No this is not the Chilkoot Trail during the Klondike Gold Rush more than 100 years ago/NPS photo
More than a year after the global pandemic throttled Alsaka’s largest industry, there are indications that far north tourism is on the comeback trail.
Transits buses to the Eielson Visitor Center in Denali National Park and Preserve are booked through June 23, according to the concessionaire’s website, and climbers on 20,320-foot Mount Denali, the continent’s tallest peak, were at the end of May lining up to make the trek from the 14,000-foot camp to “high camp” at 17,200.
A photo the Park Service posted on its Denali Dispatches blog (see above) was reminiscent of the historic pictures of Chilkoot Pass during the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s.
Granted, the 984 climbers registered to climb as of this writing is well below the more than 1,200 who showed up to attempt the mountain in the year before the pandemic stormed onto the scene.
And the shortage of space on the buses is in significant part due to the Park Service’s failure to adequately increase staff for the 2021 season. Some visitors are being forced onto more expensive, privately run tour buses, which some in Healy have suggested might be an effort on the part of the Park Service to help out park-linked businesses that took a big hit when Denali largely shut down.
Since that criticism started rumbling, the Park has, however, upped the number of seats available on park buses.
Whatever the case, the situation is undeniably way better than last year when climbing on Denali – though not elsewhere – was banned for the season, and other park services were significantly scaled back.
A near-empty park
Park visitation for the year fell to less than a tenth of what has come to be the norm.
Given that what happens in Denali spreads across Alaska – the park is the biggest tourist attraction in the central part of the state – the ripple effect was felt by tourism business almost everywhere.
The Park Service in 2017 calculated Denali spun $906 million in statewide, economic impact out of 634,000 visitors that year. As of now, no one has calculated the loss due to the visitor number falling to 54,850 last year, according to park statistics.
That dropoff was massive. In the five years leading up to and including 2019, an average of more than 600,000 people per year visited the park, according to Park Service statistics.
Lockdowns, travel restrictions that followed when lockdowns were eased, and simple fear of the pandemic disease COVID-19 combined to visit a disaster on the many in an Alaska tourism industry dependent in some way or another on Denali traffic, but there strong indications that tide has begun to turn.
National media is already expecting crowds in Alaska as the country slowly but steadily learns to live with the latest of the many diseases daily trying to kill homo sapiens.
The story below the headline was shallow and predictable but pitched plenty of Alaska businesses catering to tourists. With cruises to Alaska still unavailable at the time, the story suggested travelers fly to Anchorage and base out of there.
Anchorage airport traffic numbers are up about fivefold from last year, and on a national level, the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) shows this to be part of the national trend.
Numbers nationally have been building steadily since March of this year when traveler counts first crossed the 1-million threshold after bottoming out at less than 350,000 on June 9 of last year.
Some Alaskans will find this all goods news. Others not so much.
The state is home to a sizable minority who consider tourism a minus, not a plus. They would prefer to have the state largely to themselves, or at least as largely to themselves as it was last year.
And as for the economy, well, who needs an economy when there is retirement (or welfare), subsistence (or personal-use harvests of fish and wildlife), and a sizable permanent fund dividend?
Categories: News
Tourism functions like our resource extraction industries. The objective is to leave as little in Alaska, so that wealth can be maximized elsewhere. We tax resource extraction. Tourism should be taxed, especially since tourists negatively impact our quality of life.
Tourists leave plenty of money in the state. Besides paying for what tourist do, they pay airport fees on vehicle rentals, bed tax fees, sales tax in many parts of the state, and fuel tax at the pump. Ask the Kenai Borough how much sales tax they collect from Fred Meyer in Soldotna in July. Also, tourist contribute more money to ADFG through license sales than Alaskans do. I can put up with tourist every summer just so many of the local businesses I frequent can stay open through the winter.
The new economy is one of rampant national debt where everyone from thugs in the hood to Elon Musk lines up for his government handout.
Stimmies, Subsidies, Snap Bennies….this is the new “three legged stool” in Amerika’
As for the tourists, well most of the tourists in Alaska are retired or close to retirement age….the adventure tourists make up a small percent compared to the “lookie lous”.
All in all it will take years to build up to pre-plandemic numbers and many of the small businesses that catered to this crowd are no longer open….neither are most of the salmon runs in SC that they used to travel for.
Alaska will continue to need to reinvent itself in the decades to come.
Oh I could appreciate the tourist much more if every time I saw one I knew he was also going to pay a tourist tax for visiting Alaska.
Interesting most tourist industry dependent countries internationally have been charging tourist an exit tax for decades. Time for Alaska to get on board with that.