Those who call Nelson home will be familiar with outside attention, and recent coverage from Sunset Magazine continues the trend by calling it one of 20 “ultimate fantasy towns.”
“The Sunset Magazine article was really designed around people thinking that this might be a place for relocation,” said Tom Thomson, executive director of the Nelson and District Chamber of Commerce.
“Our area gets a lot of good quality press. Some of it is press that Nelson Kootenay Lake Tourism generates, some of it is press that just continues to come up from other articles and people seeing those and saying ‘hey, let’s find out more about this community,’” said Thomson.
The article calls Nelson a “quirky-quaint” town “truly in the middle of nowhere. In a good way.”
“Up here, it’s all about community: Networking takes place on the sidelines of the kids’ soccer field, folks tend to boycott big chain stores, and if you choose work over family here, you stick out,” says the Sunset article.
Of course, there’s also mention of acclaimed powder skiing, hiking and mountain biking.
“I think when people come to this community they try to see if there’s a way of carving out a piece of the pie either through employment with a current employer or entrepreneurially,” Thomson says. “I think it’s a place that a lot of people just want to be in.”
He adds many people may do a majority of their work for companies in larger centres, but make an effort to be based out of Nelson.
“A lot of people that have that ability want to shift to a place where opportunity meets lifestyle… it’s a place that a lot of people want to be in and I don’t think that locals are really giving up an awful lot by people coming in and looking to create new entrepreneurial opportunities.”
Sunset is an American lifestyles magazine focused on the west.