Kenai Fjords A Stern and Rock-Bound Coast: Historic Resource Study

Federal Efforts to Preserve the Icefield and Fjords, 1968-1980

The National Natural Landmark Nomination

Prior to the late 1960s, federal and state authorities had paid little attention to the coastal fjord country. Early efforts, as noted in previous chapters, had been limited to U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey investigations in the 1904-06 period, a U.S. Geological Survey visit in 1909, and occasional visits by USGS and Bureau of Mines personnel in the 1920s and 1930s. The military showed a brief interest in the area during the early 1940s; then, a decade later, the Fish and Wildlife Service began stationing personnel at various area sites. The newly established Alaska Department of Fish and Game continued this practice for a year or two; for the remainder of the decade, however, their presence was limited to aerial flights related to fish management activities. The Fish and Wildlife Service, according to a former agency official, also tried to do waterfowl surveys along the southern Kenai coastline "sometime during the 1960s" as part of a broad study on wintering waterfowl along the Alaska coast. Due to poor weather, however, the agency "didn't get much good data" from the Kenai coast. In 1956, the territorial ADF&G had conducted a sheep survey at nearby Cooper Mountain and in the mountains surrounding Crescent Lake; the agency did not conduct surveys within the boundaries of the present park, however, until goat inventories were conducted in 1968 and 1969. [122]

The late 1960s brought a new governmental study of the area. The National Park Service, which had previously shown no interest in the southern Kenai coast, contracted with an Anchorage college to evaluate the Harding and Sargent Icefields for the National Natural Landmarks (NNL) program.

The NNL program was fairly new, the NPS having launched it in 1962. The agency established the program in order to recognize and encourage the preservation of significant natural lands. The NNL program was akin to the National Historic Landmarks program, which had been established two years earlier; the agency created both programs, in part, because of the increasing difficulty of adding new units to the NPS system. On March 17, 1964, Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall announced the inclusion of the first seven areas in the new NNL system. None were in Alaska. [123]

In the spring of 1967, the agency began to turn its attention to the forty-ninth state. That April, Lake George–a site near Anchorage that was well known for its annual outburst floods–was declared the first Alaska NNL. A month later, NPS Assistant Director Theodor Swem allotted $20,000 for studies of potential natural landmarks. As a result of that and subsequent allotments, approximately fifty Alaska features had been evaluated for the program by the end of 1969. Investigators stated that more than forty of those sites were qualified to be National Natural Landmarks. Only fifteen of those sites, however, were named as NNLs. [124]

In May 1968, officials in NPS's Alaska Field Office moved to have the Harding and Sargent Icefields evaluated as a National Natural Landmark. Several factors apparently moved the NPS to take this action. First, NPS planner Craig Breedlove–one of the few employees in the agency's Anchorage office at that time–had flown over the icefields in the spring of 1967 and had been impressed by their beauty and expanse. Second, a mountaineering party had just completed a well-publicized traverse of the Harding Icefield. Third, the huge size and uniqueness of the icefields demanded their inclusion on an inventory of this type; as the report evaluating the icefields noted, "The uniqueness of these areas was deemed worthy of investigation for a natural landmark site." [125]

On May 21, NPS officials tendered a contract with Anchorage Community College, and paleontologist Ruth A. M. Schmidt agreed to evaluate the icefields' NNL eligibility. Dr. Schmidt first discussed the icefields with Dr. Troy Péwé, a geologist at the University of Arizona and with H. R. Schmoll of the U.S. Geological Survey. Then, on July 24, she flew over the icefields. The following January 20, she submitted a report to the NPS stating that the Harding and Sargent icefields were two of only three relict glacial icefields located wholly within the United States. (Bagley Icefield, east of Cordova, was the third.) They furthermore represented "vanishing geological phenomena." She noted that there seemed "little possibility that man will endanger the integrity of either of these ice fields." She cautioned, however, that "at the present time, they are reasonably free of man-caused influences, and as such, are rare examples of our country's natural heritage." She thus found them outstanding on several counts, and concluded that "the Harding and Sargent Ice Fields are eligible for inclusion in the National Registry for Natural Landmarks." [126]

