Alaska Parks and Outdoor Recreation
Alaskans crowd popular recreation sites
Stealing a page from the playbook of radio-tracking wildlife biologists, the Alaska Division of Parks and Outdoor Recreation four years ago began tracking people roaming the state’s big outdoors to see where they go.
Some of what was discovered is predictable; some more surprising.
One of the big discoveries is that despite a massive influx of tourists in the 49th state every summer – tourism numbers more than double the number of state residents – out-of-staters are really not – with one or two exceptions – the folks crowding popular recreation areas.
Overall, at their worst on a statewide basis, tourists represented less than a quarter of the recreationists using more than a dozen popular recreation sites tracked in the years 2019, 2020 and 2021, according to the data in the 2023-2027 Statewide Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan now available online.
The busy places – such as Chugach State Park and the Kenai River – attracted a lot more locals than visitors. All of which is in line with participation studies showing Alaskans are tied with Montanans as the most outdoor active people in the country.
Alaskans often complain about tourists crowding the state, but in reality the data would indicate Pogo, a character developed by the late cartoonist Walt Kelly, had it figured out:
Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at The Ohio State University Libraries
Not that there aren’t tourist hotspots. Mobile phone tracking – the new way to radio-collar humans with no need to fit them with radio collars – recorded that 65 percent of the folks at the Totem Bight State Historical Park in Sitka in the summer of 2021 were visitors from Outside, as Alaskans call the lower 49 states, and Denali State Park looked to be two-thirds filled with tourists in the summer of that same year.
Traffic to and from the hotel would also help explain why the vast majority of activity tracked in Denali State Park centered on the period from May 15 and Sept. 15, the prime part of the Alaska tourist season.
Overall, too, the report concluded Denali was a “moderately low use” attraction.
The hotspots
The big attractions turned out to be pretty predictable: Chugach State Park and the Kenai River Special Use Management Area.
Measured in cellphone “device days” per year, no other identifiable recreation area came close to the Chugach’s nearly 100,000 pings. The Kenai River Special Management Area was second with about half the traffic of the Chugach.
“By monitoring over 150,000 different mobile phone apps, the location (latitude and longitude), timestamp, and anonymously assigned device IDs are collected (by cellphone carriers) and available for analysis,” the Parks report says.
“On average, approximately five to ten percent of all available devices in an area are captured through this methodology…..(and) it can distinguish device geographic origins (e.g., in-state versus out-of-state users).”
Given this level of coverage, 100,000 pings in the Chugach would represent a half-million to a million people engaged in recreation in the park in a given year, but the number is likely larger than that given the non-existence cell service in parts of the park.
The “heat map” of cell phone pings there showd some noticeable holes that likely correspond to dead zones.
Popular trailheads, with the notable exception of Eklutna Lake have generally good reception, however, and it was predictable that the park’s Glen Alps parking lot below Flattop Mountain, a notable landmark on Anchorage’s eastern edge, was at the top of the list of “locations of interest” in the Chugach.
Any regular user of that area could not have missed the history of an overflowing parking lot, the addition of another parking lot, and the now regular overflow of both lots that still happens on warm, sunny summer days.
The Eagle River Campground in number two on the top Chugach locations of interest might have been something of a surprise, but not the Turnagain Arm Trail, McHugh Trailhead and Glen Alps Anchorage Overlook rounding out the top five.
All are busy almost every day from mid-April into mid-October.
What was more surprising about Chugach use numbers was that the number of people using the park went up even as the pandemic was raging.
“Recreational use, as measured by device days, spiked significantly between 2019 and 2021,” the report says. “This included a jump in out-of-state visitor use from 24 percent in 2019 to 35 percent in 2021. This growth rate occurred despite very limited cruise traffic in Alaska in 2020 and 2021 and despite the park not being marketed as a major visitor attraction.”
Containerized travel
Cruise ships have long been the major vehicle delivering tourists to the 49th state.
Approximately 57 percent of the visitors coming to Alaska in 2018 arrived on cruise ships, according to the Alaska Resource Development Council. But the Alaska cruise industry collapsed with the arrival of the pandemic in early 2020.
The boom in the Chugach while a bust was underway in the cruise industry might best be explained by the very packaged nature of Alaska cruises.
The tour companies bundle their clients and ship them off by buses or trains to national parks once they arrive in the north rather than visiting local attractions in Anchorage.
The changes the pandemic wrought in the national parks are reflected in the Labor report which showed the number of visitors to Denali National Park and Preserve dropping by 91 percent in 2020 while Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve visits fell by 78 percent and Kenai Fjords National Park by 78 percent.
These differences between the parks are largely explained by the pre-pandemic ratios of tourists to Alaska residents visiting each.
