Katmai National Monument was created by President Woodrow Wilson on September 24, 1918 to preserve the famed Valley of 10,000 Smokes. This spectacular forty square mile, 100 to 700 foot deep, pyroclastic ash flow was deposited during the June 6-9, 1912 eruption of Novarupta, the most explosive and voluminous volcanic event of the Twentieth Century.

Katmai became a National Park & Preserve, and received Wilderness designation, by an act of Congress on December 2, 1980. The area is famous for volcanoes, brown bears, fish, and rugged wilderness. Katmai is also the site of the Brooks River National Historic Landmark, recognized as having North America's highest concentration of prehistoric human dwellings (about 900).

There are at least fourteen volcanoes in Katmai considered "active," more than in any other National Park. None of these are currently in eruption, but a few peaks do show an occasional steam plume.

Brown bear and salmon are abundant in Katmai. The number of brown bears has grown to more than 2,000, making them the world's largest protected population of these bigger cousins of the grizzly. Calorie-rich seafood is the reason brown bears get so big. During the peak of the world's largest sockeye salmon run each July, and during return of the "spawned out" salmon in September, forty to sixty bears congregate in Brooks Camp along the Brooks River and along the Naknek Lake and Brooks Lake shorelines. Brown bears along the 480 mile Katmai Coast also enjoy clams, crabs, and an occasional whale carcass. A study is under way to assess and improve human/bear relations along the Coast.

A rich variety of other wildlife is found in the Park, including beaver, moose, caribou, wolves, wolverine, lynx, red squirrel, snowshoe rabbit, mice, and voles. Birdlife includes tundra swans, several types of ducks, geese, gulls, and migratory shore birds, plus warblers, ravens, magpies, and a large population of bald eagles. Katmai's waters are home to world-class rainbow and lake trout, char, grayling, and all five varieties of salmon.

Katmai encompasses more than four million acres of pristine wilderness, with wild rivers and streams, rugged coastlines, broad green glacial-hewn valleys, active glaciers and volcanoes, and Naknek Lake, the largest lake within a National Park. Except for two short trails and the 23-mile Valley of 10,000 Smokes dirt road (accessible from Brooks Camp) and a short distance of dirt road at the western edge of the Park at Lake Camp, there are no maintained roads or trails within Katmai. Many visitors challenge the wilderness by canoe, kayak, and/or backpack each year (filing a Backcountry planner is recommended).

The area we now know as Katmai National Park & Preserve has been a very popular place for millennia. Archaeologists have discovered remains of nomadic hunter's camps dating back 9,000 years in the interior lake region of the Park. Impressive coastal sites show that marine sea mammal hunters were established along the Katmai Coast by 7,000 years ago. Large Native villages persisted along the Coast until Russian contact in the late 1700s, and were not completely abandoned until after Novarupta's cataclysmic eruption