Three Early Alaska Park Units Were Created in the Name of Science

Alaska’s national park units began before the National Park Service itself, which was established in 1916. By the mid-1920s four national monuments and Alaska’s first national park were part of the growing system. Two small monuments, Sitka (1910) and Old Kasaan (1916), preserve remarkable assemblages of Tlingit and Haida artifacts. The other three units, Mount McKinley National Park, Katmai National Monument and Glacier Bay National Monument, were established in the name of science, and this history follows how research kept shaping Alaska’s parks until the lands act of 1980.

Three parks made for science (1910-1925)

Mount McKinley. President Woodrow Wilson signed the park into law in February 1917, largely thanks to Charles Sheldon, a hunter-naturalist who first visited the area in 1906. Though he loved to hunt, the article says, Sheldon was primarily a scientist: concerned about North America’s Dall sheep, he went to their habitat north of the Alaska Range to study their distribution, habits and migration. In 1915, after two extended expeditions, he began lobbying for a “Denali National Park” and, asked to draw its boundaries, took pains to include all areas within “the limits of the caribou run.” The park’s purpose includes preserving animals, birds and fish and the area’s natural curiosities and scenic beauties.

Katmai. In June 1912 an enormous volcano erupted in southwestern Alaska, popularly thought to be Mount Katmai; only in 1954 did a scientific party show that the site was Novarupta, a side vent six miles west. After a geologist sent by the National Geographic Society got only as far as Katmai’s eastern coast, the Society turned to Robert F. Griggs, an Ohio State University botanist. Turned back by ash in 1915, Griggs returned in 1916, saw a tiny puff of vapor and, climbing a hillock, thousands of little volcanoes, many sending up columns of steam a thousand feet high. In 1917 he returned with a 10-man scientific party that spent about a month in the “Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes” gathering geological, chemical and biological data. Griggs called it one of the greatest wonders of the world, his reports helped convince the Society to encourage protection, and with the support of Interior Secretary Franklin Lane and Horace Albright of the Park Service, Wilson signed Katmai National Monument into law on September 24, 1918.

Glacier Bay. Scientists had been interested in the bay since 1879, when the naturalist John Muir made the first of several visits, and an earthquake on September 10, 1899 that shattered the face of Muir Glacier ended tourism there. In 1916 William S. Cooper, a young University of Minnesota ecology professor, arrived and set out one-meter quadrats at varying distances from the glaciers to study changing soil and plant composition. His visit set in motion the events that led to the area’s withdrawal in 1924 and its reservation as a national monument in 1925, with a proclamation that made scientific study the primary purpose: a unique opportunity to study glacial behavior, the movements and development of plants and animals that follow, and relics of ancient interglacial forests.

Mount McKinley’s museum opened in 1943; visitors learned there for years afterward about the park’s natural and human history. NPS photograph, Denali National Park & Preserve Historical Collection.

Research without new parks (1925-1971)

For more than 40 years after Glacier Bay’s designation no new units were created in Alaska, and the number even fell when Congress removed Old Kasaan’s designation in 1955. All three large units gained acreage, though, sometimes after scientific work for boundary studies and sometimes in support of general management.

At Mount McKinley, Olaus J. Murie, a young assistant biologist with the U.S. Biological Survey, came in spring 1922 hoping to capture young bull caribou, and by the year’s end had persuaded his brother Adolph, also a biologist, to join him. In 1925 Olaus compiled the first classification of the park’s flora, fauna and natural phenomena, and rangers’ monthly reports gave almost half a century of observations on wildlife.

The wolf-sheep controversy dominated the 1930s and 1940s. Local sentiment strongly favored killing all wolves and coyotes, and rangers at first went along; a biologist sent in 1932 to find out why so many sheep had been lost suggested killing more. The Park Service’s Wildlife Division urged an end to wolf control, and the new director, Arno Cammerer, halted it in 1935, but strong protest from Alaskans and from hunting and conservation groups forced him to recant within a year, and from 1936 through 1938 rangers assigned to “springtime predator control” harvested 14 wolves. Adolph Murie was then asked to study the park’s predators. His wolf-sheep study took much of the next three years and became The Wolves of Mount McKinley (1944), and he kept working in the park almost every year until 1970.

