Ecotourism: exploring the last frontier of travel.

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Ecotourism is the buzzword attached to this growing adventure
travel trend. For decades, long before anyone defined ecotourism, Alaska
has attracted such travelers. Only today, record waves of visitors are
washing into the state each year, boosting the growth of the adventure
travel business by up to 20 percent annually and threatening to destroy
the very wilderness that travelers want to experience.

THE PRINCIPLES AND THE PLAYERS

The growth of ecotourism is not just an Alaska phenomenon.

“Ecotourism has swept across the Americas, rerooted in Africa,
taken hold in Asia, and jumped to life in Europe all within the last
five years,” says Megan Epler Wood, executive director of The
Ecotourism Society (TES), in her introduction to Ecotourism Guidelines
to Nature Tour Operators.

TES, a Vermont-based organization with members from around the
world, spent years researching and preparing its ecotourism guidelines,
which were released 1993. “The point is to have a road map. This is
a brand-new, heavily researched road map that provides nature tour
operators and lodges with the information they need to begin pursuing
the full agenda of objectives listed here,” Wood adds in her
introduction.

A glance through the guidelines reveals what ecotourism is all
about. In summary, these guidelines include:

(1) Education: Before a trip, educate travelers to minimize the
impact of their visits to sensitive environments and cultures. On guided
tours, prepare participants for encounters with local cultures, animals
and plants.

(2) Prevention: Lessen visitor impact on natural environments and
cultures by providing literature and briefings, and by setting a good
example and taking corrective action when necessary. Keep groups small
enough to avoid group impact on an area. Stay away from under-managed,
over-visited sites.

(3) Example: Make sure your tour company minimally impacts the
environment. Train your employees to communicate with and manage
visitors in sensitive areas. Offer accommodations that are not harmful
to the environment and allow guests to learn more about their
surroundings.

(4) Contribution: Establish a plan to promote conservation of the
region you’re visiting. Contribute to the economy of the area you
visit by hiring locally for your tour operation.

What kind of traveller goes on these ecotours, anyway?

People like Michael Kutska from Illinois. A CPA by profession,
Kutska and his wife are birdwatchers and members of the Chicago chapter
of the National Audubon Society. For 30 years, the Kutskas traveled to
many places around the world for birdwatching. In the last year alone,
“we have had the good fortune to bird in areas of the U.S. (such)
as Nebraska’s Platte River, southeastern Arizona, the Delaware
shore and the Pacific Coast of Washington State,” Kutska says.

This year, the couple wants to come to Alaska for a few weeks. To
prepare for this trip, the Kutskas have already read five books on
Alaska birding and want more information before they arrive. In a letter
to the Anchorage Audubon chapter, they asked for additional information
— everything from “suggested reading/reference materials of
birding in the area” to any “unusual birding locations.”

Information collected by Alaska’s ecotour operators show that
many eco-travelers are like the Kutskas. They are all ages and come from
all walks of life. Love nature. Belong to conservation organizations.
Read naturalist publications. Visit parks. Pay taxes and vote. Have
money to spend.

How do these intrepid travelers find out about Alaska’s
ecotour organizations? Like the Kutskas, many write to Alaska’s
environmental organizations for information. Thousands more travelers
around the world just browse through the pages of the Alaska Official
State Guide and Vacation Planner and find dozens of ecotour ideas.

Up close, most of Alaska’s ecotour operators fit a similar
profile: They work for love, not money. “If you’re getting
into this business, you should get into it because it’s a labor of
love, and you’re seriously interested in creating the best
experience,” says Kirk Hoessle, president of Alaska Wildland
Adventures, based in Girdwood.

GROWING AN ECOTOURISM BUSINESS

The two key ingredients to succeeding in Alaska’s rugged
ecotourism market are a great idea and hard work.

Back in 1972, Alaska Discovery began offering sea-kayaking trips
into Glacier Bay and canoe trips on Admiralty Island. After slow growth
for the first eight years, the company got a jump-start in 1980. Today,
the business offers adventures ranging from Southeast to the Alaska
National Wildlife Refuge, Kotzebue area and Russian Far East.

“We’ve had a presence in Alaska tourism long before
ecotourism started,” says co-owner Ken Leghorn.

In starting up the business, “only one of the spouses should
quit their other job,” Leghorn advises. “If you really want to
do wilderness-type tourism, it will start out as more of a lifestyle
choice than a career for at least the first several years.”