George Hall, who headed the NPS's Alaska Field Office, forwarded Schmidt's recommendations on to the Washington office. In a May 27, 1969 letter, Hall told Assistant Director Theodor Swem that the recently-completed evaluation of the two icefields "indicates that they are rare examples of our country's national heritage.... We recommend that [they] be strongly considered for eligibility under the Natural Landmarks program." [127] Despite Hall's urging and Schmidt's ringing endorsement, however, the nomination was not forwarded through either the NPS's Washington office or the Interior Secretary's office, and the site was not declared eligible for the NNL list. The Joint Federal-State Land Use Planning Commission, an interagency group studying Alaska lands issues, stated in the early 1970s that the icefields had "ecological reserve potential," but the icefields never attained either NNL or ecological reserve status. [128]

The Seward National Recreation Area Proposal

As noted above, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made several moves, on the heels of the Kenai Peninsula oil-exploration frenzy, to protect portions of the Kenai National Moose Range. In 1958, it had declared about half of the range–including all of its land in the Kenai Mountains–off-limits to oil exploration. Six years later, a Secretarial Order had modified the range's boundaries to eliminate much of its ice-cap acreage. In order to protect its remaining high-elevation acreage, however, the agency submitted a proposal in April 1971 that would have put more than a million acres of the range in the National Wilderness Preservation System.

Just a month before the Fish and Wildlife Service submitted its wilderness proposal for the Kenai National Moose Range, Alaska's congressional delegation began making its own proposals for the huge amount of Forest Service and BLM land located elsewhere on the peninsula. On March 24, 1971, Senator Ted Stevens submitted Senate Bill 1356, which would have established a 1,400,000-acre Seward National Recreation Area, to be administered by the Secretary of Agriculture. The proposed NRA stretched from Crow Pass (near Girdwood) all the way south to Godwin Glacier (east of Seward); west of Seward, it also included Exit Glacier, Lowell Glacier, and more than 50,000 acres of the Harding Ice Cap. In commenting on the bill, Stevens remarked that the NRA would be managed "for public outdoor recreation benefits and the conservation of biotic, scenic, scientific, geologic, historic and other values." But the bill, which was patterned after legislation that established other National Forest recreation areas, allowed a broad mix of land uses, including timber-cutting, mining, sport hunting, and other forms of recreational use. Most of the land involved in the proposal was U.S. Forest Service land, but some 116,000 acres (including the ice cap acreage) was on BLM land. (Within two years, as noted below, the NPS would be formulating its own proposals for the BLM portion of the Seward NRA proposal.) [129]

Inasmuch as the bill creating the Seward NRA largely perpetuated the status quo, local residents appear to have favorably viewed S. 1356. Before long, Alaska's sole House member, Nick Begich, submitted a similar bill in that body. The BLM, which had a multiple-use philosophy similar to that of the Forest Service, also favored the bill; in its 1971 report on the legislation, the agency proposed extending Seward NRA's proposed boundaries south to the coast to include Aialik and Harris bays. As is noted in a section below, proposals for a Seward NRA remained active for the remainder of the decade, though it soon became one of many competing proposals regarding Kenai Peninsula's (and Alaska's) public lands. [130]

Proposed Interior Department Reservations

In December 1971 the fate of the Seward NRA proposal, and the status of public lands throughout Alaska, was cast in an entirely new mold when Congress passed, and President Nixon signed, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA). The bill's primary aim was to provide a land settlement, and cash payments, to Alaska's Native peoples. But one small provision inserted into the bill–Section 17(d)(2)–set the stage for a public debate that would dominate Alaska for the remainder of the 1970s. This provision demanded that Congress, within a seven-year time frame, determine the fate of Alaska's federal public lands by including them in one of several protective classifications. [131]

The general outline of the Alaska public lands debate, which culminated in the December 1980 passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, is fairly well known. Historian Frank Williss has written a comprehensive account of this process from the National Park Service's point of view. The present study will present only a general outline of how the Kenai Fjords National Park proposal developed; a more detailed account is within the purview of an administrative history.

