June 1912 eruption ran roughly sixty hours and ranked as a magnitude six on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, the largest of the twentieth century by erupted volume. Magma drained from beneath Mount Katmai, ten kilometres east, and vented at Novarupta, leaving Katmai's summit to collapse into a 600-metre-deep caldera. Ash darkened skies as far as Vancouver and the eruption was heard in Juneau, 1,200 kilometres away. The National Geographic expeditions led by Robert F. Griggs from 1915 onward named the still-steaming valley below and lobbied for the national monument designation that came in 1918.
There is no road to Novarupta. Most visitors fly into King Salmon on a scheduled flight from Anchorage, take a floatplane on to Brooks Camp inside Katmai, and book a guided van transfer twenty-three miles up to the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes overlook. The hike to the lava dome runs about twenty-three kilometres round trip across loose pumice, with stream crossings and no marked trail beyond the Three Forks Cabin. Backcountry permits are free but required, and bear-resistant food canisters are issued at Brooks Camp. Most parties go in July and August.