Heritage Tourism and Outdoor Recreation Are Telling the Same Story
Laura Scharle spent ten years managing interpretive programming at Delaware Seashore State Park before she thought of herself as anything other than a biology major who wanted to teach people about horseshoe crabs. Today she runs Scharle Outdoor Recreation Consulting and Delmarva Trails and Waterways, a 40,000-follower outdoor recreation platform that has grown into a real business, with sponsored partnerships, print guides, and direct content work for a DMO. She was my fourth guest in the Heritage Tourism Conversations series, and the conversation turned out to be one of the clearest arguments I’ve heard for why heritage and outdoor recreation need to stop operating as separate categories.
The question that defined her career
Laura told me about a job interview years ago that she still thinks about. She was interviewing for a full-time role as interpretive programs manager at Delaware State Parks, and one question caught her off guard. “A lot of us interpreters consider ourselves either a nature outdoor interpreter or a history interpreter,” the panel asked her. “Do you identify with one of those, or do you think they should be mixed together?”
She hadn’t prepared an answer, so she thought out loud. What came out has stuck with her ever since. “You can’t tell the full story of an outdoor landscape without talking about how human history affected it,” she said, “and vice versa. You can’t tell a story from a thousand years ago without talking about how the natural resources in the landscape around it impacted that story.” She got the job.
That instinct is exactly what I try to name in this series. Heritage tourism’s sectors, museums, DMOs, byways, outdoor rec, and Main Streets, tend to function in silos that visitors never see. I spent years working alongside the C&O Canal, where every community along its 184 miles had its own access point and most visitors never registered they were inside a park boundary at all. Laura found the identical dynamic in Delaware. The landscape and the history it holds were never actually separate. Only our org charts made them look that way.
What the landscape feels like when you slow down
Laura has spent eleven years chasing a personal goal: paddling the entire 600-mile perimeter of the Delmarva Peninsula, a few miles at a time. Some of those miles put her alone on the water before sunrise, on creeks so remote there’s no interpretive wayside for miles in any direction. That’s when her mind starts to wander toward whoever paddled the same creek first. “It’s when the rest of the world quiets down and I see less and less signs of modern life,” she said, “that I start to feel like I can connect most with the people who came before me.”
It isn’t only visual. She described paddling a narrow, buggy creek in Dorchester County, bleeding from black needle rush and getting swarmed by greenhead flies, and thinking about Harriet Tubman and the freedom seekers who navigated that same landscape under conditions she can only approximate. “Here I know I’m totally safe,” she said. “I’m just uncomfortable.” That’s the difference between reading about a place and being in it. The discomfort is an experience a museum label can't duplicate.
Furnace Town: what a viral video and a good bathroom can do
Laura’s clearest case study is Historic Furnace Town, an 1820s-1830s village built inside Pocomoke State Forest in Maryland, miles from the nearest town and easy to drive past without knowing it exists. In 2020, Laura hiked one of the site’s trails and posted a video to her own social channels. It reached roughly 400,000 people. The site’s director reported a real jump in fall foot traffic that year, traceable to a video Laura made for her own audience rather than for the site’s.
That’s when the two of them started working together. The tagline Laura wrote for her original proposal, “Discover the Village, Wander the Wilderness,” did double duty: it pulled in visitors who wanted the history and visitors who wanted the trail, and pointed each group at the other. Furnace Town has adopted it into its own marketing, and the site has seen new memberships climb since.
Laura also makes a point that’s easy to overlook and expensive to ignore: Furnace Town has some of the only flushing toilets and running water in the entire Pocomoke State Forest. “One of the first things you learn in interpretation is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,” she said. “You have to make sure your basic human needs are met before anybody can connect with the landscape on a deep level.” A parking lot, a bathroom, and a water fountain are the most important thing to a family arriving from a long drive or hike.
The gap she built a business around
Delmarva Trails and Waterways started as a pandemic project, born out of Laura’s frustration that information about where to hike, paddle, or walk a dog on the Delmarva Peninsula was scattered across federal, state, county, municipal, nonprofit, and private websites with no single place to find it. I told her it was practically my own origin story too. I once tried to plan a Blue Ridge Parkway trip from Roanoke to Frederick using four maps, three destination guides, and a handful of websites, none of which connected the byway to the small towns, museums, and hikeable parks along it. Tourism entities are funded and organized by jurisdiction, while visitors experience a single trip. Laura and I both built our work inside that mismatch.
Her platform has grown into sponsored partnerships with Maryland DNR linking the Maryland Ice Cream Trail to nearby hiking trails, the Dogfish Inn in Lewes, and the Lower Shore Heritage Area, plus direct content creation for the DMO Maryland’s Coast. Her audience and the algorithm both skew heavily toward hiking and kayaking. A reel she spent hours producing about the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway barely reached anyone. But when she polled her followers directly, they told her they wanted more local history and content built around specific towns. She’s building toward that now, one town at a time, rather than competing with her own hiking content for the same feed.
She’s also had one surprise this year. After actively avoiding print for most of her career, she released her first downloadable regional guide this spring and sold about fifty copies in the first day. She’s since released two more. People still want something they can hold, especially when they’re standing in a place with no signal.
What AI actually pulls from when it plans a trip
We spent real time on AI, because Laura is watching its effects from both sides. Her own website traffic has plateaued, likely because AI-generated answer summaries are keeping searchers from clicking through at all. But when she’s tested AI tools with questions she already knows the answer to, they’ve occasionally cited her own site back to her, which tells her the documentation strategy is working even if the traffic numbers don’t show it directly.
The more useful finding came from her own trip planning. When she used AI to plan a family road trip through the Southwest, the tools pulled heavily from Yelp and independent travel blogs, rarely from official tourism or DMO sites. Her advice to anyone working at a DMO: the bloggers and creators you might be tempted to deprioritize are exactly who AI is already treating as a trusted source. That’s a partnership opportunity, not a threat.
It’s advice I give my smaller clients too, from a different angle. If a question a visitor might ask an AI assistant doesn’t have an answer somewhere on your website, in readable text rather than a PDF, add it. Keep your Google and TripAdvisor listings accurate too, since those feed AI answers as well. The organizations documenting their own specificity are the ones that show up when someone asks a chatbot where to go.
One line for frontline staff, and a place worth the drive
Laura’s most immediately usable advice was also her simplest. Train frontline staff and travel ambassador volunteers to genuinely understand the connection between the outdoors and local heritage, not just recite it. When her own seasonal rangers started opening every kayak tour and guided hike with a ninety-second orientation -- here’s where you are, here’s the wider park, here’s the museum you might not know exists -- visitors who came for one thing started coming back for the other. A well-told connection appeals to more people than either topic told alone.
She was just as direct about over-tourism, a subject that comes up constantly in her comment sections even though her current clients aren’t close to that problem yet. She’s retired the phrase “hidden gem” because it invites a sense of ownership that doesn’t belong to any one visitor. Her public rules are three: stay on the designated trail, dispose of waste appropriately, and if the parking lot is full, come back at a less busy time. She also works to disperse visitation on purpose, pointing her audience toward quieter beaches instead of funneling everyone to the same well-known one.
If you’re planning your own trip to the Delmarva Peninsula, she recommended Robinson Neck Preserve on Taylors Island in Dorchester County, a Nature Conservancy property with boardwalks through the forest, citizen-science monitoring stations, and, in her words, nothing to hear but the wind and the birds.
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