Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

From May through September last year, 85,330 people toured the Chilkat Valley by four-wheeler, boat, bus, bike, plane or on their own feet, according to data collected by the borough for the first time.

In late 2018, the Haines Borough Assembly amended borough code to require tour operators to submit annual customer numbers based on location by Nov. 1.

“I think it’s very useful in knowing the density of where tours are visiting,” said borough clerk Alekka Fullerton, who compiled the data.

The information identifies locations and types of tours, but does not name specific companies. “It’s confidential to a certain extent, because you could extrapolate how much money (a company) has made,” Fullerton said.

The numbers indicate that the most well-trafficked locations are Lynn Canal and Glacier Point and the Chilkat, Tsirku, and Tatshenshini rivers, which both account for the largest majorities of customers at 24 percent, or about 21,500 passengers. Most commercial tourists explored the Chilkat Valley from a self-propelled boat---including canoes, kayaks and rafts-- at 37 percent.

The next most popular type of tour with nearly half the customer base was bus tours.

The least populated areas were Battery Point and Chilkat State Park, with 1,832 and 1,494 visitors respectively.

Alaska Nature Tours operator Dan Egolf said that, while it’s hard to compare 2019 to years past without the same data, he guessed tours have been on the decline since big ship dockings decreased after 2000.

The code change requirement was forwarded from the Tourism Advisory Board for the purpose of gauging impacts on areas where tours are led, said TAB chair Barbara Mulford.

“It also shows how many people coming to Haines participated in tours,” she said. “It could prove the positive economic impacts of tours, or what improvements the borough needs that tourism needs to fund.”

The baseline data will be helpful to measure impacts against 2020, when Holland America will cease docking its Wednesday docking in Haines, Mulford added.

Tourism director Steven Auch said the new data might help inform management decisions moving forward. “If we have a survey that says that an amount of use in an area is too much, maybe we could use that to regulate the amount of people that could go to a certain area at a time,” he said.

In 2018, the Haines Borough Assembly passed a moratorium on issuing new permits on the Chilkoot Lake and river corridor inspired by years of overcrowding that led to potentially dangerous bear encounters.

To see the full report of the 2019 tour season, visit the attachment in the assembly packet from Jan. 14.