Specialize in what you offer and provide your customers a quality
experience, Leghorn adds. Personalized adventure travel brings guides
and guests close together for hours at a time. Good impressions can
bring you repeat business year after year.

That’s what Ramona Finoff, owner of ABEC’s Alaska
Adventures based in Fairbanks, discovered. Focusing on backpack and
river-trip excursions in the Brooks Range, she started the business in
1980, and it grew slowly. Today she employs nine people in the summer
time, “all Alaskans, all Fairbanksans, who are teachers or have
other professions but enjoy having the summers off to learn about
Alaska,” she says. “Because we’ve been in the business so
long, most of our clients come to us on referrals from other people who
have gone with us in the past.”

Plying the waters of the Kenai Peninsula for 17 years now, Kenai
Fjords Tours owes its success, says owner Tom Tougas, to Pam Aldo and
Sheila Scoby, the two women who founded the company. In addition to
providing an outstanding experience to the customers, “they
invested pretty much everything they earned from the company back into
additional boats,” Tougas adds.

“Don’t over-leverage your ability to stay in the
market,” he says. “I see many people who have very good ideas,
but they try and do the whole thing the first year, and overextend themselves, and find out marketing and capital costs are greater than
expected, and don’t have the cash flow to make it through the
second winter.”

Starting small and learning from experience is the name of the game
for new ecotourism operators.

Randy Williams, operator of Alaska Llama Treks based in Wasilla, is
one such newcomer. Providing food, llamas and packs, he takes clients on
guided hikes in the mountains north of Palmer. The first year he
operated the venture, in 1992, he had four guests. In 1993, 24 clients
joined his adventure. A member of the Anchorage Convention and Visitors
Bureau and Alaska Visitors Association, Williams searches for new
customers through ads in travel guides and occasional magazine articles.

“My main obstacle is getting the word out about my
business,” he admits. “You have to be patient.”

To assist in marketing an Alaska ecotourism business, “become
members of the Alaska Visitors Association (AVA) and find out what they
have to offer,” says Rose Rand, co-owner with her husband Dean of
Discovery Voyages.

In 1989, the Rands bought the Cordova business from its original
owners. With a 65-foot boat, they take 10 to 12 people on week-long
voyages of Prince William Sound. Joining AVA, the Rands found executive
director Karen Cowart and cooperative marketing manager Vicki Minkemann
were “constant supporters, showing us how to make it all come
together even before we had the boat to do it,” says Rose.
“Our advertisement that we put into the Vacation Planner brought in
a wealth of phone calls and brochures.”

Once you start to grow an ecotourism business, the trick becomes
keeping the business small enough to still provide a personalized
wilderness experience. Experts in the industry predict that it takes an
average 13 years for an ecotour business to grow too big to provide the
intimate natural adventures it started out offering.

Aaron Underwood, owner of Osprey Expeditions based in Denali
National Park, offers seven different river trips to only 75 to 100
clients each summer — and he intends to keep it that way.
“Basically, we don’t want to grow any more,” he says.
“It’s a point of diminishing returns. For myself, since this
is a lifestyle, if we get bigger, then I find myself more involved in
management than in hands-on experience with the trips.”

Growth for new ecotour operators today depends on finding a niche.
One such niche in Alaska comes with Native cultural tours.

Providing educational tours and bringing benefits to the local
community has been the purpose of Arctic Village Tours. For three years
now, the adventure has flown travelers to Arctic Village for day trips.
This year, extended stays will be available on the tour. From 50
visitors last summer, Arctic Village Tours hopes to attract about 100
guests this year.

Because the operation is owned by the region’s tribal
government, “other than commissions and taxes, all the revenues are
paid to the people in the villages for their services,” says Ben
Boyd, director of tourism for the operation.

Long-term success for these ecotourism operators seems to come from
their ability to fulfill the guidelines outlined by The Ecotourism
Society.

One of the state’s largest ecotourism operators, Alaska
Wildland Adventures of Girdwood, lives and breathes ecotourism
principles. Founded in 1977, the company first took visitors out on
short trips “to give people a chance to see Alaska in a way that
was beyond what could be experienced from boat or bus,” says
president Kirk Hoessle.