When ANCSA was passed in December 1971, both the NPS and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had already shown an interest in the area. The F&WS had been managing a large part of the Kenai Peninsula for more than thirty years, and it had previously exhibited some research interest in the southern coast. The NPS, for its part, had had several exposures with the area. NPS planner Craig Breedlove, as previously noted, had flown over Harding Icefield five years earlier. In 1968-69, the agency contracted with the University of Alaska regarding the Harding and Sargent Icefields NNL nomination. During the summer of 1970, Breedlove and NPS planner Richard Stenmark made an overflight of the southern coastline in order to gather information for Interior Secretary Walter Hickel's Alaska Parks and Monuments Advisory Committee. Perhaps the most significant event had taken place during the summer of 1971, when NPS Director George Hartzog accompanied Senator Alan Bible (D-NV) on a visit to the southern Kenai coast. Perhaps as a result of the Hartzog-Bible visit, Director Hartzog outlined the so-called Kenai Fjords [132] area as one of several proposed parks and monuments in a November 1971 memorandum. Theodor Swem, who as the NPS's Assistant Director for Cooperative Activities was Hartzog's right-hand man on this issue, recognized that the NPS knew little about the area outside of what had been written in the Harding Icefield report. Swem, recalling that period, stated that "We probably thought that the Icefield wouldn't qualify on its own, so we asked about surrounding values as well. Probably Dick Stenmark or someone else had the answer, and told us they deserved consideration." [133]

In the wake of ANCSA's passage, NPS officials recognized that the agency would be competing with other federal agencies for the right to manage the hundreds of millions of acres of Alaska national interest lands. The NPS, therefore, quickly began to prioritize its interests. By early January 1972, planner Richard Stenmark had assembled the agency's first rough list of proposed park areas, and on March 9–in accordance with an ANCSA-imposed timetable–Interior Secretary Rogers C. B. Morton made a preliminary withdrawal of approximately 80 million acres of so-called "d-2" land. Some 33.4 million of those acres had been withdrawn at the NPS's request. [134]

During the three-month period that followed the passage of ANCSA, the NPS showed a schizophrenic attitude toward the Kenai Peninsula's southern coast. In one January 1972 list of proposed parks, for example, Stenmark included the area, but another such list that month overlooked it. As the winter wore on, according to Williss, the area remained a more consistent priority in the minds of NPS officials. But by this time, Natives within the newly formed Chugach Alaska Corporation had made it known that they planned to claim much of the fjord country, using the "deficiency lands" clause, as part of their ANCSA allotments. Those claims threatened to prevent the NPS (or any other federal agency) from assembling a cohesive management unit. In order to meet the 80 million acre limit, therefore, the NPS deleted the Kenai Fjords area from its March 1972 list and allowed the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife (part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) to claim the area as part of its Aialik withdrawal area. Morton withdrew some 139,600 acres along the Kenai Peninsula's southern coast, much of which is now included in the present park. [135]

According to the ANCSA timetable, the Interior Secretary was mandated to make a final withdrawal of "d-2" lands by mid-September. The various public lands agencies, therefore, spent the next several months studying Alaska's public lands in order to ensure the selection of appropriate parcels. By July, the NPS had submitted a proposal to Secretary Morton that would have added 48.9 million acres to the NPS system. Included in that proposal was a 95,400-acre NPS unit in the so-called Kenai Fjords area southwest of Seward. This unit, by far the smallest of the eleven proposed areas, consisted of three small, separated subunits: two along the coast (in the Pye and Chiswell islands, respectively) and a third in the Exit Glacier area, near the northern edge of the icecap. Richard Stenmark, the NPS planner, recalls that the unit's existence in the NPS package was largely due to the "insistent" efforts of Craig Breedlove, who had "decided that Kenai Fjords was salvageable" and should be studied further. [136]

Over the summer, the agency juggled many of the other proposals in its Alaska proposal package. In mid-September, the number of acres in the final withdrawal for proposed NPS units had shrunk from 48.9 million acres to 41.7 million acres. But the Kenai Fjords proposal remained as it had in July. Small as it was, Williss notes that "the Park Service received most of the land [that] Alaska Task Force planners believed necessary for study as potential parklands." [137] The F&WS, at this juncture, probably had its own proposal to manage other areas within the present park.

