(Photo: Fireworks from White Pine County's Fire & Ice Festival)
The GNARly Vlog: Using Outdoor Recreation to Diversify a Rural Economy in White Pine County, NV
By: Kyle Horvath, Director, White Pine County Tourism
When a community finds itself in decline, it can be one of the biggest challenges to overcome. How do you stem the loss? How do you convince people to come back, invest, and give it a second chance?
Well, if you're lucky like White Pine County, NV, you snag an employee like Kyle Horvath who can look around your community with a pair of fresh eyes and see all the beautiful, wonderful, and quirky potential you have!
This week we're introducing a new format of GNARly Blog, the GNARly Vlog!
We saw Kyle give this presentation at the 2024 NORC conference in Lake Tahoe and were incredibly impressed with his community's story. So we wanted to share it with you all! As Kyle shared recently with Nevada Magazine:
"We don’t promote the area just to get visitors here. This is economic development. We want the people who will stay here to move here, so we invest in and promote the lifestyle that is uniquely White Pine. We want to grow, but we are not interested in having our destination lose its identity, so we use our budget to invest in raising the quality of life for everyone, not just tourists. We don’t have to be everything to everyone, so we just do Ely the best we can."
To learn more about White Pine County, Ely, and their incredible journey, check ou tthe vlog below – also: let us know if you like this format (or not!)!
Kyle Horvath Bio: Kyle Horvath has been in the tourism industry in one way or another since 1999 when he moved to Nevada with degrees in Marketing and Communication. Spending his early years in the recreation industry (meaning tennis pro/ snowboard bum) he most recently was the marketing manager for Visit Carson City and is currently the Director of Tourism for Ely and White Pine County. He has spent his career using the vehicle of tourism to build and inspire communities to rally together around their history, arts and culture, and outdoor recreation. In his positions, Kyle has worked with rural communities across the state to collaborate and cross market and finds that his greatest satisfaction comes when leaving something better than how he was introduced to it.