The
long-awaited commemoration of the centenary of the 1912 sinking of the Titanic
has come and gone. But what most people do not know –and few will commemorate-
is that the forces of Nature that created the Titanic disaster were minor
compared to what happened 52 days later on the opposite side of North America
in an isolated, volcano-strewn valley on the Alaskan Peninsula. Just as that
valley struggled to escape the clutches of a harsh winter, the earth began to
tremble. Then, on June 6th, Mt.
Katmai , one of five
active volcanoes in the area, awakened. What followed next would become the
20th Century’s largest volcanic eruption on Earth and the sixth largest ever.
The display of Nature there was far more remarkable than the Titanic not only
because of its pyroclastics, but because not a single human died, although many
animals were not so fortunate.
Over
the next three days, three cubic miles of hot ash and lava spewed forth, but
not from Mt. Katmai . The eruption, 30 times more
powerful than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens ,
actually drew on three volcanic systems, and instead of Katmai’s blowing its
top, it caved in and the eruption blew out a vent created by a weakness in the
valley floor six miles distant. Afterwards, what remained was a pile of rubble
300 feet high and almost a mile in circumference (later named Novarupta), a
40-square mile formerly lush valley now blanketed with ash 700 feet deep in
places, and a shorter Mt. Katmai.
The
explosion was heard in Juneau ,
750 miles away. In nearby Kodiak Island , day
suddenly turned to night; residents, under a foot of ash, could not see a
lantern in front of them for days. Clothes left outside in Vancouver , Canada , disintegrated from the acidic fall. A massive ash
cloud passed over Virginia June 10th,
and later Africa . A haze darkened the sky over
most of the Northern Hemisphere for days.
It was
not until 1916 that Robert Griggs, a botanist with the National Geographic
Society, led an expedition into the valley to see what had happened. There he
discovered a two-mile wide caldera in Mt. Katmai ,
so he assumed that to be the source of the eruption. (Only in the 1950s was the
source found to be Novarupta.) Later, as Griggs peeked over a high ridge, he
saw a valley filled with thousands of smoking fumaroles, vents formed by snow
evaporating beneath the still-hot ash. The name he gave the apocalyptic scene,
the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes , remains to
this day, although the fumaroles have long since ceased smoking. The only puffs
of smoke seen today are at Novarupta, if you climb it and look hard enough.
Unlike
Mount St. Helens , where the surrounding area
recovered within a few years, the Katmai valley still has a long way to go;
recovery is evident only on its fringes. Today, it still resembles a moonscape,
but when seen through sunglasses reveals a spectacular Kaleidoscope of colors,
the result of the various minerals from the several volcanic systems involved
in the eruption. Williwaws, sudden, violent windstorms, intensified by gravity
and armored by the whipped ash, move down from the cold mountains to the sea at
velocities of up to 100 miles an hour, reducing visibility -and personal
stability- to near zero. The few hardy backpackers who each year venture into
the valley retreat to its edges at night to seek refuge, but the options are
few due to a century of ash blown up slopes 1000 feet from the pre-1912 valley
floor, obliterating the coves. Non-human life in the valley is rare; what
creatures do venture onto the valley floor risk becoming confused and trapped
(as I once did, temporarily, during one of my four hikes in the valley in the
1990s) by the impassable, deep chasms formed by underground rivers of snowmelt
off the glaciers on the nearby volcanoes cutting through the ash from the
bottom up. The main river through the valley was appropriately named Lethe by
Griggs, inspired by one of the rivers in the underworld of Greek mythology, the
"river of forgetfulness”.
Past
visitors to the valley have included NASA astronauts who rehearsed there in the
1960s for the moon landings because of its resemblance to the moon. The best
known visitor was Timothy Treadwell, the subject of Werner Herzog’s 2005 film, Grizzly
Man. Timothy and his girlfriend, Vicky Scott, met their tragic deaths in
Katmai in 2003 during an encounter with an idiosyncratic –or hungry- brown bear
just a few miles from where I pitched my tent in the 1990s.
A
journey today to Katmai –now a national park- is not especially difficult, but
it is a strenuous one once you get there. A comfortable jet ride to Anchorage , a smaller plane
to King Salmon, a float plane to Brooks Camp, and finally a school bus ride
along a 23-mile dirt and gravel road takes you to the edge of the valley.
Although most visitors return later in the day, Novarupta is a two-day hike
away. To climb what is left of Mt.
Katmai takes another few
days. So, six days after mingling with a bustling urban crowd, you could be
standing alone on top of Novarupta, with no one around for miles, surrounded by
the purest silence and natural beauty one could possibly experience, unless, of
course, you happen to encounter a williwaw, a hungry grizzly bear, or the next
eruption.
I long
planned to return to Katmai this year for the centenary of the eruption, to
stand atop Novarupta and toast Nature. But other priorities now in my life will
keep me away. Nevertheless, with the memory of my four journeys to Katmai
indelibly imprinted on my mind, I shall offer that toast from home, and forever
relish that pure silence amidst such awesome splendor created by Nature’s
sometimes violent forces, knowing that she is not always against us, especially
when we learn how to live with her.