The next ANCSA-imposed deadline was December 18, 1973, a date by which draft environmental impact statements (EISs) and conceptual master plans would be submitted by the various agencies. During the fifteen-month period that preceded this deadline, the various agencies completed a series of progressively sophisticated study packages. In regard to the southern Kenai coast, NPS and F&WS officials were well aware that their interests overlapped; they therefore proposed various ways in which to manage that area.

In May 1973, the NPS completed its Kenai Fjords study package. Based on that study, agency officials apparently concluded that dual management would best serve the coastal areas. By mid-June, the NPS's Alaska Task Force had met with the interagency Alaska Planning Group; the APG, in turn, endorsed the idea of a proposed 100,000-acre Harding Icefield-Kenai Fjords National Park. The NPS would manage the icefield portion of the park; the NPS and BSF&W would jointly manage the two coastal units. [138]

During the months that followed, the cooperative spirit of the two agencies apparently rose and fell. In September 1973, the Fish and Wildlife Service issued a Draft Environmental Statement for a BSF&W-managed Aialik National Wildlife Refuge, which would include the Pye and Chiswell islands. Three months later, Secretary Morton approved an NPS-issued master plan for a 300,000-acre Harding Icefield-Kenai Fjords National Monument, in which the Pye and Chiswell islands units–as before–would be cooperatively managed by the NPS and BSF&W. The NPS proposal was far larger than in September 1972 because it included far more land on the Harding Icefield; it was renamed a monument, apparently because the Harding Icefield dominated the proposed acreage. [139]

Throughout the two-year period that followed the passage of ANCSA, the NPS was well aware that much of the land in the proposed monument was Native deficiency land. Agency officials could only wait until the Native corporations made their land selections. They hoped, obviously, that Native officials would select relatively few of the lands within the NPS proposal boundaries. If Natives did select lands within the proposed park, NPS officials knew that cooperative management agreements with the new landowners would be necessary in order to ensure a viable, manageable park unit. NPS officials, unsure of how the land selection process would unfold, purposely drew conservative boundaries for the proposed park. In order to indicate additional lands in which the agency had an interest, the NPS placed some 453,000 acres of adjacent Native-claimed lands in a so-called "area of environmental concern" that linked and expanded the three subunits of the national monument proposal. [140]

Congress Establishes Kenai Fjords National Park

Once the master plan and draft EISs had been submitted to the Interior Secretary, agencies proceeded to prepare final environmental statements (FESs). These documents were completed in late 1974 or early 1975. The FES for Harding Icefield-Kenai Fjords National Monument envisioned a similar management scenario from that suggested a year earlier; the size of the proposed monument was now 305,000 acres, and it still called for joint management of the two coastal units. [141]

The completion of the master plans and draft EISs also meant that Congress was now free to either consider the recommendations that Secretary Morton had issued or propose a legislative alternative. Congress, however, showed little inclination to act. From 1974 through 1976, several bills were submitted to resolve the national interest lands question–most of them piecemeal in nature–but none became law.

During this period, several major developments took place. In one major action, the Chugach Alaska Corporation decided to select most of their deficiency acreage in areas outside the park. As a result of that action, federal managers felt more confident that Congress could enact legislation creating a single park unit rather than three noncontiguous subunits as had previously been the case. [142] The other major action was that the NPS and BSF&W, acting in a joint capacity, funded a scientific study in the proposed park unit. Both agencies recognized that wildlife was one of the major area resources, but little baseline information was at hand. The NPS, therefore, bankrolled a cooperative wildlife survey. Edgar Bailey and Nina Faust spent a month in the field in June and July 1976. The results of their survey were published later that year. [143]

