Your input needed – I’m curious if the same conversations go on about snow in your cities that go on here in the Syracuse area. Mainly Buffalo, Syracuse and Rochester. The argument every year is that is it good to brag about all of the snow we all get or to just keep quiet about it and hope that people don’t see the 4 – 5 foot snowbanks at times when they visit the area. Is this the same conversation in your city about the snowfall you get? Don’t brag about our snow.
Feel free to chime in here or at Sean Kirst’s place on the web. Sean, who is a great journalist for the Post Standard and Syracuse.com had a good article in the paper the other day. It’s about a gentleman from the Syracuse area, Russ Andrews who has been saying that he doen’t think it’s smart bragging or promoting our cities as being one of the snowiest bigger cities in the country on average and even in all of North America. Russ feels it hurts the city having that kind of reputation. Keep in mind that Russ Andrews is just making a fun spirited argument and shouldn’t be seen as a bad guy 😉 You can read the article at http://www.syracuse.com/kirst/index.ssf/2013/02/amid_winterfest_russ_andrews_a.html
Sean and I have seen eye to eye on this since we first met and we both believe we should be promoting the Hell out of the snow our cities get. Let me also add that Sean is the main reason that the Golden Snowball contest was revived to what it is today with his articles, conversations about the snow and so on.
Sean, like myself vision drawing people to the area because of the amount of snow we normally receive each winter season. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, It snows here in Syracuse, Buffalo and Rochester and no matter how hard some of the people in Syracuse want to hide it by shoveling it under the curbs it’s not going to work.
What needs to be done in my opinion is to bring the snow lovers from out of town into town because of the high amounts of snow we receive. Open up some of our state owned land in the area for snowmobilers, find a place where skiers can ski in the area besides the nearby ski slopes that we already have. Open up the state fair grounds for the snowmobilers and try to bring in the top sledders around the country for either races or the extreme sports shows. Make Syracuse, Buffalo and Rochester a stop on their tour every year. Open the roadways (some of them) for a weekend and let the sledders use them. I miss the days when all you heard during a good storm were sleds cruising up and down the streets.
There is so much country side land around all of the Golden Snowball cities that it wouldn’t be hard to promote cross country skiing. Look at all of the lakes around central and upstate New York that would be perfect to draw in people to take advantage of the frozen lakes for ice fishing. Have a couple fishing tournaments to draw out of towners to visit our areas. Fill the hotels with fun filled winter sporting events. Come up with something fun and different each weekend for the snow lovers to draw them to the area. Open up some of the bigger hills for the kids to go sledding on.
I was reading a few years back about how well Quebec City does with their annual winter carnival they have. I think the last I looked they were drawing almost a million people to their area each year including a lot of out of towners including snow enthusiast’s from the United States. No doubt it’s a big investment, I think it was over a million dollars spent on the event but they are bringing in millions of dollars to their local businesses on that investment. Sure it would take a few years to get it going as good as Quebec city does with their winter carnival but in the long run if done right it would be well worth it.
Do people from other states really like snow though. I just looked at my visitor stats from the National Snow contest to see how many visitors were coming to the site. In the last 30 days goldensnowglobe.com had over 40,000 visitors from pretty much every state in the country. So I would have to say that yes, people from all over like snow. Build and they will come 😉
Have an awesome weekend all and make sure you check out Sean’s latest article at http://www.syracuse.com/kirst/index.ssf/2013/02/amid_winterfest_russ_andrews_a.html and don’t be too hard on Russ 😉
