The Weekend
That Buried
a Valley

Sixty Hours That Outdid Everything Since 1815

The eruption began on June 6, 1912, at a vent that would later be named Novarupta, and didn't stop for sixty hours. By the time it was over, the volcano had emptied roughly 3.1 cubic miles of magma, about thirty times what Mount St. Helens released in 1980, into a column that reached more than 100,000 feet into the atmosphere. It remains the largest volcanic eruption anywhere on Earth in the entire twentieth century, and one of the five largest ever recorded. No eruption since has matched it. The last one that did was Mount Tambora, in 1815.

Kodiak Island, roughly one hundred miles away, went dark. Ashfall there was thick enough to block out the sun almost entirely, and residents lived through nearly three days without real daylight. The ash cloud didn't stop at Kodiak. It kept moving, thinning as it went, until researchers tracking it confirmed it had drifted all the way around the planet.

The Man Who Named a Valley of Smoke

Nobody from the outside world got a close look at the eruption's aftermath until 1916, when botanist Robert F. Griggs led a National Geographic Society expedition into the region. What he found was a valley that had been tundra a few years earlier, now buried under pyroclastic deposits and vented by thousands of steaming fumaroles rising off the hot ash below. Griggs named it the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, and the name outlasted the smokes themselves, most of which cooled and stopped within a few decades.

Griggs's account of what he'd seen carried enough weight that he and the National Geographic Society successfully lobbied Congress to protect it. Katmai National Monument was established in 1918, just two years after his expedition, specifically to preserve the volcanic landscape he'd documented. It would be more than sixty years before that monument grew into the national park and preserve that exists today.

Eruption dates, magma volume, ash column height, and its ranking among historic eruptions checked against the National Park Service's official Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes page. The Griggs expedition, the valley's naming, and Katmai National Monument's 1918 designation are drawn from the same source.

Most of the ten thousand smokes are gone now, cooled to nothing over the decades since Griggs walked through counting them. The valley itself hasn't gone anywhere. It's still buried under the same ash that fell over sixty hours in June of 1912, a scale of event that's easy to state in numbers, cubic miles, feet of ash column, hours of darkness on an island a hundred miles off, and still hard to actually picture standing at the edge of it.