When he first heard the term “ecotourism” three years
ago, Hoessle says, “I laughed. I thought ecotourism was a marketing
buzzword that you could put on your product to attract your customers
now, and jump on another bandwagon later.”

But today’s sophisticated travelers know that ecotourism
isn’t just a buzzword. It’s the way you do business.

For companies like Alaska Wildland Adventures, that means educating
guests and guides. Bringing everything back when you go out on a trip,
leaving only footprints and collecting only memories. Recycling your
waste and using recycled products. Hiring local guides (the company
hires 10 to 15 Alaskans full time, and 50 to 60 in the summer season).
Contributing to local nonprofit groups that preserve the environment
(Alaska Wildland Adventures donates 10 percent of pretax earnings to
such organizations and encourages guests to donate $1 per day of their
trips to conservation groups).

Tom Watson, owner of Wavetamer Kayaking in the city of Kodiak,
operates his business on the same principles. Offering small-scale,
guided day-trips by kayak, he says, “We are always trying to
educate and broaden the horizons of our clients about what is going on
in the world around them.

“If you say you’re ecotourism, you’d better
be,” he says. “You need to have guidelines and be involved in
the ecotourism business. There’s a growing market out there, but
it’s a very sophisticated market in terms of understanding,
appreciating and taking responsibility for world concerns.”

ORGANIZING A STATE PLAN

On the surface, Alaska’s tourism industry looks like a battle
ground divided between two opposing armies. On one side, this vast,
spectacular wilderness has large tour operators bringing more visitors
by plane, train, boat and motorcoach into the state each year.

On the other side of this battle-ground, small ecotour operators
shiver with alarm as they face rising insurance rates, increasing
governmental regulation and large-scale development plans encroaching on
their backcountry vistas.

If there is a tourism war, the little guys won’t win. To avert
such a calamity, questions have to be answered, such as: Who gets access
to what land? How can tourism pay for itself? Should the same rules and
regulations apply to all operators? How do you forge cooperative efforts
between diverse agencies?

To answer these issues, experts advise, “Plan.”

“A tourism communication system where all stakeholders are
involved in the process is the only way to make this work,” says
Ray Ashton, a senior environmental scientist from Gainesville, Fla., who
spoke at the March 1994 Alaska Ecotourism Workshop held in Anchorage.

In 1976, St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs took such a step to bring
visitors to its remote Bering Sea location. With an incredible diversity
of bird species, a huge population of fur seals and a tiny piece of
land, the island could only survive with a planned tourism approach.

After careful analysis, the community decided on a joint-venture
tourism program with other outlying villages that did not disrupt
wildlife, cause littering or prove destructive to the Native Aleut
lifestyle. Establishing limits to tourist traffic, the Pribilof Islands
now gets 600 to 1,200 tourists in the three-month summer season.

But how does a state as vast as Alaska forge a coordinated tourism
plan that considers the interests of the diverse tourism players?

Models already exist which offer a comprehensive tourism road map.
Carol Kazsa, operator of Arctic Treks out of Fairbanks, outlined one
such formula at the March ecotourism workshop. Called a tourism
“zonation” system, the plan outlines urban, front, middle and
backcountry tourism zones and describes the users and activities of each
zone.

“We need to acknowledge the whole spectrum of tourism,”
Kazsa says, “and look at what kinds of activities fit into each
area.”

In 1993, the Alaska Visitors Association published
“Destination: Alaska,” a report that provides “strategies
for the visitor industry.” While it outlines ways to spur growth in
all areas of Alaska’s tourism, the report notes, “Beyond a
certain point, the quality of a vacation experience begins to
deteriorate in proportion with the number of participants.”

Those words echo the sentiments of Alaska’s small ecotour
operators. But more action needs taken.

The Alaska Wilderness Recreation and Tourism Association (AWRTA)
represents many of the smaller tourism operators, and acts as a
legislative watchdog on issues affecting its members.

AWRTA sponsored the March ecotourism workshop, and, as president
Nancy Lethcoe notes, “What we would like to do now is work with all
the different tourism groups to put together a plan for ecotourism in
Alaska. The plan’s success will depend on how well all the
different share-holders work together.”

As Ray Ashton from Florida says, “Alaska has probably one of
the greatest opportunities. You’ve got to plan in advance,
you’ve got to create a state plan with regulation, you’ve got
to work with everyone involved in creating financial support.

