Shame on the Haines Borough manager and assembly for dropping the moratorium on new tours on the Chilkoot without any public notification other than the back-door invitation to the applicant. Didn’t manager David Sosa say he was interested in openness in government?
I’m sorry the tourism director felt dropping it was necessary to help her avoid having to explain it. Here, I’ll help:
She can say that the Chilkoot is a mile-long stretch of river which is grossly overused and undermanaged, and that the combination of multiple brown bears, hundreds of sport fishermen, thousands of tourists and gridlock traffic is a lethal cocktail, not improved by adding more.
She can say that nervous mother bears have been known to bolt right through crowds of tourists, and that habituated bears walk between vehicles since there’s nowhere else to go, and that management is a shambles, whatever Sean Gaffney says.
Parks gets a dollar a head for tours and has no incentive to set limits. The bear monitor position is barely funded this year, either by Parks or the borough, both of them evidently preferring to just go ahead and milk their cash cow to death.
Management is so bad, nobody will even take the incentive to keep sport fishermen away from the bears. Maybe a better question for the cruise lines to ask would be: Why would they want to send more of their clients to the Chilkoot?
Sally McGuire