As Alaska’s wildlife Disneyland, Denali is considered the state’s biggest tourist attraction. Alaskans visit there less while more get counted as visitors to Wrangell-St. Elias when they flock to Chitina to dipnet for salmon in the Copper River or as visitors to Kenai Fjord when they head to Seward, headquarters for the Kenai park, to fish for halibut or salmon, engage in Resurrection Bay water sports, watch the legendary Mount Marathon Race, or pursue other forms of recreation.
The phone tracking data in the Resurrection Bay Special Use Area showed the pandemic effect, but it was not as great as that hitting the parks. State Parks reported Seward-area activity “went from a majority of Alaska users in 2019 (62 percent) to a majority of out-of-state visitors in 2021 (61 percent.)”
The flipflop was especially notable in summer. By 2021, the Alaskans who’d been in the majority in 2019 were down to 32 percent of visitors in the broad Resurrection Bay area blanketing the bay, the city Seward, part of Kenai Fjords park, and parts of the drainages of the Resurrection and Snow rivers.
Still, the plan ranked the overall use of the area as “moderate” while the Kenai River area on the opposite side of the Kenai Peninsula was second only to the Chugach as a high-use area.
The Kenai rush/Alaska State Parks
While the use of the Chugach showed a fairly steady, year-round base of use climbing toward an early summer peak before gently sliding into the fall, the action on the Kenai started climbing to a pinnacle in early July, peaked around the end of that month, and then crashed into August almost as fast as it had gone up in July.
Two words adequately explain this phenomenon: sockeye salmon.
When the fish swarm back from the sea by the hundreds of thousands, people from the 26,000-square mile Anchorage Metropolitan Area – the Alaska underbelly home to more than half the state’s population – grab nets and rush to meet them.
There they are joined by anglers from around the world, but the Parks data proved interesting in that the entire list of top five “locations of interest” on the Kenai as identified by phones were dipnet areas.
Once world-famous for its world-record size king salmon approaching 100 pounds, the Kenai River appears to have become more of a mecca for Alaskans hoping to fill their freezers with sockeyes since those Kenai kings joined nearly all other Pacific king stocks in decline.
Why this is remains a mystery, but it appears to be tangled up in competition with other salmon for food and warmer ocean waters plus potential problems from disease and predation from marine mammal populations that have boomed since the implementation of the Marine Mammal and Protection Act in 1972.
With the king fishery in tatters, Alaskans rather than Outside tourists now dominate visitors to the Kenai River management area although their majority shrunk from 76 percent in the pandemic summer of 2020 to 59 percent by the summer of 2021.
And there appear to be key differences between the fishing areas favored by Alaskans, a lot of whom prefer to catch fish in the resident-only dipnet fishery, and tourists from outside.
Non-residents still dominate the traffic at the Russian River Campground on the banks of a Kenai tributary famed for its angling opportunities. Alaskans were the main visitors there in the summer of 2019, but by 2021 the out-of-staters appeared back in force with 66 percent of the phones belonging to someone other than an Alaskan.
A smallish, clearwater tributary to the much larger, glacier-fed Kenai, the Russian was once thought of as “the” place to catch sockeye on rod and reel, but over the past decade major rod-and-reel fisheries for sockeye have developed up and down the Kenai.
The heat-zone map of phones along the Kenai shows heavy use now concentrating around the dipnet fishery and the most popular locations for catching sockeye with rod and reel.
New developments
Outdoor recreation in Alaska is, however, constantly evolving, as the Parks report also notes, and some of that evolution now shows up in the data.
The report says the Petersville Snow Machine Use Area west of the community of Talkeetna, about 115 miles up the Talkeetna Highway from Anchorage, has grown into a moderate-use area with a considerable increase in winter recreation.
“State lands sales over the last 50 years pepper this block of state-owned land,” the report says. “Thus cabins have been built on many of these parcels. Much of the terrain is wetlands so most access is in the winter by snowmachine.
“The map shows the well-marked snowmachine trails maintained by the Petersville Community non-profit group….The combination of these trails, good snow, areas of wide-open terrain and access into the Alaska Range foothills with grand views has made this one of Alaska’s most popular snowmachine areas.”
Summer activities in the area remain greater than winter activities, but the latter are fast growing with peaks in early winter – depending on snow levels – and in late February through early April when the days are getting longer with weather conditions often making this the perfect season for travel on snow.
Data for the Knik River Public Use Area reflects a similiar late winter-early spring phenomenon with a notable, year-on-year increase in use tied to a steady increase in snowmachine, fatbike and all-terrain-vehicle traffic to the Knik Glacier.
Ultimate social distancing/Craig Medred photo
Touring to the glacier has largely been an Alaska thing, but the Parks data shows the percentage of non-residents visiting the area in spring almost doubled between 2019 and 2021 and was approaching the level of summer use of the area by out-of-state residents.