“You only have a few years left,” Ashton adds.

“Instead of five-year plans,” concludes Kirk Hoessle of
Alaska Wildland Adventures, “we need to ask the question: Where are
we going to be in 100 years?”

Each year, as bigger cruise ships and transcontinental planes zoom millions of passengers to glitzy locations for vacation, other travelers seek out different experiences … to get a hands-on, heartfelt experience of the wild, secret corners remaining on this planet, without leaving a sign of their passings through.Ecotourism is the buzzword attached to this growing adventure travel trend. For decades, long before anyone defined ecotourism, Alaska has attracted such travelers. Only today, record waves of visitors are washing into the state each year, boosting the growth of the adventure travel business by up to 20 percent annually and threatening to destroy the very wilderness that travelers want to experience.THE PRINCIPLES AND THE PLAYERSThe growth of ecotourism is not just an Alaska phenomenon.”Ecotourism has swept across the Americas, rerooted in Africa, taken hold in Asia, and jumped to life in Europe all within the last five years,” says Megan Epler Wood, executive director of The Ecotourism Society (TES), in her introduction to Ecotourism Guidelines to Nature Tour Operators.TES, a Vermont-based organization with members from around the world, spent years researching and preparing its ecotourism guidelines, which were released 1993. “The point is to have a road map. This is a brand-new, heavily researched road map that provides nature tour operators and lodges with the information they need to begin pursuing the full agenda of objectives listed here,” Wood adds in her introduction.A glance through the guidelines reveals what ecotourism is all about. In summary, these guidelines include:(1) Education: Before a trip, educate travelers to minimize the impact of their visits to sensitive environments and cultures. On guided tours, prepare participants for encounters with local cultures, animals and plants.(2) Prevention: Lessen visitor impact on natural environments and cultures by providing literature and briefings, and by setting a good example and taking corrective action when necessary. Keep groups small enough to avoid group impact on an area. Stay away from under-managed, over-visited sites.(3) Example: Make sure your tour company minimally impacts the environment. Train your employees to communicate with and manage visitors in sensitive areas. Offer accommodations that are not harmful to the environment and allow guests to learn more about their surroundings.(4) Contribution: Establish a plan to promote conservation of the region you’re visiting. Contribute to the economy of the area you visit by hiring locally for your tour operation.What kind of traveller goes on these ecotours, anyway?People like Michael Kutska from Illinois. A CPA by profession, Kutska and his wife are birdwatchers and members of the Chicago chapter of the National Audubon Society. For 30 years, the Kutskas traveled to many places around the world for birdwatching. In the last year alone, “we have had the good fortune to bird in areas of the U.S. (such) as Nebraska’s Platte River, southeastern Arizona, the Delaware shore and the Pacific Coast of Washington State,” Kutska says.This year, the couple wants to come to Alaska for a few weeks. To prepare for this trip, the Kutskas have already read five books on Alaska birding and want more information before they arrive. In a letter to the Anchorage Audubon chapter, they asked for additional information — everything from “suggested reading/reference materials of birding in the area” to any “unusual birding locations.”Information collected by Alaska’s ecotour operators show that many eco-travelers are like the Kutskas. They are all ages and come from all walks of life. Love nature. Belong to conservation organizations. Read naturalist publications. Visit parks. Pay taxes and vote. Have money to spend.How do these intrepid travelers find out about Alaska’s ecotour organizations? Like the Kutskas, many write to Alaska’s environmental organizations for information. Thousands more travelers around the world just browse through the pages of the Alaska Official State Guide and Vacation Planner and find dozens of ecotour ideas.Up close, most of Alaska’s ecotour operators fit a similar profile: They work for love, not money. “If you’re getting into this business, you should get into it because it’s a labor of love, and you’re seriously interested in creating the best experience,” says Kirk Hoessle, president of Alaska Wildland Adventures, based in Girdwood.GROWING AN ECOTOURISM BUSINESSThe two key ingredients to succeeding in Alaska’s rugged ecotourism market are a great idea and hard work.Back in 1972, Alaska Discovery began offering sea-kayaking trips into Glacier Bay and canoe trips on Admiralty Island. After slow growth for the first eight years, the company got a jump-start in 1980. Today, the business offers adventures ranging from Southeast to the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, Kotzebue area and Russian Far East.”We’ve had a presence in Alaska tourism long