The state of Alaska is big -- very big. And so is Katmai National Park and Preserve, the location for the upcoming Katmai game expansion. Katmai is almost twice as big (16,500 square kilometers) as Yellowstone National Park (about 9,000 square kilometers). So, where in that vast expanse should we put our Katmai Coast game map? Obviously we want to set it on the coast -- but the Katmai coast is 800 kilometers long. In fact, it's the longest stretch of uninhabited coastline remaining in North America.
Hallo Bay is the most famous spot along the coast. If you've seen the movie "Grizzly Man", that's mostly where Timothy Treadwell hung out, and that is typically where sightseeing and bear photography tours go. The calm, shallow bay offers a good runway for floatplanes. But the Hallo beach is 9 kilometers long, and the very flat valley floor extends about that far inland as well. With our standard map size (7x7 or 8x8 kilometers), the beach and flat valley would encompass the entire thing. So we ruled that out.
Going south-southwest from Hallo, the vegetation gets very dense, with deep bays that would split the map in half. Very annoying for players. So I ruled that out as well.
The next bay to the north-northeast of Hallo is Swikshak, which has a fairly long beach but also some other interesting features: a lagoon, small point, and a cool volcanic caldera. But still not that much variety.
Going further up the coast we come to Cape Douglas. This is a favorite area of Ellen Dymit, our Katmai science adviser, who spent a summer doing field research along the coast. Cape Douglas extends out into Shelikof Strait, and behind it is a beautiful coast strip backed by a gorgeous mountain range. There are also several glaciers sliding down the mountain valleys, two glacial ponds, and Sukoi Bay. Plus a variety of beaches, shoreline cliffs, and rocky prominences where marine mammals can haul out for a rest. Since Katmai wolves mainly eat food from the sea, the more coastline the better.
So the Cape Douglas area is a very attractive place for a map -- and because the coastal strip between the shoreline and the mountains is fairly narrow, that means we can create more of a linear map -- twice as wide as it is deep. This is what we chose. A map that is 20 kilometers long and 10 kilometers deep (though much of that is inaccessible ocean), with a coastline that is perhaps twice that length, due to the twists and turns of the shoreline around the cape.
That inland strip is pretty flat -- something we know many players have wished for, so here it is -- but alas, there are no elk to chase across that easy landscape. Oh well -- we think this is still a beautiful and interesting map for gameplay.