Halfway through the summer tourism season, Southwest Colorado’s economic and tourism officials are seeing visitors turn away from the region due to concerns about the ongoing drought and fires.
Mesa Verde Country manages tourism in Cortez and Montezuma County. Executive Director Brian Bartlett said it has noticed a weekly decline of 1% to 2% in typical visitation numbers since Memorial Day.
“That's everything from heads and beds to visitations at restaurants, to visitors participating in our cultural experiences,” Bartlett said.
He added that the region is down nearly 10% in visitation and visitor spending from historic numbers. The Colorado Welcome Center in Cortez has seen an increase in tourists coming to ask questions and express concerns about the drought, which is extreme in Montezuma County.
The 65,000-acre Ferris Fire burning northwest of Dolores near Dove Creek has also deterred tourists and inspired cancellations of trips.
“That's affected a ton of things because we have long term vacation planning that goes on for the Dolores area. People don't just pop in on a whim,” Bartlett said. “They don't want to get in the way of the fire professionals and they don't want to add extra stress to a community that's already stressed out.”
The fire shut down Bradfield Campground, which contains 22 campsites and provides access to fishing, rafting and swimming activities. Tens of thousands of acres of surrounding national forest and Bureau of Land Management land have been burned.
“People don't want to come back to a burn scar and camp there in following years,” Bartlett said.
He also said the 100,000-acre Babylon Fire in Utah’s San Juan County near Monticello is interfering with the typical routes roadtrippers take to discover Cortez and its surrounding areas.
“That's a big pipeline for us from Monticello, Moab, here. We work both ways up and down the Trail of the Ancients scenic byway,” he said. “There’s fire activity at multiple points along that trail so that’s not helping us.”
Shak Powers, deputy director of Region 9 Economic Development, said a key measure of fire impact on tourism and businesses will be Dove Creek’s July sales tax numbers, which won’t be available until August. However, it’s not necessarily just the drought and fires responsible for tourism decreases – it’s also the messaging.
“The real takeaway from the last couple of droughts was that the messaging had more impact than the lack of water,” Powers said.
He said this messaging includes “people panicking on social media, making things look worse than they are” and “the media dramatizing the fire.”
Bartlett concurred, noting that people can conflate “Dolores County” where the Ferris Fire is with “Dolores,” unnecessarily steering clear of the town around 15 miles away from the blaze, perceiving it to be on fire.
Beyond the fire conditions, high gas prices – which average $4.29 per gallon in Montezuma County, according to Triple A – are also hurting RV campgrounds, a popular lodging choice for road trippers.
“A lot of our RVers are still making those trips but they're staying in one campground for three or four weeks, whereas previously they would stay two or three nights and go to lots of campgrounds,” Bartlett said.
Campgrounds offer discounted prices for longer stays, he said, but their business models rely on more frequent and shorter stays.
Bartlett expressed concern for all businesses that rely on tourism, saying restaurants are some of the hardest hit by reduced visitation.
“They have a certain number of covers that they have to do each day for their business model to work,” Bartlett said.
Tourism, he emphasized, is vital to the region’s economy which has lost a lot of oil and gas production and is seeing agriculture hit hard by drought. He encouraged people to consider a trip to Southwest Colorado and to check conditions before they arrive. While tourism is down, he said, it might actually be the best time to visit.
“It's a great time to come to visit the (Mesa Verde) National Park. The visitation is down, the crowds are down. You'll get more of a one-on-one experience,” Bartlett said. “The interpretive guides are hungry for people to interpret for. So you’ll get a real deep dive.”
avanderveen@the-journal.com
