What will Visiting Alaska's National Parks in 2025 be like?

Jennie shares what to expect while visiting Alaska's National Parks and other federal lands in 2025 along with her editorial approach for 

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Transcript

Jennie Flaming: 0:00

Jennie, welcome to the Alaska uncovered podcast with me, your host, Jennie Thwing Flaming, my occasional co host and full time husband, Jennie and I bring you accurate, helpful and entertaining information about Alaska, travel and life in Alaska, before we start today's show, we'd like to take a moment to thank our Patreon subscribers for your support and Making this podcast possible. Enjoy the show. Hi everyone. Jennie here, Happy National Parks week once again. So just a reminder that this week we are having some extra episodes. We have four episodes for you this week, it is this is not going to be the case going forward, it's not going to become a daily podcast, but this week, we're celebrating National Parks week and talking in depth about Alaska National Parks before we get into today's episode too far. I wanted to just remind you that I have my brand new on demand workshop in my online shop. It's a it's a video class, and it is all about visiting all eight Alaska National Parks and how to do that. I want to encourage you to pick that up this week, until Friday night, it is on sale for 30% off to celebrate parks week and to launch this new workshop. So you want to use the code parks 30 to get that 30% discount. And so you can get it for $12 instead of 17, which is pretty cool. All right, you can find the link to the show notes, or you can go to shop, dot ordinary, dash adventures.com, and you'll find it there. All right, so today we are talking about visiting Alaska's national parks, and not just national parks, but other public lands. In 2025 to start off with, I want to just mention that this podcast is primarily focused for visitors, and so we'll be talking about like what you can expect as far as a visitor experience. But before I talk about that, I really want to mention that there are so many things that as visitors to our national parks, we don't necessarily see that are super important, and the cuts that we are experiencing right now in the United States are absolutely catastrophic for our public lands. So I want to just start by making that clear. I really tried to get some folks who work in public lands to come on the podcast for this episode, and I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that no one felt comfortable doing that, and I certainly didn't want anyone to feel pressured to do that. So I'm going to do my best to share what I know based on talking to people around Alaska, and I also just want to say that this is a huge problem for protecting our public lands and making sure that they're there for many future generations of humans, and also because these places are worth protecting just for their own sake, that's what I really believe, and that is really under threat. Beyond that, the federal government is the state of Alaska's largest employer. There are more veterans living in Alaska than any other state. Many of them work in federal jobs, or did until recently. So in addition to how this impacts our public lands, this is really impacting Alaska's economy and Alaska as a community, and so I I mentioning that because I think it's important. I think it's important for people to know how devastating it is to lose these jobs and in some cases access to places. But more often than just access, we're talking about things that we don't necessarily see as visitors, things like the science and research that's going on. In Alaska's parks, which is a lot, and in addition to that, all the maintenance things that need to be done, there's just so much that happens behind the scenes, both to protect our public lands, but also to study and understand what's happening. And there are so many reasons why that's important. Climate change research is especially crucial in Alaska's parks, because in northern places, many of these impacts of climate change are here now, and not something that's coming in the future. So I'm not qualified to tell you about every single project that's going on, but I know you all know, probably by now, I'm sure you do that. My husband, Jay worked for the National Park Service as an archeologist, and I did research, but there's so many other kinds of research, biology, wildlife, climate change, just various things about how different environments and ecosystems work. There are just so many different things. And so I wanted to just mention that, because you won't necessarily see that as a visitor, but those are things that are super important to the work, especially of the National Park Service. With that, let's move into talking a little bit about what to expect in Alaska's national parks this summer. I want to be clear. I'm going to keep this episode fairly short, because I want to make sure I'm only sharing real information that I can actually verify, which is pretty challenging right now, to be honest with you, everyone is scrambling to figure out how to make everything work, and you know that is part of the spirit of Alaska and Alaskans is to persevere, to find a way to make things work. And so people are working very hard to make sure visitors still have amazing experiences. I am not aware of any visitor centers or activities that will be closed or inaccessible this summer, 2025 in Alaska. That doesn't mean it's not going to happen, and it doesn't mean that it might not change. So again, this is just me sharing what I've been able to learn one thing that's important to know about Alaska parks. You know, the last couple days, in the episodes that we've had, we've talked quite a bit about how remote they are and challenging to access. And so in most cases, when you are going into Alaska's national parks having an experience you're typically going to be working with, or traveling with a someone who has a permit to commercially operate in that park. And the way that this is structured is kind of complicated, but like, for example, in Denali, all of the bus tours are operated in a joint venture between Doyon and Aramark, and so they are expecting to continue as they normally do. It's not National Park Service employees that drive the busses, for example. And so what I have heard from talking to different people who provide visitor services in the parks, whether that's tours or other types of things they have, what they have told me is that they're expecting to operate in the same way that they always have, and that is across all eight of Alaska's national parks. They're still