Ghosts of Salt Lake
It all looks familiar.
A goggle tan on the train. An ultralight backpack on the escalator. Young women in light hikers and yoga pants. Young men in lightweight puffies. The fruity lobby water at the Hotel Monaco. The spirally confusing carpet of the Salt Palace. The Beer Hive. The Red Iguana. The inversion. The super random downtown people. The longer-than-you-think city blocks. The beep of the crosswalk. The insomnia of a time change.
I landed a week ago in Salt Lake City, returning on business for the first time in half a decade, coming back to a city where I had spent a couple weeks a year for what felt like half of my life as part of the Outdoor Retailer faithful.
I didn’t know what to expect or how I’d respond. There were alternating tinges of excitement, anxiety, anticipation and dread, knowing I might just as easily hate it as totally fall in love. Best comparison? Heading to an alumni reunion knowing I’d see an old girlfriend who had clearly moved on.
Once upon a time, the city of Salt Lake shifted hard between the 24 hours ahead of Outdoor Retailer and the starting gun of live show days. Between setup and day one, a second-tier small city changed overnight from empty to vibrant, dead to alive, urban saltiness to Gore-Tex and taffeta nirvana.
Last month, the Utah Governor made outdoorsy headlines by stating that Utah hadn’t “missed OR at all” since its departure in 2017. It didn’t seem like he was trying to poke anybody in the eye with a Nordic walking pole, but just nonchalantly stating a fact.
After spending a few days amidst Utah crowds and hotels and restaurants, a massive airport renovation and an Oz-worthy tower of a convention center hotel, I would take the Governor’s statement a step further – I’m not sure downtown SLC would even notice the current OR show if it were there right now.
I’m more than a few 4-irons from the inside loop of how the decision was made for Outdoor Retailer to exit SLC and move to Denver, but like most show regulars I certainly heard/internalized/repeated the legitimate explanation that it was about using a sector’s collective economic leverage to take a stand for Public Lands.
The last gasp of Salt Lake City’s push to retain Outdoor Retailer, in my recollection, was a collaboration of downtown business owners publishing a “don’t leave us behind” letter. In the twilight of 2016, it was too little, too late, a sad and ominous foreshadowing of tumbleweeds and dark times.
But standing on a busy street a block from the Salt Palace – no visible tumbleweeds in either direction – it’s hard not to wonder what might have been. Was the stand an effective tactic? Did the pullout have any effect at all? Did moving the show do anything more than transfer an economic blip from one side of the Rockies to the other?
On the train back to the airport, the big rock bouncing in my head wasn’t about lobbying for a gathering I don’t control to go to a place I have no connection with, it was about how to navigate a heavily interconnected world full of people and business and states, and what effective tools remain for advocacy and persuasion. Can you do business in a location that you don’t agree with 100% of the time? Can you talk across the fence with a neighbor that sees the world totally differently? What about 50% of the time? Or 20%?
Don’t get me wrong. You either stand for something or you stand for nothing, and it’s essential to know where your line is drawn. But ultimatums, to me, feel like a tool of another era, one of ideology over strategy, an iron weapon in a decentralized digital age.
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