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Growing Wyoming's Outdoor Recreation Economy

Jackson Hole's annual SHIFT Festival brings together the outdoor recreation industry and conservationists. This year, the festival is focusing on making the case for how conservation can be good for business. Gov. Matt Mead's Policy Advisor Nephi Cole attended SHIFT to release a new report that he says will guide the state in how to enhance outdoor recreation in Wyoming.

“We truly believe that this is a growth industry in Wyoming, and sometimes being a growth industry doesn't mean you need government support, it means you need us not to get in the way of that industry and so that's one of the things we're going to look at very hard,” he told festival attendees at the festival Thursday.

Cole says he expects businesses and non-governmental groups to lead the charge with government agencies taking a support role. Recommendations range from how to attract and retain outdoor recreation businesses to expanding the Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources to prioritize statewide outdoor recreation similar to other western states.

The recommendations come from a 26-member Wyoming Outdoor Recreation Task Force created by Gov. Mead in 2016.

A multi-media journalist, Rebecca Huntington is a regular contributor to Wyoming Public Radio. She has reported on a variety of topics ranging from the National Parks, wildlife, environment, health care, education and business. She recently co-wrote the one-hour, high-definition documentary, The Stagecoach Bar: An American Crossroads, which premiered in 2012. She also works at another hub for community interactions, the Teton County Library where she is a Communications and Digital Media Specialist. She reported for daily and weekly newspapers in Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Wyoming for more than a decade before becoming a multi-media journalist. She completed a Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado in 2002. She has written and produced video news stories for the PBS series This American Land (thisamericanland.org) and for Assignment Earth, broadcast on Yahoo! News and NBC affiliates. In 2009, she traveled to Guatemala to produce a series of videos on sustainable agriculture, tourism and forestry and to Peru to report on the impacts of extractive industries on local communities.
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