By David Kennard
A few months ago, I was walking through downtown Salt Lake City with my son, Noah.
We had taken the FrontRunner up from the Orem station to go see a movie at the theater at the Gateway Mall. It was a Saturday afternoon and he was up for an adventure.
After the movie we walked over to Temple Square, on our way passing behind the Salt Palace, which was just tearing down from the Outdoor Retailer Show. We had to dodge dozens of fork lifts, which were working to move literally thousands of Buick-sized wooden crates from inside the show floor to stacks that lined at least two city blocks.
Each crate was labeled with the brand of some outdoor equipment manufacturer: Patagonia, The North Face, Camelbak, Salomon, Yakima, and countless more.
Crates stacked 20 feet high made it feel as if we were walking through some slot canyon in southern Utah.
We were both amazed by the volume of merchandise and the number of different band names brought in for the show.
During the last few decades, Utah has firmly established itself as a leader in outdoor recreation, the number one sector in the state’s tourism industry.
From branding campaigns such as “Greatest Snow on Earth” to “Life Elevated,” Utah has done an excellent job of telling its outdoor recreation story to the world.
On page A6 of today’s Daily Herald, you’ll find a story by reporter Karissa Neely who reports on recent numbers released about our state’s tourism industry.
She learned that tourists spent a record high of $7.5 billion during 2013, with $6.4 billion of that spent by out-of-state visitors.
Those are big numbers.
Those are also good numbers for our local economy because of the compounding effect of those dollars in the form of related jobs and local businesses.
We hear complaints from time to time that Utah has done too good of a job marketing our peculiarity. It is getting harder to find places where you can get away because too many people have discovered our secret places.
A few years ago my boys and I created a Google map that labeled some of our favorite places, places where we had been hiking or camping or fishing or just hanging out. We’ve got a spot on Morro Bay in northern California where we spent an afternoon poking star fish in the tide pools, another on Rehoboth Beach on the southern coast of Delaware where we threw french fries to sea gulls as they hung in mid-air in the ocean breeze.
But most of our spots are here in Utah. From Bear Lake to the Four Corners, we’ve been lucky enough traverse the Beehive State and see many of its wonders.
We’ve not quite made it to all of the “Mighty 5,” but we have checked off Zion, Bryce and Canyon Lands, although to be honest we only saw a piece of Canyonlands National Park from the bottom of the Labyrinth Canyon during a canoe trip along the Green River. And the trip to Bryce Canyon National Park was marred by an impromptu alternator repair job in the campground. The kids got to see the park while I spent several hours under our Dodge van swearing at various engine parts.
One of my favorite trips was a weekend backpack trip I made with my then 8-year-old daughter into some high mountain lakes in the Uintas. We still have the bright pink backpack that she had to have before we left the sporting goods store.
I can’t tell you how much money I’ve contributed to the billions of dollars collected each year by the tourism industry, but I will say I’ve done my part.
Daily Herald executive editor David Kennard can be reached at 801-344-2530 or dkennard@heraldextra.com or on Twitter @davidbkennard.
We had taken the FrontRunner up from the Orem station to go see a movie at the theater at the Gateway Mall. It was a Saturday afternoon and he was up for an adventure.
After the movie we walked over to Temple Square, on our way passing behind the Salt Palace, which was just tearing down from the Outdoor Retailer Show. We had to dodge dozens of fork lifts, which were working to move literally thousands of Buick-sized wooden crates from inside the show floor to stacks that lined at least two city blocks.
Each crate was labeled with the brand of some outdoor equipment manufacturer: Patagonia, The North Face, Camelbak, Salomon, Yakima, and countless more.
Crates stacked 20 feet high made it feel as if we were walking through some slot canyon in southern Utah.
We were both amazed by the volume of merchandise and the number of different band names brought in for the show.
During the last few decades, Utah has firmly established itself as a leader in outdoor recreation, the number one sector in the state’s tourism industry.
From branding campaigns such as “Greatest Snow on Earth” to “Life Elevated,” Utah has done an excellent job of telling its outdoor recreation story to the world.
On page A6 of today’s Daily Herald, you’ll find a story by reporter Karissa Neely who reports on recent numbers released about our state’s tourism industry.
She learned that tourists spent a record high of $7.5 billion during 2013, with $6.4 billion of that spent by out-of-state visitors.
Those are big numbers.
Those are also good numbers for our local economy because of the compounding effect of those dollars in the form of related jobs and local businesses.
We hear complaints from time to time that Utah has done too good of a job marketing our peculiarity. It is getting harder to find places where you can get away because too many people have discovered our secret places.
A few years ago my boys and I created a Google map that labeled some of our favorite places, places where we had been hiking or camping or fishing or just hanging out. We’ve got a spot on Morro Bay in northern California where we spent an afternoon poking star fish in the tide pools, another on Rehoboth Beach on the southern coast of Delaware where we threw french fries to sea gulls as they hung in mid-air in the ocean breeze.
But most of our spots are here in Utah. From Bear Lake to the Four Corners, we’ve been lucky enough traverse the Beehive State and see many of its wonders.
We’ve not quite made it to all of the “Mighty 5,” but we have checked off Zion, Bryce and Canyon Lands, although to be honest we only saw a piece of Canyonlands National Park from the bottom of the Labyrinth Canyon during a canoe trip along the Green River. And the trip to Bryce Canyon National Park was marred by an impromptu alternator repair job in the campground. The kids got to see the park while I spent several hours under our Dodge van swearing at various engine parts.
One of my favorite trips was a weekend backpack trip I made with my then 8-year-old daughter into some high mountain lakes in the Uintas. We still have the bright pink backpack that she had to have before we left the sporting goods store.
I can’t tell you how much money I’ve contributed to the billions of dollars collected each year by the tourism industry, but I will say I’ve done my part.
Daily Herald executive editor David Kennard can be reached at 801-344-2530 or dkennard@heraldextra.com or on Twitter @davidbkennard.
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