During the mid-1970s, several alternative scenarios emerged on how the Alaska lands question could be resolved along the Kenai Peninsula's southern coast. Conservationists, predictably, hoped to see a relatively large unit with restricted land-use provisions. In November 1973, for example, the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society issued a proposal for a 600,000-acre Kenai Fjords National Ecological Reserve. Shortly after learning about the Chugach Native corporation action, the NPS made a similar proposal for a large national monument. Alaskans, however, preferred a less restrictive environment. Seward-area citizens appear to have rallied around Senator Stevens's Seward National Recreation Area proposal, and the Joint Federal-State Land Use Planning Commission (which had strongly influenced Secretary Morton's September 1972 proposals) recommended an Alaska parks package that completely ignored the southern Kenai coast. [144]

The Seward NRA proposal, as noted above, was particularly popular among local citizens because it catered to their interests while providing few additional land use or lifestyle limitations. Locals also liked the bill because it proposed an expanded management role for the U.S. Forest Service, an agency that had been a part of community life for many years. Senator Stevens had submitted a bill to enact the Seward NRA several months before ANCSA was enacted; the following year, Rep. Begich submitted a similar bill in the U.S. House, and Stevens resubmitted the bill in the next three congresses. [145]

The Seward City Council made no secret that it backed the NRA proposal, and it actively fought any attempts to allow NPS management of area resources. Shortly after the NPS issued its master plan and draft EIS for the proposed Harding Icefield-Kenai Fjords National Monument, the Council passed a resolution opposing the agency's plans "because we support the Multiple Use Management philosophy for this area." Instead, it supported "the concept of a Seward National Recreation Area ... because of the unique terrain characteristics which lend themselves to year-round boating activity, professional, amateur and cross-country skiing, and other unlimited snow-oriented recreational events." The NPS would have had a difficult time organizing local support for its monument proposal under the best of circumstances; the agency, however, failed to contact either municipal or borough authorities and gather their input during the preparation of the master plan and draft EIS. The Council's anti-NPS resolution passed in February 1974; two years later, it passed a nearly identical resolution. [146]

In November 1976, Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in a close presidential election. A few months later, former Idaho governor Cecil Andrus became the new Interior Secretary. Carter and Andrus quickly made it known that they intended to break the legislative logjam over the Alaska lands issue. In early January 1977, Morris Udall, who headed the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, submitted H.R. 39, a bill backed by many national conservation groups. The bill called for a 600,000-acre Kenai Fjords National Monument, to be administered by the National Park Service. Opposing Udall's bill was one by Rep. John D. Dingell, which would have placed much of the fjord country in an F&WS-managed national wildlife refuge; that bill would have permitted sport hunting in some areas. Senator Stevens, as noted above, still advocated the establishment of a Seward NRA, which covered part of the fjord country and mandated relatively few restrictions on mining, timber cutting and other consumptive activities. None of these bills, it should be noted, called for joint management of the coastal portion of the park. The joint management idea was probably abandoned because the Natives' land-selection decision a year earlier allowed federal agencies to propose one cohesive unit rather than the three subunits that had been put forth during the early 1970s. [147]

During the spring and summer of 1977, two major decisions were made regarding the fate of the various public lands proposals along the Kenai's southern coast. First, the NPS decided to call the proposed unit a national park instead of a national monument. An NPS document written shortly afterward noted that the name change, in part, was the result of local input:

Several people have suggested that the area should have a name to draw future tourism to the peninsula. The more famous term "National Park" was used to respond to a specific request from the President of the Seward Chamber of Commerce.

