Katmai National Park and Preserve is located on the Alaska Peninsula in Southwest Alaska, with headquarters in the nearby town of King Salmon, about 290 miles southwest of Anchorage.
The park and preserve cover 4,093,077 acres. Most of this is a designated wilderness area in the national park where all hunting is banned. The park is named after Mount Katmai, its centre piece Volcano. The area was first designated a national monument in 1918 to protect the area around the major 1912 volcanic eruption of Novarupta, which formed the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. The park includes as many as 18 individual volcanoes, seven of which have been active since 1900.
Following its designation as a national park, the monument was left undeveloped and largely unvisited until the 1950s. Katmai and the surrounding lands, became appreciated for their abundance of sockeye salmon, the grizzly bears that fed upon them, and a wide variety of other Alaskan wildlife and marine life.
After a series of boundary expansions, the present national park and preserve were established in 1980 under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. A truly remarkable ecosystem, beautiful to behold and full of natural treasures to discover.