Lake Clark National Park Trivia
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49 free Lake Clark National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Lake Clark National Park trivia quiz covers the four-million-acre park and preserve a hundred miles southwest of Anchorage that has everything Alaska offers in one place: two volcanoes above Cook Inlet, glaciers, tundra, a 42-mile lake, coastal salt marshes crowded with brown bears and the world's most productive sockeye salmon watershed. Questions cover the geography and geology, Mount Redoubt's eruptions and the airliner that flew into its ash, the bears of Chinitna Bay, the salmon-eating wolf pack and the roadless logistics of a park you can only fly or boat into. The human story runs from Paleo-Arctic hunters and the Dena'ina village of Kijik through Captain Cook, the bush pilots who founded Port Alsworth, Jimmy Carter's 1978 monument and the 1980 ANILCA park, the Pebble Mine fight and, above all, Dick Proenneke, the Iowa mechanic who built a cabin by hand at Twin Lakes in 1968 and filmed his 31 years alone in the wilderness. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is marked on every question, so it works for a floatplane game or a serious park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our Katmai and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which national park, also famed for its brown bears, lies directly south of Lake Clark?
Katmai
Katmai. Lake Clark sits directly to its north, and each July Katmai's bears crowd Brooks Falls to catch salmon as they leap upstream.
Q 02Lake Clark's two active volcanoes are part of which volcanic zone?
The Ring of Fire
The Ring of Fire. Ash from Alaska's stretch of it blows straight across some of the world's busiest air routes, so scientists keep watch on these volcanoes and warn pilots when one stirs.
Q 03What carved the basins of Lake Clark and the other long lakes on the national park's western side?
Glaciers
Glaciers. Rivers of ice gouged the valleys and, as they melted back about 12,000 years ago, left ridges of rubble that dam the lakes and hollows that filled with meltwater.
Q 04What happened to KLM Flight 867 when it flew into Redoubt Volcano's ash cloud in December 1989?
All four engines failed
All four engines failed. The jumbo jet fell more than two miles before the crew restarted them and landed at Anchorage; nobody was hurt, but repairs cost $80 million.
Q 05Lake Clark is named after John W. Clark, who was what?
A trader at Nushagak
A trader at Nushagak. In 1891 a journalist on a winter expedition reached the lake and named it for his travelling companion, who had lived in western Alaska for a quarter of a century.
Q 06What threatened the Drift River oil terminal during Redoubt Volcano's 2009 eruption?
Lahars from melting ice
Lahars from melting ice. Hot avalanches of gas and rock stripped snow and ice off the summit, and the biggest mudflow ran 20 miles down the Drift River, up to two miles wide.
Q 07Which range of jagged granite peaks holds both of Lake Clark National Park's volcanoes?
Chigmit Mountains
Chigmit Mountains. They rose as great masses of granite pushed up from below, leaving what one naturalist called 'a sea of rock' thrown up by colliding mountain waves.
Q 08The language of Lake Clark's Native people belongs to the same family as which Southwestern nation's tongue?
Navajo
Navajo. Both are Athabaskan languages, carried far apart by an ancient migration south; in the northern one Lake Clark is Qizhjeh Vena, roughly 'the lake where people gather'.
Q 09What is Libby's No. 23, a relic displayed beside Lake Clark National Park's visitor center?
A sailing fishing boat
A sailing fishing boat. Built in 1914, she worked the salmon fishery under sail for a cannery until about 1951, and the Park Service later spent seven years restoring her.
Q 10Which species of salmon was Lake Clark National Park created partly to protect?
Sockeye
Sockeye, also called red salmon. An average of 372,000 swim into the park each summer to spawn and die; without them, says the Park Service, it 'would be like a house with an empty pantry'.
Q 11Lake Clark's coastal bears are called brown bears; what are the same species usually called inland?
Grizzlies
Grizzlies. They are one species: the name simply follows the menu, and inland bears with little or no seafood to eat are the ones called grizzlies.
Q 12Which bay on Lake Clark National Park's coast is one of Alaska's best-known bear-viewing spots?
Chinitna Bay
Chinitna Bay. As many as twenty brown bears can be watched from one spot there, and since nobody feeds or hunts them they find people about as interesting as a gull.
Q 13Why do Lake Clark's bears flock to its small coastal salt marshes?
Early-summer food before the fish run
Q 21What is the main settlement inside the park, home to the visitor center and several lodges?
Port Alsworth
Founded in 1950 by missionary bush pilot Babe Alsworth and his wife Mary, it sits on private land on Lake Clark and had 186 people in 2020.