But the diversity of resources–coastal as well as glacial–also played a role in the name change. The NPS discovered that "field investigations of the area in 1976 revealed an area of rich scenic diversity and geological interpretive values." The agency felt that wildlife values not as high as the Fish and Wildlife Service had reported; the area's setting, however, was inarguably impressive. An NPS official noted that "the pristine area of Federal land with such a diversity of multiple experience values" allowed the area to qualify for national park status. [148]

The other major decision made during this period was that the Interior Department chose the National Park Service–and not the Fish and Wildlife Service–to represent the Department in future public land proposals for the lion's share of the southern Kenai coast. As noted above, both the NPS and the F&WS had long been interested in the area. On August 18, 1977, however, Assistant Interior Secretary Robert L. Herbst decided that the NPS would manage the mainland while the F&WS would manage most of the offshore islands. Historian Frank Williss notes that Secretary Andrus had ordered Interior agencies to make a thorough review of the 1973 Morton proposals; based on that order, F&WS officials had recommended that the fjord country be added to the wildlife refuge system. But "intensive lobbying" by NPS officials resulted in Herbst's August 18 decision. [149] That agreement stipulated that the F&WS would manage the Pye, Chiswell, and other offshore islands (but not Nuka Island) as part of a new Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, which stretched from the Craig-Hydaburg area to the Aleutian Islands and north to the Chukchi Sea. Before long, language reflecting Herbst's decision had been placed in several congressional bills addressing the Alaska lands question. [150]

On September 15, 1977, Interior Secretary Andrus responded to Udall's H.R. 39 (the primary legislative vehicle at that time) and recommended a 410,000-acre Kenai Fjords National Park. This was far less than the 757,000-acre park proposal that NPS Director William Whalen had recommended a month earlier. Regarding the wilderness issue, Andrus agreed with Whalen; the Interior Department proposal called for 340,000 acres in the park to be managed as wilderness. In addition to recommending the establishment of a new park along the southern Kenai coast, Andrus also recommended that 230,000 acres be added to the Kenai National Moose Range and that 1,350,000 acres in the newly enlarged moose range be managed as wilderness. [151]

For the next several months, the House of Representatives considered several Alaska lands bills. Alaska's sole House member, Don Young, spearheaded an effort to have the Kenai Fjords area managed as a wildlife refuge. That effort fell short, however, and on May 19, 1978, the House passed H.R. 39, which called for a 420,000-acre Kenai Fjords National Park. In the Senate, the Energy and Natural Resources Committee passed a public lands bill; that bill, insofar as it pertained to the Kenai Fjords area, agreed with the House's overall boundary recommendations but eliminated the House's 340,000-acre wilderness proposal. The Senate committee, trying to be accurate, recalculated the area within the park proposal to be 570,000 acres–150,000 acres larger than the House committee staff had calculated. [152]

Although an Alaska lands bill cleared the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, it never passed the full Senate. Secretary Andrus was well aware that the seven-year deadline imposed by ANCSA was approaching. He knew that if no bill passed before the deadline, the lands being proposed in the various Congressional bills would revert to the public domain. To prevent that scenario from being implemented, Andrus prepared a list of appropriate lands to be administratively designated as national monuments. On December 1, 1978, President Carter issued an executive order proclaiming 56 million acres of Alaska land as national monuments; the National Park Service would manage some 41 million of those acres. The proclamation included a 570,000-acre Kenai Fjords National Monument. [153]

In January 1979 a new Congress gathered, and a renewed attempt was made to pass a comprehensive Alaska lands bill. In mid-May, the House once again passed H.R. 39 that called for a 570,000-acre Kenai Fjords National Park. The Senate delayed action, but in August 1980 it passed its own Alaska lands bill, which also called for a 570,000-acre park. As it pertained to other park proposal areas, the Senate bill was more conservative than H.R. 39, so House leaders hoped that a conference committee would iron out the differences between the two bills. Senate leaders delayed, however, until the November 1980 election. The voters in that election chose Ronald Reagan as president and opted for a Republican majority in the Senate. Given that reality, the House reluctantly voted to accept the Senate bill in its entirety. On December 2, 1980, President Carter signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.

