Katmai's Brooks River Cultural Landscapes: A Road, a Camp, a Fish Lab and 4,500 Years

The Brooks River area of Katmai National Park and Preserve, on the northern Alaska Peninsula, is famous today for bear viewing and sport fishing — but people have lived here for 4,500 years, and their lives are written into the land. Four documented cultural landscapes lie around the river, places where culturally and historically significant changes to the land made what visitors see today. The National Park Service protects the historic character of each by identifying and managing the features that define it.

The four cultural landscapes of the Brooks River area. NPS / Alaska Regional Office.

The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes Road

The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes Road landscape. NPS / Alaska Regional Office.

The road runs 22.5 miles southeast from the Brooks River developed area to the Three Forks Overlook.

• Planned in summer 1961 and built in summer 1962 under the Park Service's Mission 66 development program; concessioner-led day tours have used it every summer since 1963.
• Built as a ten-foot-wide jeep road of gravel, it follows the Park Service's principles of scenic road design, with views, vistas and rest stops that show off the landscape and the park's defining geological wonder, the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes.
• Building it was debated by nationally significant figures, among them Senator Ernest Gruening, and by groups including the Sierra Club.
• It is not connected to any larger road system, and only park, concessioner and contractor vehicles use it.

More: Valley of 10,000 Smokes Road Historic District.

Brooks Camp Historic District

The Brooks Camp Historic District. NPS / Alaska Regional Office.

Brooks Camp sits on the west shore of Naknek Lake.

• 1950: the Park Service signed a contract with Petersen's Northern Consolidated Airlines (NCA) — its first concession lease to an airline, and the first time an airline provided the main access to a Park Service site.
• 1960s: to broaden visitation, the Park Service and NCA built a series of milled cedar log cabins called Pan Abodes, after the company that made them. Pan Abode became the park's most recognizable architecture, central to its rustic northern-frontier feel, and both the Park Service's and the concessioner's buildings keep that frontier tradition.

Visitors come for camping, fishing, bear watching, wilderness sightseeing and Alaska's cultural history. More: Brooks Camp.

Lake Brooks Fisheries Research District

The Lake Brooks Fisheries Research District. NPS / Alaska Regional Office.

On the shores of Lake Brooks and the Brooks River, this was headquarters for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (later the Fish and Wildlife Service) investigations in the Naknek region.

• From 1940, fisheries scientists built a research camp that grew to include a laboratory, residences, outbuildings, roads, an airplane ramp, a fish-counting weir and a fish ladder.
• Research — mainly on sockeye salmon — continued there through 1972; the facilities were transferred to the National Park Service in 1978.
• In the mid-20th century, fisheries research became the foundation of salmon management, and so played a large part in the lasting economic development of coastal communities.

More: Fisheries Research District.

Brooks River Archeological District

The Brooks River Archeological District National Historic Landmark. NPS / Alaska Regional Office.

The district covers a series of ancient beach ridges and river terraces along the 2.5-mile Brooks River.

• Its 22 well-preserved sites date from 2,500 BCE to recent historic times.
• People have fished the Brooks River for nearly 4,000 years; the remains of their homes and villages, and the camps of earlier hunters, cluster along it.
• It holds the greatest concentration of Arctic Small Tool Tradition houses and camps known in Alaska — and possibly in Arctic North America.
• More than 90% of its archeological properties are estimated to be intact, giving it major scientific importance.

More: Brooks River Archeological District, and the Park Service's poster of the four landscapes (PDF).

Sources

Based on "Cultural Landscapes of Katmai National Park and Preserve," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.