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Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

It's starting to look a lot like Half Dome:

http://www.sierradescents.com/hiking/half-dome/cables-7.html

Natural places don't seem like a scalable form of entertainment.

Nature tourism needs to be scaled horizontally. There are plenty of beautiful places to go, just not everyone can go to the same few places.

For many, the beauty is derived from the uniqueness or low supply of the features of the place. Whether it’s status signaling or genuinely wanting to see it in person, the limited quantity of great waterfalls, accessible and scenic mountains, sunsets, clear blue green water on a white sand beach, combined with good weather, will never be able to be substituted with ever abundant plains or deserts.

Landscape of Hawaii will be more popular than Nebraska, unless maybe 90% of the world looked like Hawaii and 10% like Nebraska.

> Nature tourism needs to be scaled horizontally.

Fuck no. Tourism is a vampiric money-making enterprise that absolutely ruins that which it attempts to make accessible.

Enterprise or not, people like novelties, want to experience other places, wonders of the world, etc.

And of course since we specialize, it's not surprising that this too became something that produces a surplus.

It's up to society and culture as a whole to protect and preserve said wonders. (From park rangers to laws and entrance limits and lotteries.)

I'm gonna have to disagree, I live in East Tennessee and Dolly Parton opening Dollywood right outside Great Smoky Mountain National Park created a booming tourism economy here when we used to be one of the poorest places of the country. And now Big Moonshine, who got big on a lot of those tourism dollars in the past decade or so, is turning around and dumping money into revitalizing lots of East TN cities that used to be total dumps (who knew Johnson City could be so cute?!), as well as pouring tons of money into boosting Knoxville's already strong arts and crafts scene. Tourism has absolutely been East Tennessee's salvation. All you gotta do to see that is cross the border into eastern Kentucky, left behind and still one of the poorest parts of this country.

Sure, tourism ruins a lot of shit, but tourist dollars have improved the quality of life for millions and millions of people all over the world.

Sure, some of the money from tourism helps local economies, if there are already local economies that can provide, e.g. food and hotels and such. But in Third World countries, which wasn't clear from my OP, tourism has annihilated people's way of life and thrown millions of people off their native lands--in particular in island countries where beachfront property brings in tons of rich westerners who end up creating an over-economy where the vast majority of money stays in an upper class. Sure, there are middle-class jobs then available, like cleaning toilets and stocking hotel rooms. But fisherman, mom-and-pop shops, farmers, all of them, kicked out and their lands taken over because it is just too damn profitable to turn into resorts and such. Sad.

On the other hand if we concentrate nature tourism to a handful of places then all those other beautiful places will be left alone and remain beautiful. Everybody dumping their trash on Everest means that there's no trash on any of the other mountains.

They should string up a whole lot of lines so people can spider up the rocks from different directions, then it would be web scale.

Or they could solve it by sharding Half Dome into 32768 little distributed 1/65536 Domes.

It worked for the Berlin Wall!

Yeah, it was exactly like then when I visited as well. One of our group of 4 was rational enough to not attempt the summit which was awfully crowded.

Sure enough, when I was halfway up, some person above me panicked and wanted to go back down and everybody had to step to the side to let them through :-\

To be fair, the hike to Half Dome is about ~18 miles (9 each way) and only the very last bit is super crowded. If you skip the cables you still have experienced 99% of one of this country's most beautiful hikes.

Isn't Everest kind of the same? The trails to the various base camps are less crowded since there's less severe weather to contend with so people can spread out more, but when the conditions are right, everyone makes a break for the summit at the same time.

If you skip the cables you still have experienced 99% of one of this country's most beautiful hikes.

If you skip the Everest summit, you've still experienced 99% of one of the worlds most difficult (yet still approachable) climbs. But just like Half Dome, most people go there to summit, not to do a scenic hike.

The view from the top of Half Dome is spectacular. I'm glad I went to the top, but I don't think I'd attempt it again due to the crowds.

True, although I think most people would be much sadder about missing the 1% of Everest. The whole reason to go there is to stand at the top of the world's highest mountain. If you just wanted a beautiful climb, there are many less dangerous/expensive places to go.

Was at half dome 2 days ago. Brought my snowshoes, sub dome completely covered in snow. Very slippery in hiking shoes, no crowds.

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