before ecotourism started,” says co-owner Ken Leghorn.In starting up the business, “only one of the spouses should quit their other job,” Leghorn advises. “If you really want to do wilderness-type tourism, it will start out as more of a lifestyle choice than a career for at least the first several years.”Specialize in what you offer and provide your customers a quality experience, Leghorn adds. Personalized adventure travel brings guides and guests close together for hours at a time. Good impressions can bring you repeat business year after year.That’s what Ramona Finoff, owner of ABEC’s Alaska Adventures based in Fairbanks, discovered. Focusing on backpack and river-trip excursions in the Brooks Range, she started the business in 1980, and it grew slowly. Today she employs nine people in the summer time, “all Alaskans, all Fairbanksans, who are teachers or have other professions but enjoy having the summers off to learn about Alaska,” she says. “Because we’ve been in the business so long, most of our clients come to us on referrals from other people who have gone with us in the past.”Plying the waters of the Kenai Peninsula for 17 years now, Kenai Fjords Tours owes its success, says owner Tom Tougas, to Pam Aldo and Sheila Scoby, the two women who founded the company. In addition to providing an outstanding experience to the customers, “they invested pretty much everything they earned from the company back into additional boats,” Tougas adds.”Don’t over-leverage your ability to stay in the market,” he says. “I see many people who have very good ideas, but they try and do the whole thing the first year, and overextend themselves, and find out marketing and capital costs are greater than expected, and don’t have the cash flow to make it through the second winter.”Starting small and learning from experience is the name of the game for new ecotourism operators.Randy Williams, operator of Alaska Llama Treks based in Wasilla, is one such newcomer. Providing food, llamas and packs, he takes clients on guided hikes in the mountains north of Palmer. The first year he operated the venture, in 1992, he had four guests. In 1993, 24 clients joined his adventure. A member of the Anchorage Convention and Visitors Bureau and Alaska Visitors Association, Williams searches for new customers through ads in travel guides and occasional magazine articles.”My main obstacle is getting the word out about my business,” he admits. “You have to be patient.”To assist in marketing an Alaska ecotourism business, “become members of the Alaska Visitors Association (AVA) and find out what they have to offer,” says Rose Rand, co-owner with her husband Dean of Discovery Voyages.In 1989, the Rands bought the Cordova business from its original owners. With a 65-foot boat, they take 10 to 12 people on week-long voyages of Prince William Sound. Joining AVA, the Rands found executive director Karen Cowart and cooperative marketing manager Vicki Minkemann were “constant supporters, showing us how to make it all come together even before we had the boat to do it,” says Rose. “Our advertisement that we put into the Vacation Planner brought in a wealth of phone calls and brochures.”Once you start to grow an ecotourism business, the trick becomes keeping the business small enough to still provide a personalized wilderness experience. Experts in the industry predict that it takes an average 13 years for an ecotour business to grow too big to provide the intimate natural adventures it started out offering.Aaron Underwood, owner of Osprey Expeditions based in Denali National Park, offers seven different river trips to only 75 to 100 clients each summer — and he intends to keep it that way. “Basically, we don’t want to grow any more,” he says. “It’s a point of diminishing returns. For myself, since this is a lifestyle, if we get bigger, then I find myself more involved in management than in hands-on experience with the trips.”Growth for new ecotour operators today depends on finding a niche. One such niche in Alaska comes with Native cultural tours.Providing educational tours and bringing benefits to the local community has been the purpose of Arctic Village Tours. For three years now, the adventure has flown travelers to Arctic Village for day trips. This year, extended stays will be available on the tour. From 50 visitors last summer, Arctic Village Tours hopes to attract about 100 guests this year.Because the operation is owned by the region’s tribal government, “other than commissions and taxes, all the revenues are paid to the people in the villages for their services,” says Ben Boyd, director of tourism for the operation.Long-term success for these ecotourism operators seems to come from their ability to fulfill the guidelines outlined by The Ecotourism Society.One of the state’s largest ecotourism operators, Alaska Wildland Adventures of Girdwood, lives and breathes ecotourism principles. Founded in 1977, the company first took visitors out on short trips “to give people a chance to see Alaska in a way that was beyond what could be experienced from boat or bus,” says president Kirk Hoessle.When he first heard the term “ecotourism” three years