As a premium viewing spot for this past summer’s total solar eclipse, the least populous state in the country got valuable exposure.
About 261,100 people traveled within Wyoming’s borders to view the rare solar event that darkened the daytime sky for a few minutes on Aug. 21, according to an economic impact study commissioned by the Wyoming Office of Tourism.
Those travelers — 75 percent of whom were from outside the state and many of them from Colorado — spent an estimated $63.5 million in Wyoming during a five-day period couching the eclipse, purchasing meals, gasoline, nights at local hotels and more. The result was $2.3 million in state tax revenues and $1.4 million in tax collections by local governments, according to the study.
A wide swath of Wyoming fell within the “path of totality” for the event, which many called the Great American Eclipse. That term refers to the path that the moon’s shadow draws on Earth as it passes between the planet and the sun during a total solar eclipse, according to NASA. This means, if you were in the right part of Wyoming at precisely the right time, you experienced a 360-degree sunset and near total darkness during the moments the moon eclipsed the sun.
That made Wyoming — home to just 585,501 people as of July 2016, according to the U.S. Census Bureau — an ideal location to check out the rare happening. It was the first total solar eclipse that could be viewed from within the continental U.S. since Feb. 26, 1979.
.”We knew that Wyoming was going to be the top destination for many people who wanted to view the total solar eclipse,” state tourism director Diane Shober said in a news release. “As a result of this study, we can confidently say that this year’s eclipse brought millions of dollars to Wyoming — in a five-day period out of a 31-day month — in travel expenditures and impacted every single county in our state.”
The study, performed by Dean Runyan Associates and Destinations Analysts Inc., found significantly fewer people traveled within the state than was estimated in the days immediately after the eclipse. Still, the exodus that followed eclipse viewing did create unprecedented traffic on highways in the Cowboy State. Motorists reported the typically 2.5-hour drive from Casper to Cheyenne took as long as 10 hours after the sun came out and motorists flooded the roads.
The Colorado Department of Transportation worked with state and local public safety agencies in the northeast corner of the state to prepare for a predicted stream of vehicles into and out of Wyoming and Nebraska (another state in the path of totality) related to the eclipse, but it didn’t run into any serious jams, agency spokesman Jared Fiel said.
The stretch of southbound Interstate 25 between the Wyoming border and Fort Collins carried 25,799 cars between noon and 10 p.m. Aug. 21 — more than twice the roughly 11,540 cars that traverse that stretch from noon to midnight on an average Monday — but Fiel said they were spread out enough to prevent major problems. He blamed backups in Wyoming.
“All the standstill they had up there made it so people trickled into Colorado,” he said.
Perhaps the best news that came out of the study — from a Wyoming tourism perspective — is that of the visitors surveyed, 44 percent indicated they would return to the state in the next two years.
“The eclipse provided a beautiful way for us to introduce Wyoming to a national and international audience,” Shober said. “For a state where tourism is one of the major economic engines — and (since) we are actively trying to encourage return visitation — this is fantastic news.”
A big contributor to Wyoming’s eclipse success? News coverage, according to researchers. The state was mentioned 19,603 times by media outlets covering the event, the study said. That’s enough eclipse coverage to make the moon jealous.
The next total solar eclipse visible from the U.S. will occur April 8, 2024, according to NASA. That one will cast its shadow from Texas to Maine.