The Knik Area, like the Petersville area, is now rated a moderate-use area, although it doesn’t always look that way. Only an hour’s drive from Anchorage, the area tends to attract a lot of weekend traffic and thus can vary from a relatively low-use area during the week to a relatively high-use area on the weekends.
This pattern of use is well-reflected in the obvious peaks in Parks’ 2021 tracking of phones in the Knik area.
Alaskans do love to get outside. A 2022 user survey conducted as part of the Parks outdoor recreation plan concluded 99 percent of them engage in outdoor activities in the summer with visits to public parks and picnic areas and walking or hiking on trails leading the list of activities.
“And 90 percent of Alasknas partook of winter activities led by ice skating and outdoor ice hockey (52 percent), snow machining (50 percent), northern lights viewing (35 percent) and cross-country skiing (24 percent),” the report said.
The biggest limitation to getting outside, the report added, was a lack of time or work, which nearly 43 percent reported as a problem, with “the next highest limitations to outdoor participation (being) safety concerns due to wildlife (24.3 percent), lack of knowledge of outdoor opportunities (21.4 percent), and lack of supporting infrastructure (20.8 percent).”
Alaska has far more near-impenetrable alder thickets than hiking trails, and both the alders thickets and the trails are frequented by bears – both black and brown/grizzly – which scare the hell out of some people.
You are being watched
Most people reading this story hopefully already know that cell phones can be easily tracked in most of the U.S., and that the wireless carrier companies – ATT, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc. – that provide the connections between those phones and the big, wide world continuously collect this tracking data.
The companies regularly sell various sorts of data on non-identified phone users to businesses and government agencies, and they rather liberally provided law enforcement authorities tracking information on individual phone users until a 2018 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court mandated they obtain a court order before asking for such information.
Alaska Parks did not track individual phone users. The agency wasn’t interested in where anyone went, but where most people go.
Anyone who in today’s privacy conscience world is bothered by the idea of being constantly tracked needs to understand that the only way to avoid this is to leave the cell phone on the counter at home or in some way block the GPS signal.
Be forewarned, however, that if you are venturing off the road system in Alaska, people’s lives have been saved by the ability of cellphone signal carriers to identify the location of a phone carried by someone who is lost.
There are individuals upsides to being constantly monitored by technology, and at the community level, the monitoring can provide a much better idea of what the public really wants from state lands in the 49th state.
I think (and I submitted some ignored comments to this effect), that this cell phone data is bunk. Much of it fails to pass the smell test. Look at the statewide results on p 17. They show a dramatic increase from 2019 to 2021. So dramatic, in fact, that far more people were supposedly recreating outdoors in late November in 2021 than were at the height of summer in 2019 (pre pandemic). I think there are some major artifacts here, probably involved with how cell phone data is collected, and no one attempted to figure out if the data is trustworthy before blindly trying to make theories based on the graphs
I’m not sure the data is “bunk,” Erin, but it does raise questions as you note. Use in 2019 looks unexplainably low compared to 2020 and 2021, though it generally follows the papttern of the other years, ie. rising in the warm season and falling in the cooler season.
There are, however, some hard to figure anomlies in there. Why the big massive from early to late August in both 2020 and 2021? It would be interesting to thorougly compare the statewide results with the local results to see if they somehow connect to that shift.
Some of the local results are strongly similiar in shape with regards to year-to-year patterns – Petersville, Talkeetna, Talkeetna Lakes, Resurrection Bay, Russian River Campground, Kenai River – and others aren’t.
Look at the flatline for Knik in the summer of 2019. It’s way out of whack with explosion of summer use in 2022 and 2021. Chugach State Park isn’t as extreme in this regard, but it is similar with the summer of 2019 rising to a little hill while the summers of 2020 and 2021 are on the order of the Denali massif. That 2019 numbers seems out of line with my general observations of the seasonal pattern of use in the park.
The Kenai also baffles me. There appears to be about a third the peak in 2019 as in the other two years. I thought that might be explained by some sort of drop in the dipnet fishery, but in looking at ADF&G permit numbers there look to have been as many if not more dipnetters fishing in 2019 as in 2020. And there’s no indication there was any big crash in sport fish effort that year.
That led me to ponder how individual phone use changed over this period given the data is only being collected when people use their phones. There is a report here – https://explodingtopics.com/blog/smartphone-usage-stats – that fingers Alaska as the state with the third largest increase in smart phone use from 2019 to 2021 at 128.3 percent, though it doesn’t break that down by 2019 to 2020 and 2020 to 2021. That said, if the bulk of the change came between 2019 and 2020 and 2020/2021 use was largely similar, adjusting the 2019 line on the graph to take this into account would make those statewide comparisons look a lot more similar except for that fall/winter jump in 2021, which I admit is a little baffling.
