While tourism fades at Lower 48's national attractions, Alaska's draw crowds
By CRAIG MEDRED
Anchorage Daily News
Published: September 3, 2006
Last Modified: September 3, 2006 at 01:08 AM
From Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park in Southeast to Denali National Park and Preserve in the Interior, Alaska appears to be bucking a National Park Service trend.
Elsewhere, visitation has flat-lined or declining. But tourism in 49th state's national parks continues to creep steadily upward.
"This year, the Alaska region will host about 2.3 million recreational visits -- more than double the number from 1986,'' said Alaska regional director Marcia Blaszak.
As other, flagging national parks try to figure out ways to lure new visitors, some Alaska parks, in fact, wonder about letting so many in.
A limit on mountain climbers on the West Buttress of 20,320-foot Mount McKinley -- the tallest peak in North America -- will begin next year. And the Park Service, after much study, is proposing to allow an extra cruise ship a week into Glacier Bay National Park to view the ice, mountains, whales and seals.
Expecting growth in Alaska park visits to continue into the foreseeable future, park officials often worry as much about controlling and channeling growth as promoting it, though everyone is acutely aware of what has been happening Outside.
Nationally, park visitation has fallen 14 million since a peak of 287 million in 1999. Everything is being blamed, from the Internet causing millions of Americans to go virtual to changes in the nature of today's family in which working spouses find it hard to coordinate the time for extended, family vacations.
"Park officials fear trend toward The Great Indoors,'' trumpeted a headline in a recent edition of the Boston Globe.
The story below the headline painted a grim view of falling park visitation throughout the Northeast, and warned that one of the reasons "could be the ballooning amount of time spent on the Internet and with electronic games."
"It's the explosion in entertainment that runs on batteries,'' said Jim Stratton, Alaska regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association. "There are so many things out there vying for our attention.''
Alaska parks appear somewhat immune to the virtual phenomenon -- perhaps because they are different from the rest of America, he added.
"Our surveys for years and years and years have said people come to Alaska for mountains, glaciers and wildlife,'' said Dave Worrell, communications director for the Alaska Travel Industry Association.
Not many other parks offer these attractions. The boom and spectacle of calving glaciers, for instance may produce enough action to overwhelm even the trendiest digital attractions.
MARKETING INFLUENCES
And both Worrell, who works for an organization that favors park promotion over protection, and Stratton, who works for a group that favors park protection over promotion, say artful pitching of these assets is a key reason for steady growth in park tourism in Alaska.
"I think it's because the cruise-ship industry and the package-tour industry do such a good job of marketing Alaska,'' Stratton said.
Some Alaskans might not exactly like that. After all, many Alaskans take their visiting relatives to Denali National Park and Preserve to see the sights but tend to avoid the park as too crowded themselves, Stratton noted. But the marketing helps support a tourism economy that generates more than $126 million a year in area benefits and almost 3,000 local jobs, according to a new Park Service study.
Clearly, adds Alaska park service spokesman John Quinley, the numbers indicate marketing matters.
Most visitors see the parks on the cruise/package tour circuit: Sitka, Glacier Bay, Klondike Gold Rush, Denali and Kenai Fjords.
Though the 113-acre Sitka National Historical Park -- the oldest park in the state -- is microscopic by Alaska standards, it now sees about 300,000 visitors per year.
That's more than the combined total of tourists for 10 far larger, and arguably more widely known, national park units in Alaska:
• Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve;
• Katmai National Park and Preserve;
• Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve;
• Lake Clark National Park and Preserve;
• Yukon-Charley Rivers National Park and Preserve;
• Noatak National Preserve;
• Kobuk Valley National Park;
• Cape Krusenstern National Monument
• Bering Land Bridge National Preserve;
• Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve.
Aniakchak, out on the Alaska Pensinsula more than 650 miles southwest of Anchorage, is visited by almost no one. The total visitor count there for fiscal 2005 was 285 people, fewer than one a day.
Alaska's congressional delegation managed to secure $750,000 to try to help promote these parks, and visitation in some has slowly crept up, but difficult access continues to make most of them a hard sell.
"Location, location, location,'' said Daryl Miller, a Talkeetna-based ranger for Denali Park, "it's all about location.''
Miller has watched Denali park growth transform Talkeetna from a sleepy, little village near the confluence of the Susitna, Chulitna and Talkeetna rivers into a booming summer tourism attraction.
