Conservation abounds in the spring skies.

Ghost-like caribou catch aurora borealis through antenna-shaped antlers, attuned to milky way signals that  sends them into impossible landscapes. It is there they hide, odd creatures living on lichen. But low numbers threaten to turn pocket change into memorial markers.

Bears awake to a dry spring without vegetation,  finding less land to roam than before their slumber. Forced to such high elevations, constellations carry their names.

And the glaciers shrink under a deathly sunkiss.

Another year of drought and disappearing animals, we brace for independent reports telling us what we already know. The wilderness is less wild this year. The connections are getting lost.

Talk of the town turns to seduction of the distant visitor. Like UFO seekers, tourism groups study new ways to make first contact, pushing package deals for pristine Maligne memories. The goal is another 200,000 this year and a return to late eighties visitation numbers, before globalization cracked open the world and Croatia became a threat to tourism market share.

Beyond channelling pyramid power, the marketers seek new tools to promote the area as a destination for those with wealth and taste. Two per cent to the restaurant bill to build a $3 million dollar war chest should do it, they say, and help keep Jasper ahead of eastern block countries in the tourism race.

But the extra visitors sought by Jasper businesses differ from those in the 1980s. These new aliens want more than bus trips up and down the Icefields Parkway and a picture beside Jasper the Bear. Sardine tours are down and the train has transformed from national dream to the iron road for the rich.

The studies show these new visitors want authenticity and connectedness - Avatar-esque experiences to rekindle their relationship with nature. They want it wild.

This is a positive. Hope springs in the imagination of the weary city dweller. But how they experience the mountains will save or seal our fate.

This requires more interpretive programs, more adventure, more local character - and more effort by local businesses to keep up with the times. And more efforts and money to protect the wild they seek.

Shoulder season is the key target - and also the hardest. When the grass is dead and brown and the service staff are cranky from a summer of juggling three jobs, that’s where the efforts to bring in the visitors lie.

But to give this new level of connectedness to visitors, the formula requires consumables. How much of the park is consumable? There must be a line. There must be a threshold that protects. Is sustainable tourism an oxymoron? A misnomer to greenwash an unsustainable industry?

I hope not. It can be an opportunity to educate a greater populace about the caribou and the bear, while selling an extra hotel room or two. Tourism and wildlife cannot be examined in isolation from one another, or they both fail. But the area has to be able to stop itself. It has to know when to say enough.

If it’s done properly, the sun will shine another day on the caribou and the bear. Preservation will go beyond celestial bodies.