Q 22Which church took root among Lake Clark's Native people in the 1800s?
Russian Orthodox
Russian Orthodox. Russians came to the region for furs in the late 1700s, and their church outlasted their rule: elders say one was built beside the lake around 1889.
Q 23Settlers on Lake Clark kept radio contact in the 1930s with Anchorage's Star Airlines, the forerunner of which carrier?
Alaska Airlines
Early-summer food before the fish run. Bears leave their dens thin and hungry, and the marshes' young sedges are rich in protein; once the salmon arrive later in summer, the bears switch.
Q 14Why are Lake Clark's black bears so rarely seen, though they live across the park?
They avoid their bigger brown rivals
They avoid their bigger brown rivals. Outnumbered here, black bears pick quieter ground; the few that risk the prime feeding spots are mostly big males that stay near the trees, ready to bolt for cover.
Q 15The ammonites and other sea fossils at Fossil Point on Lake Clark's coast date from which geological period?
Jurassic
Jurassic. The Park Service dubs this coast 'Alaska's Jurassic Park', though its stars swam rather than stomped: shellfish from warm seas and the bones of ichthyosaurs, sea reptiles of the dinosaur age.
Q 16What is the title of the 2003 documentary about Richard Proenneke's solitary life in what is now Lake Clark National Park?
Alone in the Wilderness
Alone in the Wilderness. It became a public-television favourite, and so much unused footage came to light afterwards that a second part followed in 2011.
Q 17What is the title of the 1973 book that Sam Keith shaped from Richard Proenneke's journals?
One Man's Wilderness
One Man's Wilderness. Keith knew Proenneke from the Kodiak naval base; a 1999 reissue won a National Outdoor Book Award, though Proenneke complained that his friend had 'changed some things'.
Q 18What became of Richard Proenneke's cabin after he left it for the last time?
The Park Service preserves it
The Park Service preserves it. Proenneke left the cabin to the nation, it joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2007, and a stone still sits on the chimney, as he kept it, to keep animals out.
Q 19In which Midwestern state was Richard Proenneke born and raised?
Iowa
Iowa. He came from the farm village of Primrose, and at about 50 he went back to see his family once more before settling in the Alaskan wilderness for good.
Q 20Who held the camera as Richard Proenneke built his remote Alaskan cabin in 1968?
He did it himself
He did it himself. Proenneke set up his own camera to record the whole build and went on shooting for years, and that footage became the heart of the films later made about him.
Alaska Airlines. Star was one of several small Anchorage outfits of the day; it bought out a rival, McGee Airways, in 1934, and a string of further mergers produced the airline known today.
Q 24What does the 'redoubt' in the name of Lake Clark's Redoubt Volcano mean?
A fortified place
A fortified place. A redoubt is a small enclosed fort; the peak's older Native name is said to carry the same meaning, and at 10,197 feet it is the highest point in the park.
Q 25Which Athabaskan people's ancestral homeland includes Lake Clark?
Dena'ina
Dena'ina. They have lived around the lake for more than a thousand years, and summer fish camps, where families net and put up salmon, remain at the heart of village life.
Q 26What is Kijik, Lake Clark's main archaeological site?
A Native village abandoned in the early 1900s
A Native village abandoned in the early 1900s. People had lived there for some 900 years; after flu and measles struck in 1902 the survivors moved down the lake, and by 1909 it stood empty.
Q 27Which British captain surveyed the inlet on Lake Clark National Park's eastern shore in 1778, leaving his name on it?
James Cook
James Cook. He sailed up it on his last voyage hoping it was the Northwest Passage and found a dead end; George Vancouver, who had served under him, later named the inlet in his honour.
Q 28Which president proclaimed Lake Clark a national monument on December 1, 1978?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter. He acted on his own under the Antiquities Act, which lets a president protect land by proclamation, and Congress upgraded Lake Clark to a national park and preserve two years later.
Q 29At about 4 million acres, Lake Clark National Park and Preserve is nearly the size of which US state?
Hawaii
Hawaii. The park and preserve cover 4.03 million acres against the islands' 4.11 million, yet not a single road leads into any of it: visitors arrive by small plane or by boat.
Q 30What may visitors do in Lake Clark National Preserve that is banned in the national park itself?
Sport hunting
Sport hunting. Inside the park only local rural residents may hunt, to feed their households; in the preserve, visiting hunters need Alaska licences and, for some big game, a licensed guide.