"The biggest use that I see is the flightseeing,'' he said.
From the time the McKinley climbing season starts in late April or early May until the leaves fall and the snow starts to fly again in late September or early October, the Talkeetna airport is seldom quiet.
The local economy, meanwhile, has taken flight along with the air taxis. There are more places to eat, more places to stay and more places to shop -- an economic upturn that has appeared in other communities fueled by park growth.
"Another interesting place is Skagway,'' Worrell said. "Essentially the whole town has become a national park.''
As the northern terminus of the Klondike Park that starts in Seattle as a commemoration of the 1887 rush to the gold fields of Canada's Yukon Territory, Skagway saw hefty National Park Service investment to save historical structures. Visiting Skagway now is, in some ways, like traveling back into time to feast on those romantic notions of old Alaska.
The marketability of that product is clear.
Klondike National Historic Park appears to be rapidly closing in on 1 million visitors per year. The 888,000 visitors in the last fiscal year exceeds Alaska's estimated 2006 population of about 650,000 people.
Visitation to Skagway now dwarfs that at either Denali or Glacier Bay, the old standbys of Alaska tourism.
Denali, one of the few Alaska national parks that appears to have joined the national trend of flat-lining, attracts slightly more than 400,000 visitors a year. Glacier Bay sees slightly more than 350,000.
SUCCUMBING TO HASSLES
Quinley, Worrell and others think the numbers at Denali reflect a steady, decade-long decline in independent travelers to Alaska. In this, Worrell adds, Alaska's parks may have something in common with Lower 48 parks.
Call it the hassle factor.
Coordinating a two- to three-week drive up the Alaska Highway to the 49th state and back home takes significant planning and a fair amount of pre-trip effort -- time-consuming tasks that seem to be discouraging visits to some Lower 48 parks.
At Denali, Quinley said, "the tours -- the long one out toward Eielson (visitor center) and the short 'natural history' tour to Mile 17 or so -- are essentially sold out, running at 99 capacity. These are typically bought by visitors who are booking through a cruise/land-package company.
About 70 percent of Denali's 400,000 visitors come from (these) cruise-tour passengers.''
The move to packaged park tours filled by people already on packaged tours leaves a lot of space available on park shuttle buses that used to be filled by independent travelers, Quinley added.
Worrell said he would not be surprised to see independent travel in Alaska surge in the next decade as the baby-boomers start retiring.
These are the people, he said, who own the big recreational vehicle, but lack the time to take it on an extended trip. Alaska, with its over-sized attractions, might turn out to be just the dream summer vacation spot.
"What there is here, you can't find anywhere else,'' Stratton added. "The Wrangells are six Yellowstones.''
Not to mention a whole different world.
Yellowstone might well have reached its visitor capacity at nearly 3 million people per year.
But Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve is clearly in its tourism infancy with less than 60,000 visitors -- 1/500th as many in six times the space -- per year.
By many standards, in fact, Wrangell-St. Elias isn't just a national park, it's an undiscovered national park. The same holds true for many of Alaska's other national parks despite two decades of increasing use.
And there's a certain cachet that attaches to the undiscovered.
Couple that to global warming concerns (the New York Times has suggested people see Alaska before it melts) and some slick marketing by state tourism backers (B4UDIE Alaska license plates appearing as billboards around the country) and there are good reasons to believe Alaska could avoid the trend that appears to be affecting national parks elsewhere.
Particularly when one considers that it doesn't take many bodies to keep Alaska park visitation climbing.
"Alaska gets such a small slice of the pie,'' Stratton said, "and we're probably getting the people who get it.''
Who's that?
• People drawn to attractions of the natural world.
• People who haven't tuned out, plugged in and gone totally virtual.
Still, the shifting nature of free time is bound to affect Alaska parks. The real questions about the future may not arise for several decades.
ATTRACTING YOUNG ADULTS
As Blaszak noted in testimony to Congress back in April, "people from their mid-teens to mid-30s dropped (nationally) from 27 percent of park visitors in 1989 to 19 percent in 2004, a level significantly below the corresponding percentage in the U.S. population.
"We need to understand the reasons for this declining visitation rate among young adults, and ... develop ways to engage a physically active younger generation in the adventure, discovery and recreational opportunities offered by national parks.''
Unless, of course, Alaskans just want to keep the state's 15 national park units covering 54 million acres of land to themselves.
Daily News Outdoor editor Craig Medred can be reached at cmedred@adn.com.