Montezuma County’s on-again/off-again tourist season is once again on, at least for the moment, but it may be too little, too late.

Three and a half weeks of valuable summertime traffic passed us by while the gates of Mesa Verde National Park remained closed. School starts in a couple weeks, and after that it’s the shoulder season. The monsoons have begun, finally, and afternoon thunderstorms are bound to hamper tourism. Few visitors who saw Mesa Verde in flames caused by lightning are likely to want to stand on top of that mesa in a storm.

That’s the trouble with an economy that’s heavily dependent on the expenditures of visitors rather than residents. We can make great hay while the sun shines, but sometimes the sun doesn’t shine, the visitors don’t come and the money doesn’t flow.

It’s difficult to plan for such years, inevitable as they are. We have to build facilities to handle the visitor load during the good years, and even during the bad years, we have to pay those costs. In theory, of course, the costs would be met even during the slow years and in the busy years there’d be a lot of gravy. For a couple reasons, though, that’s not the way it works. Human nature being what it is, we convince ourselves that the trend will be ever upward, and sometimes the economic disasters are beyond the realm of predictability.

Mesa Verde is an invaluable resource, and the economic contribution it makes to southwestern Colorado is even more amazing in view of the fact that it was unidentified when Cortez was first settled. We’ve done a good job of capitalizing on it, and sometimes we take its presence for granted. That’s not likely to happen for the next few years, as local business struggles to recoup the losses incurred during the summer of 2000.

What now? Tourism officials are working hard to draw visitors back to Mesa Verde, but they’re hampered by the false start experienced a couple weeks ago, when visitors were allowed into the park for a single day between the Bircher Fire and the Pony Fire. "Everything’s fine now," they said, and the next thing we knew, Wetherill Mesa was burning and the park had been evacuated once more. National news coverage of those fires and all the others has not helped, particularly among easterners and foreign visitors who don’t realize how big the West really is. There’s a lot left unburned.

Perhaps the lesson for us is that we can’t pin all our hopes on Mesa Verde. It’s spectacular, and it makes a good advertising centerpiece, but in retrospect, we’d have been better off to emphasize our other assets: other uncrowded Ancestral Puebloan sites, the national forest, McPhee Reservoir, the Dolores River canyon, and our proximity to numerous attractions in the Four Corners.