North to Alaska in 1997.

• Author: Montoya, Karen

Here they come again - Alaska's summer visitors. As you read this, about a million people are either already on the road, in the air or afloat, or making last-minute preparations for a North Country adventure this summer. Some, in fact, have already come and gone this year.

Last summer, Portland businessman Joseph Driscoll, 51, and his wife, Bonnie, 46, celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary by taking the trip of a lifetime - a 10-day cruise/tour to the Last Frontier. They booked the trip in the hopes of experiencing something exotic and wild like they'd never seen before.

"I'm not sure I can name it," said Driscoll. "We just expected something different. Something unique."

That they found. But they also found something else-old-fashioned commercialism. Lots of it.

"I don't think I've seen so many gift shops in my entire life," said Driscoll. "I always thought of Alaska as fishing, hunting and logging. That's just how I always envisioned it. I guess I expected the towns to have a mix of businesses. But tourism seems to be the primary business."

No doubt about it, tourism is big business in the 49th state. And while Alaska sells itself with clean, fresh air, unspoiled wilderness and plenty of wildlife, it seems visitors are buying that and a whole lot more. In 1995, some 967,000 tourists spent about $700 million in the state.

Cruise line passengers who arrive each year in southeastern ports like Juneau, Skagway, Ketchikan and Sitka play no small part in that windfall. About 450,000 passengers spent more than $130 million last year in Juneau alone. The numbers are expected to grow this summer.

With that much money at stake, it's no surprise that Juneau residents actively pursue tourist dollars. Tourist-related businesses of all kinds have moved into the downtown core in the hopes of enticing big spenders as soon as they set foot on land.

"Our downtown area has changed," said Sarah Stucky of the Alaska General Store. "Basically downtown is full of tourist businesses. It's galleries, gift shops and restaurants."

Shopping may pass the time, but that's not what brings most tourists into town from their luxury ships. Most cruise passengers - and most of the relatively small number of tourists who arrive in the city on their own - are eager to see the Mendenhall Glacier.

"When you think about going to Alaska to see the edge of the wilderness the glacier is really the thing," said David Tam, a ranger at Mendenhall Glacier State Park. "This is an opportunity to have some interaction with nature."

Mendenhall Glacier, a few miles north of Juneau, is reportedly the third-most-popular attraction in the state. "For a lot of people just seeing a glacier is pretty different," Tam said.

Many people in the local tourism industry estimate that three-quarters of the visitors who arrive in Juneau see the glacier. About 270,000, signed in at the visitors center last year. Others probably didn't have the time. They rafted the Mendenhall River, took a plane trip over the glacier or landed on it in a helicopter.

"We're very busy," said Bob Englebrecht, vice-president of TEMSCO, a helicopter company that lands visitors on the glacier. TEMSCO has been doing helicopter tours since 1983. Though the tours have always been popular, Englebrecht said business picked up substantially when cruise ship companies began offering the TEMSCO tours to passengers as a shore excursion.

Shore excursions are...