How many tourists visit Colorado Springs every year? I would have guessed about 2 million, but the Experience Colorado Springs at Pikes Peak folks (aka Convention and Visitors Bureau) say it is 3 times that, at 6 million. In fact, they say that 2 million visit Garden of the Gods alone. Now I don’t really know how you would count all of that, given that GOG is a free city park, and many of us go, park, hang out or hike, and leave, without every telling anyone we were there, so maybe 2 million is a guess, but still, that is a lot of visitors to a city park in a town of less than 600,000! There are of course some other places that are even more touristy kinds of places, like Seven Falls, the Pikes Peak summit, the Air Force Academy chapel, Cave of the Winds, Manitou Cliff Dwellings, the Cripple Creek casinos, etc that they estimate at no more than 1/3 the traffic that Garden of the Gods sees. And some tourists don’t actually do any of that, and instead just hang out, go downtown, go hiking in the national forest, take day trips to other mountain towns, golf, fish, gamble in Cripple Creek, etc. Colorado Springs began as a resort, and I guess that it is fitting that we still get so many visitors. After all, what better place to visit?
We may have a few extra visitors at the Air Force Academy this year, in part due to President Bush being the keynote speaker at graduation on May 28. The tickets are all gone already :-( The Broadmoor is also hosting the Men's Senior Open this year, which should further boost the visitor count.
Visiting may get easier, or harder soon, depending on who you use for frequent flier miles. I know many people drive to their summer vacations, but flying is pretty important, and I found it so ironic that within a month or so of announcing flights to the Springs and a new maintenance hanger here, Frontier Airlines goes Chapter 11. I have been a fan of Frontier, and I was really saddened by the news. They actually started service as scheduled on April 15, and they say the bankruptcy won’t change anything, but we’ll see. The new merger between Delta and Northwest should prove interesting. It should theoretically open some better routing up for the Springs, but again, we’ll see. United is the “big dog” at the Colorado Springs airport, and despite most of their routes simply going through Denver from here, they will probably continue to be the number 1 carrier.