No igloo this time!

Hello from downtown Salt Lake City, where Outdoor Retailer has again taken over the Salt Palace for a weekend of new gear, networking, and other festivities!

It’s too hot for us to build an igloo, but the NOLS Bus has been parked outside the Salt Palace, representing the school to folks attending the show as well as folks on the street. Our fearless marketing team has been busy meeting with different brands and roaming the halls of the show to find NOLS grads. We’ve been snapping mug shots of NOLSies around the show and displaying them at the bus.

Some of us found time this morning to go to a press conference regarding the release of a report quantifying the importance of outdoor recreation to our nation’s economy (pdf). It was pretty exciting stuff–the study showed that outdoor recreation contributes $730 billion to the US economy, between gear and travel and job creation! It blew me away to find out that 6.5 million US jobs (or 1 in 20!) owe their existence to the outdoor industry.

We’ll keep you posted as the weekend unfolds. Cheers!
Amy Rathke
NOLS Social Network Engineer