FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — Seemingly endless freight trains still rumble down the tracks that first brought settlers to this town high on the Colorado Plateau.

Just alongside runs iconic Route 66, which later attracted cross-country motorists who needed places to stay or stop for a meal.

These days, travelers are rediscovering Flagstaff for another reason: It’s cool.

Not just cool as in stylish and trendy, though many of the historic sandstone buildings have been transformed into hip galleries and shops and busy restaurants and microbreweries. Cool as in less hot than other destinations in the sunbaked Southwest.

At 7,000 feet elevation, surrounded by the largest Ponderosa pine forest on the continent, the city is “a cool zone,” the local visitor bureau says — a great place “in the cool mountains” to “escape the heat,” with “mild days and cool nights.”

If tourists don’t pick up the hint, they can just check the thermometer. In July, when highs in Phoenix and Las Vegas average a stifling 107 and in Tucson 101, it’s 83 in Flagstaff.

“It is a great message for us” as a way to promote the city, said Trace Ward, director of the Flagstaff Convention and Visitors Bureau, though he quickly added that it isn’t meant to capitalize on other places’ hardships.

“People have always come up to escape the heat,” Ward said. “So that hasn’t really changed.” He paused. “Have we seen more people come up? Yes. Our visitation is rising.”

So are global temperatures, sea levels, and the frequency and intensity of hurricanes and fires, while glaciers are receding, fresh water drying up, and coral reefs fading. And tourists are paying attention when they make their travel plans.

That means the tourism industry, so susceptible to the climate change of which science says these things are symptoms, has been striving to adapt and even take advantage with “summer heat escapes,” more robust shoulder seasons, and new uses for ski mountains when there isn’t any snow.

There’s even a grim new phenomenon called “last-chance tourism” to places where anything from coral reefs to polar bears are disappearing. An Internet search for “places to see before they’re gone” betrays how widespread this idea has gotten.

“We are an industry that relies not only on weather and climate but very heavily on areas of the world that are at risk from extreme weather and climate — beaches, coral reefs, ski areas,” said Rochelle Turner, research director at the World Travel & Tourism Council.

“We have developed a sector based on requiring nature to behave,” said Turner. “And what we’ve seen is that nature hasn’t been behaving in the way we’ve built our industry around.”

Of course, the tourism industry bears some responsibility for this, spewing greenhouse gases from the exhaust pipes, engines, and funnels of buses, planes, and cruise ships; tourism generates about 8 percent of global emissions, according to research conducted at the University of Sydney.

But it’s also particularly vulnerable to the results, reliant as it is on generally predictable weather and natural attractions that will be still be there when people come to see them.

The United Nations says the average worldwide sea level is already up more than 7 inches in about the last century, and a report released by 13 federal agencies in November documented a record number of incidents of flooding at high tide in popular destinations including Charleston, S.C., and Miami.

Rising temperatures and drought are among the factors making forests more likely to burn. And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has tied climate change to an increase in the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes, with stronger winds and more rain.

Global warming is already having an effect on ski resorts, whose business has been affected by shorter seasons and those same long droughts.

“We do see the obvious first wave of impacts,” said Daniel Scott, executive director of the Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who studies sustainable tourism.

Some places are making the best of the situation by, like Flagstaff, promoting themselves as escapes from summer heat. “There are a number of destinations that have realized they have potentially a niche they haven’t even thought about before,” said Turner.

Ski resorts are adding mountain-biking, climbing, and other activities that don’t rely on snow.

Then there’s last-chance tourism — “going to parts of the world where resources such as polar bears, the Great Barrier Reef, are at risk of being degraded, and wanting to see it before it’s gone, or to see Glacier National Park while it still has glaciers,” Turner said.

That can have a silver lining, too, she said. Seeing the markers that show how far the glaciers have receded in Banff National Park in Canada, or photos of the now-gone ice caves at Glacier National Park, provide sobering lessons.

“If going to these places wakes people up to the reality of climate change,” said Turner, “that can only be a good thing.”

Other shifts are slowly under way.

Such conventional tourism as summer traffic to Europe shows no sign of waning, Turner said, in spite of heat waves worthy of dystopian science fiction. But cooler shoulder seasons are gradually becoming more popular for people who aren’t tied to school schedules.

“There is a lot of innovation that’s happening, just because there has to be,” Turner said.

There’s also some overreaction on the part of travelers, about which tourism officials are equally worried.

When hurricanes tore through the Caribbean in 2017, for instance, 11 islands were affected. “But the reaction was it’s the whole of the Caribbean and the whole of the islands are completely devastated and you can’t travel there,” said Turner, whose organization helped to quickly produce a website with real-time information about what was and wasn’t open.

Even when they are hit by natural disasters, economies dependent on tourism can rebound more quickly than public confidence does. “Often the tourism infrastructure is your most resilient,” Scott said. “Hotels and resorts will open up sometimes within a week.” Not only are they safe, uncrowded, and grateful for guests, he said, “you can probably get some deals.” But many tourists opt to stay away.

Back in Flagstaff, Anthony Quintile has seen travelers pay growing attention not just to how much cooler it is there, but to the massive fires that have scorched the West.

After a fire burned more than 15,000 acres just outside of town, Quintile started hearing from prospective visitors in his role as a board member of Flagstaff Biking, an advocacy group that helps maintain mountain-biking trails.

“For months we were getting calls asking, ‘Are any of the trails open? I heard there was a big fire,’” Quintile recounted in his office under the rafters of the bicycle shop he owns, Absolute Bikes, which fronts Route 66.

The trails are open, after Quintile and other volunteers rebuilt them twice.

“The fire thing, that’s a real thing in the American West now,” he said. “And in some places, that’s a result of climate change too.”

By: Jon Marcus – Source: https://www2.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/travel/2019/04/30/especially-vulnerable-climate-change-tourism-struggles-adapt/2yhJ1RitY5ZJEF6NOBWwNN/story.html