Courtesy
Tuesday, June 25, 2024 | 2 a.m.
Nevada State Parks surveyed over 3,400 people to determine what people do and what improvements they'd like to see, according to a new state report.
The report, online at extension.unr.edu/publication.aspx?PubID=6550, details what park visitors do, how long they state and what they'd like from each of the state parks in Nevada.
Park employees used to hand out paper surveys with questions on topics such as the cleanliness of the park and asking participants to provide their ZIP codes, Nevada State Parks Administrator Robert Mergell said.
He said over the years, fewer and fewer were returned. At the same time, he said, the University of Nevada, Reno, Cooperative Extension service was conducting surveys about environmental and economic impacts of outdoor recreation to each county.
"So I asked those folks if there were some questions that they would like to see us put into our surveys, as we move forward with trying to go more digital with our surveys, helping to increase the response rate," Mergell said.
"The Nevada Economic Assessment Project team called me the next week and were offering to have a discussion about what it might look like if they took over that survey for us, because they already had a platform in place they could utilize. It turned out to be a great partnership. They built this survey for us. And it was way more in-depth than what information we used to put into our surveys."
He said the result is "a lot more detailed information on exactly what the economic impact is at each of our parks and what it is for the surrounding communities. But we're also able to look at the demographics of our visitors and try to identify which groups we are not serving as well as we could be, so that we can do some more outreach and try to get a more diverse visitor base," Mergell said.
Some findings
The survey revealed 80% of Nevada State Parks visitors rated their experience as good or excellent. For each park, fewer than 10% of visitors reported negative interactions with park employees.
For some Elko County-specific numbers, 64.4% of visitors to Wild Horse Reservoir identified lake fishing as its most popular recreational activity.
The survey found 62% of visitors to South Fork State Recreation Area said they were somewhat likely or extremely likely to use amenities like power or water facilities if they were placed on the southwest side of the park. And 13% of South Fork guests reported garbage or litter were an issue at the park.
Mergell said one notable feature of the survey was how it provided numbers on the individual groups of people showing up to the parks.
"We've historically built our campgrounds with room for a trailer. Now, we're seeing that people like to camp in family groups. So as we build new campgrounds, for instance, we'll look at putting in some number of sites that actually have two sets of hookups that two family members or friends could actually occupy. They want to be in the same kind of shade structure and picnic tables anyway. So we might as well make the spaces to accommodate that type of use."
Also, he said the survey "helps us to identify what type of new facilities our parks might need. In the past, we were kind of forced to just make those determinations, based on what we thought people might want. But now we can actually ask people what they want to see, so it gives us more accurate information," Mergell said.
"We ask the same questions, regardless of which park you're staying at. But for instance, if we're looking at how long people stay, the numbers vary broadly depending on where you're at," he noted.
For instance, he said, 32% of people stay four to five days at South Fork and the about 43% stay there for two to three days. "We can use this data so that we know that's the typical stay," he said. With this data, the parks team can calculate how to increase the time spent at a park through strategies like adding power hookups to campgrounds, Mergell said.
He said the data shows usage at each park.
"A park like Echo Canyon over in Lincoln County, 93% of the people come from outside of the area to go to camp at Echo, while at South Fork, 68% of the people live locally," Mergell said.
"By locally, we mean within 50 miles of the park. So two-thirds of the visitors who are going to South Fork are from Elko or Spring Creek, that general area, which is back to that two to three days. Most of the people are just coming out there for the weekend," he said.
"I worked up at South Fork for over a decade," Mergell said. "We talked to the same people over and over again. Most of them were from the local area."
The survey data for Wild Horse Reservoir showed "87% of the people traveled for more than 50 miles," he said. "Elko is 67 miles from Wild Horse, so almost everybody who goes there is coming from outside of the area. But we also know that 67% of them are Nevada residents. So there are not a whole lot of people coming down from Idaho, for instance. The vast majority of people are coming from Nevada. We presume most of them are coming from Elko."
Regarding South Fork, 54% of visitors "just come out for the day, like just coming out to go fishing, for instance."
"But for Wild Horse, 83% of the people, by the time they drive that far, are going to camp. So South Fork is a lot more day use, obviously, than Wild Horse. Most of the vast majority of people that go up there, go ahead and camp for the night," he said.
He said out-of-town visitors "are bringing the most money into the area. They have the highest economic impact."
"If you're an Elko resident and you're buying your groceries there but you're also camping there, you're not going to have a dramatic increase in your expenditures, because you are from that area," he said. "People from outside of the area who would normally be spending their money in Salt Lake City, for instance, if we get those folks to come and camp in Elko for a week, we know that we would have a much larger economic impact on the Elko community."
Using the data
If the majority of visitors to South Fork are from the Elko area, "we still definitely want to keep the local folks spending money in the local community," he said.
"But there might be a benefit to doing some outreach and trying to get some folks from outside of the area to identify South Fork or Wild Horse as recreational opportunities that they might want to use, also," he said.
"We will use the information to build future budget requests, and to justify why those budgets should be approved by the governor's office and the Legislature," Mergell said.
If the survey results come back saying visitors found the facilities to be showing their age and needing maintenance, "I will use it as we build our budget to show that there is a need to take care of a lot of our deferred maintenance issues that are out there."
For upgrades such as additional camp showers or RV hookups, "that's not anything that I can just put in. I have to have a funding source in order to make those upgrades," he said. "We're going to use it from that perspective, so that we can show that this isn't just us saying we want these facilities or these improvements. These are the visitors who are saying they want to see these things."
In addition, Mergell said "this information is going to be very useful for us to show where we need more parking — because we're just super short on parking — or where we need expanded access, because that's the other thing that we're trying to do, is make sure that our facilities are more accessible to everybody," he said.
While some Nevada State Parks locations will not be accessible to all ability levels due to remote locations or steep hills, "as much as we're able to control it, we want to get as many of our facilities accessible to everybody as we can," Mergell said.
"Every park has its own unique challenges," he said. "Being able to point to certain line items in here is going to be incredibly helpful."