expecting to get their permits to take people into the park. Depending on the park, it might be by airplane, it might be on a hiking tour, it might be on a boat tour. We've talked in the last couple days about the many different kinds of cool experiences that you can have in Alaska's parks. And so as of right now, what I'm expecting is that those tours are going to continue as normal. Now, of course, there are many challenges that are always there, things like staffing, things like wildfires. You know, there's the potential, potential for this volcano erupting, but as far as cuts to the Park Service, I'm not expecting that your scheduled tours will be affected. The thing that I think may be affected, although I don't have solid information about this, is potentially things like visitor center hours. I i The only place I know that is going to have more limited visitor center hours is the Mendenhall Glacier Visitors Center, which is not National Park Service, that is the US forest service that operates Mendenhall Glacier. And they have several community partnerships, including the cultural ambassadors program with the Tlingit and Haida. And they are working together to keep the visitor center open as much as possible, but it is going to have less hours than in the past. The Mendenhall Glacier visitor center will be closed on Saturdays, and it will open, I think, an hour later and close an hour earlier. But if you're traveling on your own, you can still get to Mendenhall Glacier. You can still hike there even when the visitor center is closed, so which is a great thing to do. So just to pause there on Mendenhall Glacier for a moment again, that's not a national park, it's the Forest Service. It's just going to be super important to have a plan for how to get there. We have other episodes where we've talked about Mendenhall Glacier in depth, but it's going to be extra important to make sure that you're on a tour with a or that you're getting there through some kind of permitted transportation provider, unless you're renting a car. If you're renting a car, then you can just drive there and pay the $5 to park, and that'll be fine. Okay, so I one thing I mentioned before that Alaskans are very resourceful, really committed to making things work, and that is amazing. I just want to make sure that you're aware that if you go to Denali and you take your bus tour as scheduled, that they're that these cuts are still devastating. They're just maybe not going to impact your bus tour. But I think it's really important to mention how important these behind the scenes things are, and how much these cuts are really going to impact things, especially in the long term. So if you care about public lands in the US. If you're an American, I just really want to encourage you to contact your member of Congress, regardless of who you voted for, regardless of your political beliefs, public lands in the United States has long been a bipartisan value, and so I just want to encourage you to reach out to you to ask for this funding to be restored. I just think that's so important, getting back to your experience. So again, if you've booked tours, whether that's into very remote Gates of the Arctic and COVID Valley National Park, whether that is in Rangel st Elias national park or Denali or Katmai or lake Clark or Glacier Bay or Kenai Fjords. I would what I would recommend is that you assume that you the tours you've booked, the lodging you've booked, will be available and will happen. But keep an open mind and be aware that there could be some other types of changes around things like visitor center hours and that, of course, everything I've talked in this episode may change. So before I finish up today, I want to just tell you how I'm going to handle this, both for those of you who are on my email list and with the podcast going forward this summer. So not just with access to public lands, but also things like if mount spur erupts, if there are wildfires, which there often are in the summer, and that is something that has been getting more intense with climate change, more fires and more of the year. This summer, I am really going to try to do bonus episodes of the podcast when major things change. Now, if that happens when I am in the middle of a tour. It's going to be hard for me to do that. I'm still going to try. I'm going to have my hand held field recording kit with me, so I will try to record a short episode if I do find out about changes related to these budget cuts on public land. Plans this summer, I am expecting to be in Denali several times. I am expecting to be in Kenai Fjords at least once, and Lake Clark at least once. I may be in other national parks but but not that I have specifically planned right now, so I will definitely report back if anything that I've shared turns out to change. I'll also, you know, as I'm learning about things that happen, I will definitely update my email list, but also I will try to record short bonus episodes when I can as things change. And I also just want to really encourage you in any time of uncertainty. And travel always has some uncertainty and unpredictability. We're just more aware of it. Right now, make sure that you have travel insurance and make sure that you have an open mind and that you have your plan, go into it with your plan, but it's going to be really important to be flexible, just like it always is, and kind and supportive to hard working seasonal staff, especially those who are government employees, but also those who are working as guides and really dedicated and working hard at giving you the best experience possible while you're in Alaska. So definitely make sure, as always to show your support for them. A few resources, I know I don't always remember to talk about my email list, but I'll put the link to shine to sign up for that in the show notes, along with, of course, my planning a trip to all Alaska's national parks workshop. That's 30% off for a couple more days. Thank you for listening. Thank you for caring about our public lands. We have one more episode for this week for national parks week tomorrow, and that episode is going to be with Al and Carla, who did a trip to all eight Alaska National Parks. They actually split it up into several trips, and I help them plan that. And so we're just going to walk through their experiences in the different parks. And they're really fun to hear from. They have a great story. They are very close to completing their quest to visit all 63 national parks in the United States. So I am going to sign off here. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you tomorrow.

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