At Katmai, the huge boundary expansion of 1931 came a year after Griggs made an extended visit. He studied plant succession, appraised brown bear habitat and recommended expansion mainly to ensure high-quality bear habitat, and President Herbert Hoover’s proclamation of April 24, 1931 more than doubled the monument. At Glacier Bay, a young Harvard glaciologist who first visited in 1926 and returned every few years for another half century taught the Park Service much about the monument, and bear habitat surveys in 1932 and six years later, with a possible expansion in mind, led to a major addition that President Franklin Roosevelt signed on April 18, 1939.

In the early 1950s the Park Service organized the Katmai Project, an interdisciplinary effort funded mainly by the Defense Department. Its scientists, from universities and public agencies, produced papers on geology, mammalogy, parasitology, entomology, archeology and more, and found that Novarupta, not Mount Katmai, had erupted in 1912. Katmai was also the scene of groundbreaking bear research: after a bear injured a sleeping camper in 1966, a University of Alaska wildlife biologist studied human-bear relationships over portions of three summers and reported in the fall of 1969. The Park Service and the concessioner accepted the suggestions, and bear-human incidents diminished.

One of the major findings of the 1953-54 Katmai Project was that Novarupta, not Mount Katmai, was the primary site of the 1912 eruption. NPS photograph by Victor Cahalane, Harpers Ferry Center.

A race to study new lands (1971-1975)

In December 1971 President Richard Nixon signed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, whose Section 17(d)(2) let the Interior Secretary withdraw up to 80 million acres “suitable for addition to or creation as” national parks and other conservation areas. The Park Service scrambled to study Alaska’s unreserved lands, woefully unprepared for the seven-year time frame Congress set. Reports on potential National Natural Landmarks done through the University of Alaska in 1967 and 1968 helped, and in 1972 and 1973 it sent a broad range of staff into the field, producing environmental impact statements. In almost every proposal a primary purpose was the area’s potential for scientific study: baseline research on undisturbed tundra and coastal ecosystems at Chukchi-Imuruk (Bering Land Bridge), study of archeological remains and of geological and biological features at Cape Krusenstern, and research and education in northern ecosystems at Wrangell-St. Elias.

Refining the proposals, then the law (1975-1980)

The Cooperative Park Studies Unit, a University of Alaska Fairbanks-based program in place since 1972, supplied the further information needed to judge whether the proposed parks were viable. By the end of 1973 its biology side had contracts on visitation at Gates of the Arctic, biological diversity at Chukchi-Imuruk and a survey of a proposed addition to Glacier Bay, and later in the decade it produced reports on geomorphology, climate, limnology, wildlife management and more. Its cultural side began large-area studies in 1974, first of traditional Eskimo life in the proposed Kobuk Valley National Park area, then subsistence studies of the Aniakchak, Yukon-Charley Rivers and Gates of the Arctic areas, and by the early 1980s similar studies existed for virtually all the remaining new or expanded units.

With that work, Congress could draw on scientific expertise as it debated the Alaska lands bill, and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), passed in November 1980 and signed by President Jimmy Carter a month later, was laden with references to science. Of its thirteen new or expanded park units, five had specific language calling for study or research, and for Noatak the law called for a board of scientists and other Arctic research experts. For the rest, Congress called on all units to maintain opportunities for scientific research and undisturbed ecosystems. Science, the article says, has remained a dominant theme in Alaska’s parks in the quarter century since.

Sources

• Frank Norris, A History of Science in Alaska’s National Parks, National Park Service article in the series The Legacy of ANILCA (the source gives no affiliation for the author); the photographs of named individuals are left out; “Old Kassan,” spelled that way once in the source, is written Old Kasaan as elsewhere in it; rewritten in hubnx's own words.