Brooks Camp Cultural Landscape Report

It’s hard to say who likes the Brooks Camp area more, people or brown bears. Because it’s all about the world class fishing—catching them and watching bears catch them. Abundant rainbow trout, arctic char, dolly varden, arctic grayling, lake trout (char) and five species of Pacific Salmon attract anglers from all over the world.

Brooks Camp has operated along the edge of Naknek Lake and the Lower Brooks River since 1950. Reflective of its Mission 66-era design, the Camp has an assortment of Pan Abode-style prefabricated guest cabins, a dining room and lodge, NPS and concessioner employee housing, rustic campground, trail system, and unparalleled access to wildlife and the outdoors.

MIG is providing cultural landscape preservation, planning, and design services, proposing a range of solutions to contemporary challenges such as mitigating the camp’s fire risk, improving historic views that have been compromised by maturing vegetation, and removing incompatible features from the cultural landscape. The cultural landscape report (CLR) provides a site history, analysis and evaluation of landscape characteristics and features, historic significance summary, and a set of design guidelines and treatment recommendations that will help NPS protect and manage the site’s distinctive blend of history, landscape, architecture and programming. It also addresses long-term management, such as proposals to relocate all or portions of Brooks Camp away from brown bear habitat and sensitive archeological resources along the Lower Brooks River. Illustrative treatment plans, diagrams and other graphics will be useful references as recommendations are implemented.