The Daily Alaska Empire

ALASKA TRAVEL PROGRAM
The Interior Department announces that construction on a long sought hotel is to begin next month in McKinley National Park, costing $350,000 and to be operated by the Alaska Railroad. At the same time comes news of a plan to create the world's first International Park in the region from Skagway to Chisana and extending to the eastward in Yukon Territory as far as Lake Kluane.

While one is an established fact and the other so far but a projected idea, both point to a similar end—a long range Alaska travel program. Both open up a vista of possibilities for future Alaska.

One of the major shortcomings in making the Territory a summer playground, unexcelled in the world, is lack of hotel accommodations. The traveling public is used to the best in the States, in Hawaii, in the Caribbean resorts and abroad. When that same traveling public comes to Alaska, as it does in droves every season, and fails to find adequate hotel accommodations, much of the value of the north as a summer recreation area is lost. But if it finds fine hotels, such as the one now to be built in McKinley National Park and as has been considered for Juneau the last year or two, Alaska tourist travel gets a very definite boost, because it means that the traveler can find in the Territory the same comforts of modern existence as he can find elsewhere: coupled with the natural wonders that Alaska has to offer.

While the announced plan of a proposed International Park above Skagway, which, of course, has to get Canadian approval, is primarily at this stage suggested as an aid to aerial transportation, making Skagway a free port of entry for both American and Canadian traffic, it, too, has great possibilities for the sight-seeing traveler. The region is sprinkled with natural grandeur and could be made appealing to the traveling public. It is on the Great Circle route and could be developed to give the north another great park to draw them just as McKinley is doing more and more every year. It could, too, be easily connected with the proposed International Highway which eventually will be built. In fact an established park in that particular area of Canada and Alaska should give impetus to the International Highway movement. It would be another guarantee that the great highway would pay out in dividends to both countries. Give the modern traveler a place to go and a road to drive on and he will head his streamlined vehicle in that direction.

The new McKinley Park hotel is a fact. The International Park is yet but an idea. Both, however, are definite steps forward on the travel side of Alaska's major development program. Serving the traveling public can be just as big a business as taking gold from the ground and fish from the sea.