That law, among its many provisions, established Kenai Fjords National Park. The bill declared that none of the new 570,000-acre [154] park would be managed as wilderness. Another provision of the bill changed the name of the Kenai National Moose Range to the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge; the bill added 240,000 acres to the new refuge and declared that 1,350,000 acres of the newly expanded refuge would be managed as wilderness. The bill also provided for the inclusion of the Pye, Chiswell, and adjacent islands in the far-flung Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. [155]

Recreational Impacts of Interior Department Activities

Prior to 1970, neither the NPS nor other federal agencies had paid much attention to the southern Kenai coast. During this period, few sportsmen or sightseers visited this stretch of coastline. As noted above, the decade of the 1970s witnessed a consistent, high level of interest in Alaska lands issues by Congress, the Forest Service, the Park Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service. The decade also witnessed substantial growth in sportfishing and other recreational activities. Some of this growth was doubtless due to the publicity that accompanied the Alaska lands act study and evaluation process. But other growth would have taken place regardless of bureaucratic activity. The following section details the nature of recreational growth in the area during the 1970s.

Few sport fishers tested the park's waters prior to 1970, but in more recent years the park has become an increasingly popular destination. NPS photo, in Alaska Regional Profiles, Southcentral Region, July 1974, 94.

In 1970, Seward was best known to tourists for the annual Silver Salmon Derby and the Mount Marathon race. During the 1970s, those activities continued. The growth of Anchorage and a general rise in leisure time activities also meant that an increasing number of tourists visited Seward, primarily in the summertime. Some of those tourists chartered boats and spent the day fishing in Resurrection Bay.

Relatively few, however, sailed to the south end of the bay or continued past Aialik Cape to the fjord country. Agency staff, as noted above, rarely saw sportsmen (either fishermen or hunters) in this area. In addition, a handful of sightseers flew over the Harding Icefield each summer. Northwest of Seward, a new road was being completed from the main highway west to Exit Glacier; almost no one used it, however, because of its rough surface and the lack of a bridge spanning the Resurrection River. Because no tourist facilities existed in these areas, and because recreational opportunities were usually available in less remote locations, commercial entities in the Seward and Homer areas saw no reason to advertise either the icefield or the fjord country southwest of Seward.

During the 1970s, area sport fishing grew more dramatically than it had in the 1960s, and by 1976, Seward was able to boast a number of businesses that profited from renting or chartering boats. One of those companies was Resurrection Bay Tours, established by Don Oldow in 1968. Oldow, a veteran ship pilot (he captained the ferryboat Tustumena), initially remained within the confines of Resurrection Bay. But in 1974, he began taking fishermen and sightseers out on the new, 43-foot M/V Shaman to the bays and fjords being considered in the various Interior Department proposals. By 1976, moreover, he was taking NPS and F&WS research personnel out into the fjord country. In 1977, Pam Oldow received her ocean operator license and began piloting her own tours. For the remainder of the decade, the couple operated regularly scheduled tours on Resurrection Bay; Aialik Bay tours were advertised (beginning in 1978) but were available only by request. [156] In 1980, anticipating tourist growth due to the new park, the Oldows became partners with Jack and Sheila Scoby (who owned the 43-foot Foxy Lady) and established Kenai Fjords Tours, Inc. Regular tours to Aialik Bay began not long afterward. The company, though no longer owned by either the Oldows or Scobys, remains an active part of the Seward tourist scene. [157]

By the late 1970s, several charter boat operators had taken clients into the fjord country; in addition, people who owned their own boat sailed into the area. The total number of visitors who headed that way is open to dispute. In 1977, an NPS official estimated that "about 200 recreationalists" each week visited either the Chiswell Islands or Aialik Bay. A state Fish and Game official made a more conservative guess; he estimated that between 50 and 100 boats per year visited the waters of the proposed park during the late 1970s. And a pair of wildlife biologists who spent the summer of 1980 in Aialik Bay estimated that perhaps 100 to 120 boats visited the bay between May and August, inclusively. [158] People apparently visited the fjord country in search of a wide variety of fish–salmon, halibut, rockfish, Dolly Varden and steelhead. Three trends brought more people into the fjords. First, the Silver Salmon Derby's increasing popularity caused participants to explore areas beyond Resurrection Bay. Second, the larger, more modern boats could maneuver through the fjord country in relative safety. The area also became better known because of the publicity brought by the various Alaska lands proposals. [159]

