Visitors Begin to Return to Alaska After Spill : Tourism: Fifteen months after the Exxon Valdez debacle, three Prince William Sound communities are turning the disaster into something of an attraction.

As Alaska Airlines Flight 93 from Seattle made a slow turn on its final approach to Anchorage Airport, pilot Steve Tillman made an announcement: “Folks, if you look down to the right, you’ll see the port of Valdez, Alaska. You’ll see a lot of tanker activity. Valdez is where the Alaska pipeline ends. It’s also the site of that great Exxon spill last year.

“If you look carefully at the tankers leaving the harbor, you’ll notice two other ships with each tanker. Nowadays, tankers are escorted out of Prince William Sound. Things seem to be getting back to normal.”

Nearly 15 months ago, on March 24, 1989, the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef, 25 miles south of Valdez, spilling 11 million gallons of North Slope crude oil into the pristine Prince William Sound.

It was the largest spill in U.S. history--about 35,000 tons of oil in the water and on the beaches--damaging and destroying wildlife.

Tourism to the area dropped 50%. People stayed away by the thousands.

As a result, residents of three communities--Cordova, a fishing town lying between powerful glaciers and the Gulf of Alaska; Whittier, at the head of Passage Canal, and Valdez--began to prepare for the worst: an end to their livelihood as fishermen and an evaporation of a promising tourism industry.

Traditionally, those three towns have been the primary destinations of tourists, including cruise passengers, visiting the Prince William Sound area.

“None of us knew what to do,” recalls Margy Johnson, owner of the 40-room Reluctant Fisherman hotel and bar in Cordova. “We just all ran down to the harbor and waited for the worst.”

To be sure, the impact was substantial on the fishermen. There was no herring season in 1989.

A small brass plaque hangs over the bar at the Reluctant Fisherman, home of the sound’s largest fishing fleet. It hangs next to other plaques commemorating the winners of the annual contest to guess the total herring catch. It reads: “The Fat Lady sang a death song--her name is Exxon. No winner in herring pool--we all lost.”

Local hotel owners and tour operators also suffered severe losses.

This year, however, there was a herring season in the sound. “People began to realize that we weren’t all covered in oil,” Johnson said. “The cleanup efforts were more successful than many thought, and the tourists are beginning to come back.”

Slowly but surely, a disaster has been turned into a sort of tourist attraction.

“What I’ve been trying to do for 40 years, to let people know about Prince William Sound, Exxon made a household word,” says Brad Phillips, who owns and operates Phillips’ Cruises and Tours, catamaran excursions from Whittier College and Harriman fiords in the sound.

“And now it’s like any tragedy--people want to see it,” Phillips says with a laugh. “Everyone wants to go out there and see Bligh Reef. They all want to see where the tanker hit. They stand there with their cameras and they take pictures. But there’s nothing to photograph. There’s nothing there.”

Indeed, tourists see no remnants of the spill. No floating patches of oil. No oil-stained birds or sea otters. Instead, the visitors take a 110-mile boat trip and see the greatest concentration of tidewater-calving glaciers in Alaska.

“Somewhere in all of this tragedy,” says Phillips, “there’s a silver lining.”

The silver lining is that, quite literally by accident, the communities of Cordova, Whittier and Valdez have become bona-fide tourist attractions.

Are they worth the trip? If you can afford the air fares (travel to Alaska is not cheap, after all), the answer is a qualified yes.

“Tourism has always been an overlooked resource here,” says Gary Graham, a floatplane pilot with Chitina Air Service in Cordova. “But in the summer, no one can beat this place for fishing, sightseeing, hunting or hiking.”

In the past, pilots like Graham simply flew support missions for commercial fishermen. Graham flew everything from 30-year-old De Havilland Beaver floatplanes to turbo-powered Cessnas.

Graham loves to take visitors on an exhilarating 30-minute ride through the updrafts of the mountains and over the fascinating tapestry of water, trees, silt, mud and glaciers.

A highlight of the trip is a low-level pass over the Million-Dollar Bridge. The decaying structure, built for $1 million in 1910, was used to transport copper ore from Alaska’s interior to Cordova’s docks.

Copper mining ended in 1938, and the bridge--rendered useless--stood quietly. (The 1964 Alaska earthquake destroyed one section; the rest still stands.)

It was only within the last year that Graham even entertained the thought of tourism. Next year he plans to buy a helicopter.

“Most of the people who come up here for the first time seem to want to assess the damage,” Graham says. “But they leave celebrating the beauty of the place.”

While Cordova is a beautiful fishing town, Whittier is worth a visit for other reasons.

No roads lead to Whittier. And that is not an exaggeration. There are three ways to get to this city of 400 people: via floatplane, ferry or rail.

So why go there? Whittier is a great jumping-off point for seeing Prince William Sound. Many of the tour boats leave from Whittier and explore the glaciers, kittyhawk rookeries, eagles, sea lions, sea otters and whales.

But as a destination, Whittier may leave something to be desired. Whittier exists--in fact it thrives --on an intentional life style of exile, isolation and decay. Many of its buildings are in disrepair or simply abandoned.

It’s as if the city was evacuated 20 years ago, but somehow, someone forgot to tell a few hundred people.

And therein lies the beauty of a place apparently lost in space. The train never leaves or arrives on time. The state ferry leaves, well, when its’s ready to leave.

“I won’t lie to you and tell you everything is perfect,” says Stan Stephens, a veteran sightseeing boat operator in Valdez. “There’s been substantial bird damage, and we won’t really know how bad the fish have been affected for years. But the good news is that the beauty of this place is still here.

“The sound encompasses 15,000 square miles and 3,600 miles of shoreline. Less than 500 miles were affected by the spill. Still, a lot of people here made a lot of money working the oil spill, and the hope is that they will use the money to improve our community for tourism.”

One of those who made money was Leroy Frank, a commercial diver from Anchorage. Frank was hired by Exxon to dive onto Bligh Reef with a video camera and document the damage.

Now, Frank says he wants to turn that experience into an attraction for tourists. This summer he plans to market a four-day dive cruise around the sound which will include a dive on the reef. Price per person: $1,400.

The cleanup also led to another development: Before the spill, accommodations in Valdez were limited to a few small hotels. Now, more than 100 bed and breakfast inns are available, thanks to rooms needed quickly by Exxon clean-up workers.

In the Alaskan tourism business, a love-hate relationship has developed, even blossomed, between locals and Exxon.

“There are a lot of people who really despise Exxon,” says one local. “And yet, thanks to the spill, these same people made a lot of money working for them.”

“After the spill,” says Phillips, “I think we were the only boat that Exxon didn’t charter. People around here made millions.”

But little of that went towards the promotion of tourism. “After the spill, and after the television news folks showed pictures of oiled birds,” says Phillips, “the image of Prince William Sound was that it was black water. And we all suffered.”

Soon, the oil company gave monetary grants to the area’s tour operators to help encourage new visitors.

One soon-to-be-completed project seems like a crude but effective attempt to maintain a sense of humor about the Exxon Valdez tragedy. It’s called the “Two Billion Dollar Cookbook.”

That’s right, a collection of recipes developed locally after the oil spill by folks who participated in the cleanup.