Sitka National Historical Park is small — about 47 hectares (116 acres) — but it sits in one of the most tectonically active regions of North America, and all of the ground under it was left by ice and sea.
The park
| Where | Western shore of Baranof Island, Sitka Borough, southeastern Alaska — about 150 km (93 mi) southwest of Juneau |
| Status | Proclaimed a national monument March 23, 1910; redesignated a national historical park October 18, 1972 |
| History | The site of the last major battle between invading Russian traders and the Tlingit |
| To see | Tlingit and Haida totem poles along coastal trails; the Russian Bishop's House, built in 1842 and restored, a rare piece of Russian–American architecture from Russia's little-known colonial past in North America |
| To do | Explore Tlingit culture and art, learn about the Russian colonial period, or walk the temperate rainforest on the Totem Trail and Russian Memorial Loop |
Harbor Mountain Trail. NPS photo by Weston Kessler.
What lies beneath
The Sitka area has mountains, dormant volcanoes and several faults. Repeated advances and retreats of Pleistocene glaciers carved deep bays, steep valley walls, jagged coastlines and sea cliffs, and left moraines nearby.
- All of the park's geology is unconsolidated Quaternary deposits: glacial till, glacial gravels, glacial erratics (boulders carried in by ice that differ from the local rock) and coastal marine deposits.
- About half of the park's resources are coastal or marine, including about 1.6 km (1 mi) of shoreline that waves and tides constantly rework.
Sitka Sound. Image from the National Park Service's Geodiversity Atlas page on Sitka.
Maps and inventories
The Park Service's Geologic Resources Inventory makes digital geologic maps and reports for more than 270 natural resource parks; its products for Sitka — scoping summaries, GIS maps, reports and posters — are in the NPS DataStore. A Soil Resources Inventory for the park has also been completed.
Geodiversity is the full range of a park's geologic and soil resources and processes: rocks, minerals, sediments, fossils, landforms and the forces that shape them. The NPS Geodiversity Atlas gathers it park by park for education, geoconservation and management.
Sources
Based on "NPS Geodiversity Atlas—Sitka National Historical Park, Alaska," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.
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