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Interior Alaska's tourism industry has lost a relatively new visitor attraction, as owners of the Fort Knox gold mine discontinued their commercial tour program of the mammothsized hardrock mine and mill complex north of Fairbanks.
Commercial tours stopped as of Jan. 1, part of a corporate decision to refocus community outreach programs more towards local residents, according to spokeswoman Lorna Shaw.
"The people we want to educate are the people who live here," she said.
But instead, many of the 3,600 paying guests visiting Fort Knox during the two seasons of commercial tours were visitors from Outside, Shaw said. "We don't want to exclude visitors to Alaska, but our primary focus is the folks in Alaska."
Civic and educational groups will still be able to arrange tours of the facility, free of charge, an invitiation the mine has offered to the community since gold production began in 1995.
In fact, the thousands of educational visitors passing through the gold mine sparked the origins of a commercial tour concept at Fort Knox.
"We were doing so many educational tours and parents heard about it and wanted to see for themselves," Shaw said. "We were inundated with people interested in...