ago, Hoessle says, “I laughed. I thought ecotourism was a marketing buzzword that you could put on your product to attract your customers now, and jump on another bandwagon later.”But today’s sophisticated travelers know that ecotourism isn’t just a buzzword. It’s the way you do business.For companies like Alaska Wildland Adventures, that means educating guests and guides. Bringing everything back when you go out on a trip, leaving only footprints and collecting only memories. Recycling your waste and using recycled products. Hiring local guides (the company hires 10 to 15 Alaskans full time, and 50 to 60 in the summer season). Contributing to local nonprofit groups that preserve the environment (Alaska Wildland Adventures donates 10 percent of pretax earnings to such organizations and encourages guests to donate $1 per day of their trips to conservation groups).Tom Watson, owner of Wavetamer Kayaking in the city of Kodiak, operates his business on the same principles. Offering small-scale, guided day-trips by kayak, he says, “We are always trying to educate and broaden the horizons of our clients about what is going on in the world around them.”If you say you’re ecotourism, you’d better be,” he says. “You need to have guidelines and be involved in the ecotourism business. There’s a growing market out there, but it’s a very sophisticated market in terms of understanding, appreciating and taking responsibility for world concerns.”ORGANIZING A STATE PLANOn the surface, Alaska’s tourism industry looks like a battle ground divided between two opposing armies. On one side, this vast, spectacular wilderness has large tour operators bringing more visitors by plane, train, boat and motorcoach into the state each year.On the other side of this battle-ground, small ecotour operators shiver with alarm as they face rising insurance rates, increasing governmental regulation and large-scale development plans encroaching on their backcountry vistas.If there is a tourism war, the little guys won’t win. To avert such a calamity, questions have to be answered, such as: Who gets access to what land? How can tourism pay for itself? Should the same rules and regulations apply to all operators? How do you forge cooperative efforts between diverse agencies?To answer these issues, experts advise, “Plan.””A tourism communication system where all stakeholders are involved in the process is the only way to make this work,” says Ray Ashton, a senior environmental scientist from Gainesville, Fla., who spoke at the March 1994 Alaska Ecotourism Workshop held in Anchorage.In 1976, St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs took such a step to bring visitors to its remote Bering Sea location. With an incredible diversity of bird species, a huge population of fur seals and a tiny piece of land, the island could only survive with a planned tourism approach.After careful analysis, the community decided on a joint-venture tourism program with other outlying villages that did not disrupt wildlife, cause littering or prove destructive to the Native Aleut lifestyle. Establishing limits to tourist traffic, the Pribilof Islands now gets 600 to 1,200 tourists in the three-month summer season.But how does a state as vast as Alaska forge a coordinated tourism plan that considers the interests of the diverse tourism players?Models already exist which offer a comprehensive tourism road map. Carol Kazsa, operator of Arctic Treks out of Fairbanks, outlined one such formula at the March ecotourism workshop. Called a tourism “zonation” system, the plan outlines urban, front, middle and backcountry tourism zones and describes the users and activities of each zone.”We need to acknowledge the whole spectrum of tourism,” Kazsa says, “and look at what kinds of activities fit into each area.”In 1993, the Alaska Visitors Association published “Destination: Alaska,” a report that provides “strategies for the visitor industry.” While it outlines ways to spur growth in all areas of Alaska’s tourism, the report notes, “Beyond a certain point, the quality of a vacation experience begins to deteriorate in proportion with the number of participants.”Those words echo the sentiments of Alaska’s small ecotour operators. But more action needs taken.The Alaska Wilderness Recreation and Tourism Association (AWRTA) represents many of the smaller tourism operators, and acts as a legislative watchdog on issues affecting its members.AWRTA sponsored the March ecotourism workshop, and, as president Nancy Lethcoe notes, “What we would like to do now is work with all the different tourism groups to put together a plan for ecotourism in Alaska. The plan’s success will depend on how well all the different share-holders work together.”As Ray Ashton from Florida says, “Alaska has probably one of the greatest opportunities. You’ve got to plan in advance, you’ve got to create a state plan with regulation, you’ve got to work with everyone involved in creating financial support.”You only have a few years left,” Ashton adds.”Instead of five-year plans,” concludes Kirk Hoessle of Alaska Wildland Adventures, “we need to ask the question: Where are we going to be in 100 years?”