Up to three new tours may be operating in the Chilkoot Lake area this summer, renewing questions about how to manage people and bears in the popular tourism zone. Two of the new tours – including the one already approved – propose operating only up to the park boundary, which tour operators say poses less of an impact, but opponents see as a bureaucratic workaround.
New conversation about this area just outside the park, around Lutak Bridge, is perhaps a result of a growing consensus that the corridor itself is overcrowded. According to Alaska State Parks regional superintendent Preston Kroes, three new tour permits will mean an all-time high in the number of tours operating in the area. Park ranger Jacques Turcotte said high volumes of tourists make it difficult to manage human-bear interactions. Last summer, Turcotte euthanized a young bear after it became human-conditioned – something Kroes said hadn’t happened in the park in four decades.
Concerns with overcrowding include even those supportive of the new permits. At a Feb. 18 borough Commerce Committee meeting, assembly member Cheryl Stickler, who was one of four assembly votes in 2022 to remove a moratorium on new Chilkoot Lake tour permits, said she didn’t know “how it’s healthy for anyone [at Chilkoot],” given the crowding. Even one of the new tour applicants, Karen Hess of Last Frontier Tours and Transportation, said she and her husband, Duck Hess, felt the area inside the park was “crowded enough already.”
That’s why the Hesses say they applied for a permit extending only to the Lutak Bridge at the edge of the park boundary. Cyclops Cycles, whose permit is not yet approved, has done the same. And while some see this as just a workaround contributing to the same old problem, the new applicants pitch it as a way to take tourists to the area with reduced impact. The third new applicant, Sue Rakes, is applying to lead small photography tours into the park itself.
Kroes and Turcotte at State Parks say the distinction between the two areas exists on a parcel viewer, but not in biological terms. “Those bears don’t only live in the park,” said Turcotte. “They don’t understand park boundaries. They’re going across all these boundaries – private property, state, borough land.”
Kroes agrees, and said that bear activity can be just as high at the bridge as inside the park. “There are a few bears out there that really like to walk across the bridge,” said Kroes, adding that multiple different sows in previous years would lie down on the bridge to nurse their young.
Prior to Turcotte’s arrival at the end of last season, Haines had two years without a dedicated ranger. That meant little enforcement and an increase in behaviors from tourists like feeding and approaching bears – training negative behaviors which, Turcotte said, due to the 10-mile minimum range of coastal brown bears, are then brought into town. Kroes and Turcotte have authority to enforce regulations and manage wildlife encounters both inside and outside the park and plan to do so this summer.
However, State Parks is not officially asking for a moratorium on permits.
“Limiting the number of people could be advantageous,” said Turcotte, “but at the same time, you could have people and bears interacting in the numbers already there by establishing an appropriate culture [of behavior towards bears].”
Sue Rakes, the third new permit applicant, went even further, calling the bridge “number one the biggest problem area.” Rakes pointed to the chokepoint nature of the structure, funneling what she said were at times last summer up to 100 tourists right into a bear-crossing zone. Rakes, who was previously a U.S. Forest Service ranger in the Juneau area, said she spent much of last summer working on her own to manage bears and people on the bridge. She believes that the borough should start by at least setting a limit on the number of new permits, which it currently does not.
Rakes, of course, is one of these new applicants, though she distinguishes between herself, taking small groups of around five into the park, and those taking buses and vans to the bridge.
“I don’t want to get a permit or add impact on that corridor,” she said. When asked why she applied for the permit, she said her goal was to “ be a role model for ethical and responsible photography,” and to “bring up the standards for how people behave as individuals in that park.”
Despite this opposition, Karen and Duck Hess’s Last Frontier Tours permit passed the assembly and public comment on Feb. 11 without friction. Karen Hess, speaking to the assembly, emphasized that the permit was for a tour all around town, with a drive up Lutak just one stop on the route. Hess said their 14-person bus would drive up to the park boundary “if time allowed… just so that [tour members] can get a view of the river.” The focus, she said, was on the history of the town.
However, as discussion at the meeting went on there was uncertainty about what the tour’s actual plans for that stop would look like. Karen Hess said the plan was “not to let them out and wander around, but if they want to get out and take pictures… we’d like to offer at least the opportunity to take pictures of the river.” Duck Hess added that the bus has specially designed large-windows. “They’re going to be able to take pictures from the bus,” he said, “so I think your worries are irrelevant.”
Assembly member Kevin Forster, the only assembly member who voiced any reservations, distinguished between a simple stop at the bridge, which he said felt like little impact, from the larger impact of letting tourists down to the river. Mayor Tom Morphet followed by suggesting the Hesses allay any concerns by assuring the assembly passengers would not be leaving the bus. Before either Karen or Duck Hess responded, other assembly members spoke to voice support for the tour: Assembly member Mark Smith called the Hesses the two most qualified operators in the town based on their history in the town tourism industry. “We need more commerce. Let the man do his thing,” added assembly member Gabe Thomas.
Andrew Letchworth of Cyclops Cycles, the other applicant to propose going up to the border of the park, has, like Thomas, underscored the commercial importance of Lutak. Letchworth said in a separate conversation that he has heard online, and in discussions with tourists, that the Chilkoot Lake area is seen as the single best reason to go to Haines. Letchworth also emphasized his concern for the bears; his permit asks for 15 days of shore excursions and independent traveler operation on days without large cruise ships, and only up to the end of July – before critical bear feeding season. He says these stipulations will ensure limited impact on crowding and wildlife.
Based only off of the public hearing for the Last Frontier permit, there is more support than opposition for new permitting. However, longtime Lutak resident Richard Buck said he and neighbors would have spoken out had they known about the new developments. Buck said he sees the crowding problem firsthand, describing finding the bridge to his home impassable during peak months, with tourists parked in both lanes. “Somebody should come knock on the door and say, ‘Hey, this is being proposed, what do you think of it,’” said Buck, of the new permits.
Buck is also less amenable to commercial concerns. “[Lutak] is being bastardized by people who want to make money off of it, and the heck with anybody else,” Buck said. “When the main object of the town is to make money, it’s pretty depressing.”
Buck said he would strongly support a moratorium on new permits.
His suggestion for more deliberate notice of the public hearings on new permits is not without precedent. Earlier this year, the assembly amended an ordinance proposing a new water main for Small Tracts to notify and solicit feedback from residents in the area. If it passes, the borough will enter into an $2.8 million loan agreement.
Other examples include applications for alcohol licenses, which require public notice on the radio or in a newspaper, and which until recently required posting notice of the application at the physical location being permitted.
The current process for tour permits is two-fold: first a permit must be approved by the borough’s tourism director, police chief, and harbormaster. Then the permit is held for public comment and must be approved by the assembly. At the Feb. 18 Commerce Committee discussion, assembly member Richard Clement said that due to the time necessary to institute a new approval process, the current process will almost certainly remain through at least the upcoming season.
As for State Parks, however, changes may be afoot sooner than next year. Regional superintendent Kroes said his office will wait to see how things develop into peak season with new operators. But they do have a few plans “in the works,” said Kroes, that they might consider for the second half of the season. Kroes was reticent to give specifics, but said that if traffic at the bridge increases with new permits, state parks “will have to find ways to separate people and bears.”