Tourists are back

Tourists are back. “Glitter Gulch,” the strip of T-shirt shops and fast-food joints just outside Denali National Park’s entrance is open for business again, even if some hotels are still shuttered and an espresso is hard to come by.

Restaurants, bars, and the hotels that are open are hampered by a lack of the normal seasonal workers, a lingering handover the pandemic and an effect of restrictions on temporary student work visas for young people, mostly from Europe, who like to visit and work to pay expenses.

Visitors are headed into the park again, however. They are mostly independent travelers coming to Alaska by air the summer.

There are no cruise ships yet to Southcentral Alaska, and the Canada border is still closed to highway travel.

Things are better this year but there are still challenges. The lack of a workforce is a real damper along with the scarcity of rental cars, said Scott McCrea, head of Explore Fairbanks, the Interior city’s visitor bureau.

There are reports that hotels having to turn away guests because of staff shortages, restaurants having to limit hours, and some trips to Alaska by air because rental cars were unavailable, he said.

An interesting development, McCrea said, is that because of ample airline seat capacity and numbers of air carriers ticket prices have been attractive, leading to more last-minute bookings.

“That means more people are arriving without having booked land tours or made other plans,” McCrea said, which creates a lot of opportunities for Alaska-based tour firms.

“There’s more optimism this year and there wasn’t much optimism last year. A lot of small businesses in the visitor industry didn’t think they would make it last year” said Bonnie Quill, executive director of the Mat-Su Visitors and Convention Bureau.

“Alaskans saved us with more in-state travel,” along with some independent tourists who responded to vigorous marketing, Quill said.

“One silver lining in this is that we now see the opportunities through marketing to independent visitors along with the in-state market,” she said. That will make the industry less dependent on the cruise ships.

Last year Alaskans had Denali National Park mostly to themselves, a luxurious experience. The state’s crown jewel of visitor attractions will have to be shared with others this year, but the park still won’t be jammed as in previous summers.

Services in Denali still aren’t back to normal. “Both transit and tour buses are operating at approximately one third of 2019 operations, National Park spokesperson Sharon Stiteler said.

Even though many of the 2020 pandemic restrictions eased in many places they are still in effect for buses operated in Denali by the park service, which means spacing rules and limited seating still apply.

This isn’t the case for private bus operators who offer wildlife viewing tour along the park road. Those are running full.

The limited capacity and number of shuttle buses will mainly restrict travel, compared with pre-pandemic years, to the park’s huge “back country” beyond the Savage River checkpoint at Mile 15 on the park road, Stiteler said. The restrictions on automobile traffic apply at Savage River, except by special permit (check Denali’s web site for details).

However, the 15 miles of road to Savage River are open to public travel, Stiteler said, and campsites and hiking trails along that stretch are open and are being well used by the public so far this summer.

The Savage Alpine Trail that begins at the small (public) parking lot at Savage River is a relatively short but ambitious trail that offers stunning views from its higher elevations which are well worth the grunt work up the trail.

The trail can also be hiked, at less of an incline, from near the Savage River campground, where the more level, and short, Mountain Vista trail winds down to the Savage River where benches are in place for enjoyment of the solitude, the nearby river, and a mountain panorama to the south.

Near the Park Entrance, with parking nearby, the Riley Creek trail offers a pleasant loop though woodlands and gentle terrain. The nearby Healy Overlook trail is for the more ambitious, but it also offers a pleasant traverse through spruce and birch forests before gaining elevation.

Denali is a wonderful experience. On a family trip in June this writer had a “nine bear day,” seeing nine grizzlies from the bus with some close to the road. There were moose, of course, including a cow and two calves that appeared alongside the road as soon as the bus turned in from the Parks Highway. There was a small herd of caribou as well as Dall Sheep.

We saw a black wolf, too, a rare sight in Denali these days. Sports hunters are active along the park’s boundary, which is affecting the wolves, which need expansive areas to live in. A wolf family stepping across the park boundary is in immediate danger.

The weather was decent for our visit. The terrain was stunning, and the big one – the mountain – was visible enough to appreciate its immense size from tens of miles away.

Denali isn’t the only enjoyable Alaska summer experience. Don’t forget Denali State Park, adjacent to and just south of the national park, which is on the Parks Highway and has state campgrounds, an extensive trail system and great views of Denali’s south face from viewpoints with parking along the highway. Seeing the mountain is always weather-dependent, however.

The Denali Highway east from Cantwell, near Denali on the Parks Highway, connects with the Richardson Highway and is another treasure, with views of an expanse of hundreds of square miles from the highway across a broad expanse to the Alaska Range.

The Denali Highway is paved for three miles on the west end and 21 miles on the east end and its remaining more than 100 miles are graded gravel with a recommended speed limit of 30 miles per hour. Some car rental agencies do not allow driving on gravel road including the Denali Highway, however.

There are a handful of small lodges with limited services along the road and the Tangle Lakes campground, operated by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, is 21 miles from the eastern terminus of the Denali Highway with the Richardson and is popular for camping, fishing and canoeing on nearby lakes.