But I generally found the data most telling for its patterns rather than for its absolute numbers. In that regard, it is usable in the same sense that in-river sonar counts of salmon are useful. They’re not all that accurate as to total numbers, but they do give you a good indication of the shape of the run, and the same applies here at least at the area level.
I agree with you about patterns as opposed to absolute numbers, but I think while it may be possible to look at area A compared to area B with this data, or to look at June vs December average use for area A (averaging all years), it really isn’t at all suitable for looking at trends year over year in its current state, which is exactly what they’re trying to do with it, if you read the associated text. In most cases, it looks like you might do better to throw out 2019 as an outlier, while there are a few that show 2021 as the oddball, and then there’s the inexplicable statewide late fall/early winter 2021 spike. Which leaves too little data and too much noise to say anything about year over year increases or decreases in use. I’d feel better if they checked with land managers in some of those areas that show very dramatic year to year changes to see if that matches reality in their experience, before just believing every spike and dip wholesale. My experience of government reports suggests that is unlikely
And here I thought I was the only skeptic left in Alaska when it came to government reports.
Huh? Guess you missed my comment below.
Exactly why my phone stays at the cabin when I go out. No reason to drag one of those spy tools around with you. Most places I go have no cell service anyhow, so what would be the point, even if I wanted to, which I don’t.
Back in the day I went all over this country without one and survived it, because I didn’t own one, and because they weren’t around.
That’s an interesting way to track people, I wonder how they bias the data? Most visitors are older folks and since they are on vacation how many carry phones with them all the time? I carry two phones most of the time, one personal and the other work, how does that potentially impact the data?
Oh, yeah, most (if not all) Alaskans prefer the tourists boxed up and shaken down. Indeed, they’d even prefer the tourists to stay home and simply mail their money up to us special folks. We deserve it, right?
Me? I’d prefer those corporations to send their ships to Hawaii, Mexico, Asia, etc. Let those Californians set up their ice cream and knick knack shops in those foreign lands, too.
But uf those tourists like getting fleeced, I suppose I’ll just watch the wool come off. Seems kinda’ immoral, but I guess that’s how this generation rolls………
Excellent article, but I can’t believe the word “Skagway” was nowhere to be found in it. Talk about the Disneyland of Alaska! When I drove there several years back, I couldn’t believe what I saw and learned. First, I saw four or five cruise ships per day in port. The streets looked like Main Street in Disneyland. People were everywhere. More, the vendors were mostly non-residents, too. They arrive in late April or early May to set up for the delivery of wallets by the cruise lines, and they begin pulling out and going back home after Labor Day, fully retreated before October.
On a Friday evening after work one day on our way north to the Denali Hwy for a caribou hunt (with the Argo on a flatbed trailer behind the truck/camper), I stopped at the Princess Lodge Chulitna (Mile 131, I believe) to treat my wife to a fine dinner. Upon parking the vehicle, we were stampeded by older European men full of questions. After finally making our way into the restaurant, we found the wait/host staff all European students working their summer. Attempting to leave, we found the Argo surrounded by at least a dozen older men speaking foreign tongues, and filled with more questions.
I realized that these people were hostages. There was absolutely nowhere to go. Nothing to do. It’s a shakedown facility.
As I type this I’m in my camper, finishing up a two week hunting recon (grim sign out here…….). I spent over a week on the Denali Hwy during caribou season. Of course, the season was closed by emergency order. Nowhere did I see a rifle except on the rack of my Argo. The trails were completely empty. But not the highway. Loads of rental moterhomes ambled along. I saw no fewer than four rental jeep motorcades with nine to sixteen jeeps in them, all in CB contact with each other. I realized that these were Denali National Park refugees; those who didn’t make their bus reservations into the park 18 months out and found themselves booked out, so they found Denali Hwy alternatives. The scenery is just as good (or better), but there is absolutely no wildlife to be seen outside of birds and squirrels.
I’ve read that the population of Alaska goes from 730,000 to 2.5 million between Memorial Day and Labor Day. As you point out, the majority of that are well guarded hostages of the cruise line industry and their complicit vendors in the coastal towns, the entrance of Denali National Park and downtown Anchorage and Fairbanks. I feel sorry for those commercial victims, but I suppose that’s better than to have to compete with them for solitude.
Ah yes, Skagway: A big tiny two-faced city. It’s one community in the winter and wholly different community in the summer.
You realize some complain about those boxed tourists not getting out to experience the “real” Alaska, right? I sort of like the idea they’re kept in boxes. It minimizes conflicts with locals who want to do the “real” Alaska.
Thanks Craig for this research. This data is about 180 degree opposite of those promoting the “Long Trail” and their data. This will be useful.
Good. Flying up to Alaska is carbon intensive. I’d think many move to Alaska to enjoy the type of recreation Alaska offers, good for them.