Brooks Camp: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Katmai National Park and Preserve

Region 11 Park Cultural Landscapes Program

Inventory Unit Description: The Brooks Camp cultural landscape is a component landscape of the larger parent landscape sport fishing camps of Katmai National Park & Preserve. The other camps include Kulik, Nonvianuk, Battle Lake and Grosvenor, some of which are described in detail in other CLIs. The Brooks Camp landscape is in many ways a designed landscape, but tends more towards a historic vernacular landscape in terms of its development from circumstance rather than from deliberate design. The Brooks Camp landscape is significant under Criterion A for its contributions to the broad patterns of regional history, it is locally significant, its period of significance is 1950 to 1968, and its areas of significance include entertainment-recreation and conservation. The Brooks Camp cultural landscape attains its significance primarily because of its historical land use. Humans have been using this landscape for thousands of years, and continue to come and utilize the remarkable resources of the area. While their motivations may have changed over time, the reasons humans flock to this area still revolves around the remarkably rich natural systems of the area. Be it for the harvesting of natural resources, recreational activities, or the observation and enjoyment of nature, the Brooks River area continues to draw humans in large numbers. As such it is inevitable that humans would seek to develop this place, and the layers of the landscape confirm this. Prehistoric, historic and contemporary humans have all left their mark on the Brooks River area. The focus of this landscape analysis is on the historic and contemporary eras of occupation, that is, the establishment of the first fly-in fishing camp in the region and the evolution of the National Park Service facilities in the Brooks Camp locale. The landscape analysis focuses primarily on the development of the Brooks Camp concessionaire and NPS facilities on the North side of the Brooks River. Landscape characteristics such as buildings and structures, natural systems & features, land use, views and vistas, circulation, spatial organization, vegetation and archeology are all addressed as important characteristics of the cultural landscape. While the Brooks Lake facility, the Valley of 10,000 smokes road, the archeological resources and the Native use of the area are also important layers of the larger Brooks River landscape, they are addressed elsewhere and are not a focus of this analysis.

Brooks Camp: Cultural Landscapes Inventory, Katmai National Park and Preserve

Series