Harding Icefield, during the 1970s, became an increasingly popular destination. As noted above, bureaucrats in 1970 had forced a budding ski-and-snowmobile operation off the icefield after just two seasons. Although no on-the-ground development took place there for the remainder of the decade, air taxi operators took an increasing number of patrons on icefield flights. The Milepost and other promotional organs consistently publicized flightseeing trips to "one of Alaska's most spectacular attractions," and individual operators (such as Harbor Air Service and Trail Lake Flying Service) published flightseeing ads. [160] As to the number of flights that visited the icefield, little is known. Edward Murphy and Anne Hoover estimated that 0.3 aircraft per day (thus 10 per month) flew over Aialik Bay during the summer of 1979; as many as 20 per month visited the bay a year later. Regarding a traffic figure for the park as a whole, no data are available until 1982, two years after the park was established. The park superintendent estimated that 500 flights visited the park each summer: 150 from Seward and the remainder from Kenai and Homer. [161]

The Harding Icefield continued to lure a small number of the mountain-expedition fraternity. Not more than a handful crossed the icefield during the decade, one of whom was NPS employee Bill Resor. A few others climbed Phoenix Peak, located three miles west of Seward near the park's eastern boundary. [162]

One additional form of transport to the area was the Alaska Marine Highway. The ferry Tustumena, active since 1964, skirted the park's waters on its Seward-Kodiak runs. Few tourists, however, saw the park from the Tustumena. Service to Kodiak, in comparison to other Alaska Marine Highway routes, was fairly infrequent. It was not a major tourist attraction, and the Tustumena's route provided only distant glimpses of the Kenai Peninsula's southern coast. [163]

In the early 1970s, a new recreational opportunity loomed in the area when the Alaska legislature established Caines Head State Recreation Area. The state, as was noted in Chapter 8, selected land in the Caines Head area in 1962 and 1964. In 1971, 1,800 acres were transferred to the newly-created Alaska Division of Parks; three years later, more than 4,000 acres were added to create a 5,961-acre park that stretched more than seven miles along the bay's western shore from Tonsina Point to Rocky Point. Hopes were high that park development would quickly ensue. In 1979, plans were afoot to develop the area with a boat dock, hiking trails, camping shelters, a picnic area, and other amenities. That plan fell through, however, and the site was ignored for another five years. [164]

By the late 1970s, as has been noted, an increasing number of people were visiting the area within the park proposal, and both the icefield and the fjord country were no longer the terra incognita that they had been a decade earlier. Despite those changes, the area was still so remote–and visitation so light–that many people, both in Seward and elsewhere in Alaska, wondered why government agencies were expending so much effort to preserve the area. As John Madson noted in a 1978 Audubon article,

Most of Seward's boat traffic stays on Resurrection Bay, which offers all any reasonable person could want in the way of sheltered boating, salmon fishing, highlining for bottom fish, scenery, and enough company to make a weekend skipper feel secure.... The Kenai Fjords area ... is surely the least-known [park proposal]. By default rather than by design, it is one of Alaska's best-kept secrets. [165]

Madson noted that Seward residents were initially leery of the NPS's proposal, primarily because they didn't want the federal government having more of a presence. By the late 1970s, however,

the majority of Seward residents are evidently in favor of the Kenai Fjords National Park — or if not actually in favor of it, they're at least getting used to the idea.... Few of the commercial fishermen and charter captains can understand why any party of 6 people would hire a boat at $300 per day just to go out and look at seabirds and sea lions — but that $300 isn't hard to understand. [Local residents are] somewhat puzzled by all the attention being paid to features they often take for granted. [166]

In the years since the park's establishment, visitation has continued to rise. Tourism in the Seward area, based both on tours to the park and a variety of other activities, is now a mainstay of the local economy. In 1997, more than 300,000 people made a recreational visit to the park; given those numbers, Kenai Fjords has become one of the most popular national park destinations in Alaska. All signs point to a continuation of existing trends.

Illustration by Rockwell Kent from Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska, 1920. The Rockwell Kent Legacies.