I once visited the valley as one of a dozen people on a 10-day
field trip with John Eichelberger, who then worked at the Alaska
Volcano Observatory. As we approached the valley the first day
on a bus ride from Brooks Camp in Katmai National Park, the
story of the 1912 Katmai eruption began to unfold. A few miles
before we reached the valley, we saw the skeletons of spruce
trees, bone white and surrounded by green bushes. The trees have
been standing dead since early June 1912, when falling ash
killed them. Getting off the bus and hiking into the valley, we
left Alaska for another world. As we walked deeper into the
valley on rounded rocks that felt like styrofoam balls, the
willows disappeared, the sparrows stopped singing, and the
mosquitoes vanished. A grizzly bear had pressed a few tracks
into the valley floor, but we saw no other signs of life.
Botanist Robert Griggs named this desolate, beautiful place "The
Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes" when he visited here on a
National Geographic expedition in 1916. A