US national park gateway towns ‘devastated’ as visitors stay away amid pandemic
On a normal Saturday in August, Mara Goodman would see up to 300 visitors at her job at the Mariposa county visitor center located on Highway 140, one of the major routes into Yosemite national park.
But it’s been months since Goodman saw a normal Saturday. This year, she’s more likely to get 30 visitors on a good day. That’s partly because Yosemite, which reopened in early June after a two-month closure, is only admitting half of its normal number of daily visitors due to the coronavirus.
If you’ve visited a national park, you’ve probably passed through a gateway community like Mariposa – to get gas, stay in a hotel, or grab a bite to eat. Their economies rely on a steady stream of tourists traveling to nearby, big-ticket outdoorsy destinations every year. Towns like Mariposa, located an hour from Yosemite Valley, have prospered thanks to this special relationship with national parks: in 2019, national park visitors spent $21bn in communities within 60 miles of a national park, supporting over 278,000 jobs.
But this year, gateway communities are suffering financially. For these communities, locals alone can’t make up for the loss in visitor spending. Mariposa’s outsized number of hotels, restaurants and retail stores, for example, are meant to accommodate Yosemite’s roughly 4 million annual visitors, not the county’s 17,000 residents.
The loss of tourists has “devastated” local businesses, according to
Kevin Kann, a Mariposa county supervisor whose district includes Mariposa’s downtown area. The county is projecting to be down $17.9m in this year’s budget, due to the loss in sales and hotel taxes.
Mariposa isn’t the only town hurting after a summer of park closures and phased reopenings. In Jackson, Wyoming, a few miles south of Grand Teton national park, the town is “busier than we thought we’d be but still not as busy as a normal summer”, according to Rick Howe, vice-president of the Jackson Hole chamber of commerce. He says tax collections are down by about 36%.
In Springdale, a town of roughly 600 people just outside of Zion national park, the town manager, Rick Wixom, says visitors are down by about 30%.
Although the town is seeing more visitors over the summer than in the spring, when the park was completely closed, Wixom noted that the local industry has not completely bounced back; people may be traveling again, but limiting their exposure to others because of health concerns.
“Someone might choose to travel but may not eat out, or might choose to travel and eat out but not to go in gift shops, or vice versa,” he said. “Other places that are heavily reliant on box stores, grocery stores and day-to-day retail are probably not hurting in the same sort of way.”
For small businesses in gateway communities, weak visitor turnout in the summer can mean a brutal winter.
In Mariposa, Covid-19 hit as businesses were preparing for the busy summer season. Over half of Yosemite’s annual visitors visit between May and August. This creates a boom-and-bust cycle for Mariposa residents, who rely on revenue from the summer to stay afloat in the winter.
“Our businesses need to make real money during this time of year. Instead they’re barely keeping their nose above water,” said Kann. “They’re limping through the period of the year where they normally make the money that carries them through the winter.”
Susan Posey, owner of the Sugar Pine Cafe in Mariposa, has cut her normal summer staff of 16 to nine. She normally relies on summer revenue to get through the winter. Instead, her goal each week is just to break even.
“This has been keeping me up at night, it’s nerve-racking. We’re hoping we can get through to the end of the year but then we might need to close for a couple months,” she said.
Service workers are hit especially hard. Teresa Gross typically works fulltime in the summers and part-time in the winters at Mariposa Shirts & Stuff, which she says is common for workers at Mariposa’s tourist-serving businesses.
After being unemployed for two months in April and May, she went back to work in June. But she’s working 32 hours each week instead of 40. Her husband, a fitness trainer, also lost income.
“We are obviously worried about our bills, and we’re worried that come wintertime there might be something needed for our car or something that might need to be fixed, and we won’t have nearly the same amount of savings that we’ve had in the past,” she said.
As an eight-year resident of Mariposa, Gross says the coronavirus showed her just how reliant the town is on tourism.
“Without tourism, there’s not nearly enough people to keep this small downtown running,” she said.
Some, like lifelong resident Kara Inman, hope that this summer serves as a wake-up call to the county’s reliance on tourism. Inman owns two retail stores in town and a bed-andbreakfast. She’s always tried to cater more to locals with her retail stores, something she hopes other businesses will try now that tourism is down. She’s also interested in the county pursuing other industries outside of tourism.
“We’ve had fires and flooding in the past that hurt our tourism, and now we have another big hit, maybe that means we should bring in something different,” she said.
Kann says he supports the idea of diversifying Mariposa’s economy, but recalled that someone once told him that Mariposa trying to develop other businesses instead of tourism is like “the most successful corn farmer in Iowa deciding to sell pineapples”.
“The fact is we will always be on the doorstep of Yosemite national park, and there’s every reason to believe that the tourists will come back,” he said.