Sitka’s summer tourism season is in full swing with numbers expected to be close to last year’s record-breaking 585,000 cruise visitors. On a handful of days the number of visitors will exceed Sitka’s own population of about 8,000.
On a busy day in June, the scale of the phenomenon was on full display. Lincoln Street was closed, people streamed up and down the steps of St. Michael’s Cathedral, buses rumbled in and out of the parking lot at Harrigan Centennial Hall.
In front of the library, Daina Bauman of Minneapolis tied a bag of salmon onto the back of her rented e-bike in preparation for the ride back out to the Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal. She was feeling good about her family’s decision to book e-bikes online before arriving in Sitka.
“I just think it’s awesome we didn’t have to sit on the bus and wait in line,” Bauman said. “They said, ‘Go early because there’s going to be another cruise ship with some 4,000 people showing up.’ We got in and out, we’ll just zip back and we’re done.”
Bauman was traveling with her daughter Lexi and mother Rita Skurupijs.
“Thank heavens for the bike path,” Skurupijs said, as she contemplated the six-mile ride back out to the Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal in an unprotected bike lane. “But of course when the big buses pass it’s a little nervy.”
A couple blocks away Sitka resident Rachel Jones was leaving Highliner Coffee, shepherding three kids on regular bikes.
“I’m certainly not opposed to the tourism industry at all, but it definitely does impact how we structure our day when the cruise ships are in town,” Jones said.
She and her family live downtown near Crescent Harbor. When it’s quiet the kids can ride around by themselves but on heavy cruise ship days she accompanies them. It’s a lot to navigate: scooters, pedestrians, buses, stop lights.
“The number of things your brain needs to juggle feels much more like trying to ride bikes in a city,” Jones said.
Jones sees tourism as a major economic engine, noting that she herself benefits as the owner of an Airbnb unit. She likes the fact that cruise ship visitors show up in the morning and leave in the afternoon, making Sitka feel very livable the rest of the time.
Not everyone is so optimistic. Klaudia Leccese grew up in Sitka and has fond memories of waterskiing around cruise ships and learning to drive a skiff in their wake. But what’s happening now is a different scale, with more crowds, buses, e-bikes, noise, pollution. Leccese is president of the advocacy group Small Town Soul, which wants to cap the number of cruise ship visitors at 300,000 a year. That’s about half what Sitka will experience this year.
“Everyone in the Small Town Soul group supports cruise tourism,” Leccese said. “We just feel like there needs to be a limit.”
So far the group has tried three times, unsuccessfully, to get a limit before Sitka voters. From Leccese’s house you get a sense of what she’s trying to protect. The window of her living room looks out on Sitka Sound and Mt. Edgecumbe. She treasures everything about the landscape.
“The quietness, the wildness, I’ve been raised subsistence hunting and fishing and gathering so there’s something for every season,” Leccese said. “I really treasure being alone in bays and on trails.”
Leccese can feel the pressure on those quiet places these days, whether she’s stuck in traffic or out running on the Cross Trail or fishing along the coast. There are more people and vehicles and boats wherever she goes.
Out at the Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal there’s no denying the hubbub. On a busy day the facility is alive with ships, visitors, vehicles, retail, food. The enticing aroma of roast nuts greets you as you enter. Chris McGraw is the owner and general manager and the main force behind the explosion in cruise ship numbers in Sitka. After the city voted down a public deep water dock his family business built a private one.
“It’s been a work in progress since 2011,” McGraw said. “The more ships we’ve gotten, you learn to adjust, learn things you need to add, learn to expand.”
A lot of McGraw’s challenge is logistics: moving people smoothly around town.
“Wednesday we had 6,200 people here,” McGraw said. “How do you deal with 6,200 people that come in at 8 o’clock and leave at 5 o’clock and get them to do what they want for the day. How do you do that without impacting the average local who wants to drive to work and go to lunch and come home. And how do you minimize that impact?”
McGraw sat on Sitka’s tourism task force so he’s familiar with the problems people cite. He’s working on various fixes: dispersing visitors, a cleaner bus fleet, a berthing policy of no more than one large ship and one medium ship on any one day. But he doesn’t want strict limits on visitor numbers.
“I’m opposed to any hard caps,” McGraw said.
McGraw’s interest is obvious but he argues the economic benefits go far beyond his own business. You can see that in the startups across the street from the terminal where the Sitka Tribe of Alaska houses an economic development center. There’s office space, a commercial kitchen, a bike-and-hike business, scuba diving, e-bike rentals, jet ski rentals, a four-wheeling venture, a warehouse for merchants at the cruise ship terminal.
“This is a hustling, bustling little place,” Sitka Tribe of Alaska Economic Development Director Camille Ferguson said.
Ferguson’s assessment is that Sitka is still gearing up to handle the influx of visitors.
“There’s a lot of tired people out there,” Ferguson said. “A lot of people putting in long hours and trying to keep up. That’s kind of what I feel. And I know that I’m not the only one that feels that way. We are super busy and we look forward to the days when we can have a day off.”
Amy Ainslee, director of planning and community development for the City and Borough of Sitka, sees this moment as the transition between reacting to tourism and managing tourism.
“I think about what does Sitka look like for the next couple years, and what does tourism look in Sitka for the next five to 10 years,” Ainslee said. “Because we’re in some ways kind of at this tipping point.”
The Sitka Assembly is now working on the recommendations of its tourism task force. That includes figuring out to regulate e-bikes and what areas or activities require special permits and how permits and locations should be doled out for Sitka’s burgeoning food truck scene. Another big action item is to negotiate a memorandum of understanding with the cruise industry over visitor numbers.
“I think there’s been a lot of earnest effort to hear from the community and to try to find the balance point that works for everybody,” Ainslee said. “But I don’t think it’s ever going to feel that way because it’s a really polarized issue.”
As the search for that balance point continues, Sitkans like Rachel Jones are adjusting to the new normal.
“You know I think you just have to adapt,” Jones said. “It’s going to be happening for a while. I got to town right when the discussion about whether the town should put in a deep water dock was happening and I understand why that didn’t happen, but if you don’t do it in a way that’s got public control then you don’t have public control. I think it’s just an ongoing conversation.”
