Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
There’s one name that is synonymous with the tourism industry in Pocahontas County – Cara Rose. For the past 12 years, she has served as the executive director of the Pocahontas County Convention and Visitors Bureau, but that’s far from the beginning of her tourism career.
“About forty years, including my high school years,” she said of her time in the industry. “I was a switchboard operator at Snowshoe. I was sixteen. It was just a wintertime job. It was my first job.”
Rose worked for the late Dorothy Coleman, who ran the mailroom and switchboard at that time.
After graduating from high school, Rose went to Salem College and earned a degree in marketing and management. On winter and summer breaks, she came back to Pocahontas County to work small jobs at local attractions.
“During my summer stints in college, I worked at Watoga,” she said. “One winter – I think it was the winter of ’86 – I worked just briefly at Snowshoe in the Burger Slope. That was in the old Shavers Centre. It was a fast food joint. I figured out real quick that wasn’t for me.”
She worked in the tax office at the courthouse one summer.
After earning her degree, Rose began her job search. While she threw out a wide net in her search, she found herself returning to Pocahontas County and getting a job at Snowshoe.
“Honestly, I did think I would leave like everybody and then my dad was definitely encouraging me to get a job here. Of course, by that time, my mother had passed away. It was my dad and brother. My sister got a job in Pittsburgh in computer programming, so it just happened that I was the one who stayed home.
“I went to work at Snowshoe, initially,” she continued. “I worked a winter in the group sales and marketing department for Alice Poore and Bill Wagner. I worked with Sue and Marty McGreal and that’s where I got my connection to the CVB. Marty was the president of the newly formed CVB.”
After her seasonal position ended, McGreal offered Rose the job of executive director for the CVB, which was located in the Marlinton Depot at that time.
“I worked at the depot – nine years – through my getting married and having my first child [Lorena],” she said. “Then I took a brief break and then went to work at the Observatory. I also worked temporarily for the Pocahontas County Development Authority which is now defunct.”
Rose worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, now the Green Bank Observatory, for 14 years. During that time, she had her second daughter, Amelia.
“I went to work full-time because the new science center was being built,” she said. “Then I worked there for fourteen years total and came back to work here. It was time for a change for me. Lorena was in high school at that point and I was working a lot.
“I loved that work, I truly did,” she continued. “I gave tours. I got to engage with a couple hundred thousand people at that job, and that was great. To see people come back again and again each year, you build a real relationship with them.”
Although Rose said she learned a lot at the Observatory and enjoyed her job there, she was looking for something that gave her a little more freedom to spend time with the girls and to be closer to home.
She returned to the CVB as executive director in 2011. By that time, the office had moved to its current location on Main Street after the Depot tragically burned in 2008.
Since her last turn as executive director, Rose said the CVB went through many changes. She returned to a staff of five, seasonal visitor center operations and a larger hotel/motel tax stipend.
“I think those years – the countywide hotel/motel tax collection was $180,000, $160,000 – something like that annually and now, of course, it’s $2.6 million annually in the county,” she said. “So certainly from the marketing perspective, it demonstrates that more and more people are visiting. We’re able to do additional marketing because of that additional funding and it again just demonstrates that the tourism economy is the number one industry in Pocahontas County.”
Although the attractions have stayed the same, they have grown to be year-round attractions or to have unique events that bring in more visitors.
“We’re just marketing them better,” Rose said. “We’re able to reach more visitors and we’re seeing more visitors. Over the past six, seven years, we’ve seen an explosion of outdoor recreation in this county, which even the resident can visually see because cars coming through town have skis, snowboards, bikes, boats. You see motorcycles.”
In her time as executive director, Rose has helped implement many new programs in Pocahontas County that are related to tourism including becoming part of the Mon Forest Towns collective and achieving first bronze and then silver rating from IMBA – International Mountain Bicycling Association – for the Snowshoe Highlands Area Ride Center.
Rose predicts that the Ride Center will achieve gold by 2025 with the construction of the Monday Lick trail and the continued maintenance of the copious trails throughout the county.
There have also been so many ongoing celebrations that Rose helped bring to fruition, like the Mountain Music Trail, Maple Days and who can forget the year long Bicentennial celebration.
“That took us five years to plan and, I believe from the very beginning, it was pretty clear that we had high aspirations to do a lot and we certainly achieved it,” she said. “COVID-19 pandemic slowed us down – postponed – but fortunately, we had planned far enough ahead that we could still pull it off in our Bicentennial year, and that was a great achievement on our commission’s behalf, for sure.”
After roughly 40 years in the tourism industry, Rose has decided it’s time to retire, with her last day as executive director of the CVB being July 6.
“It’s been a great ride,” she said. “Forty- years of just greatness. I love Pocahontas County. I have truly loved every job I had, and I learned something from every job. You just continue to grow, and I am really excited to see where the next generation takes tourism for the county.”
Reflecting on her time with the CVB, Rose said she feels her greatest achievement would be facilitating collaboration between all the attractions in the county.
“I would say the collaborations that we’ve been able to form in our county and within our communities has been my biggest achievement,” she said. “I feel like our communities have really bonded and all of our organizations, our attractions and all of our assets have been very successful at that collaboration piece and that’s ultimately what makes all of this happen.
“You have to have that grassroots buy-in from the beginning to be able to pull off all these product development projects and programs,” she continued. “That’s what our county has really set the standard for in the state of West Virginia. All the projects that we work on have really gotten a lot of statewide attention because we’ve been able to work well together and establish goals and achieve them.
“I have said this many times, but I truly do believe we have the best CVB in the state of West Virginia because we have leadership and they participate.”
While she is officially retiring, Rose said there are a few projects she wants to complete that are still in the works, so she will be with the CVB as a contract worker for a little while.
“I have a couple pretty large projects that are just now starting that I would like to continue to facilitate for awhile until someone can take over,” she said. “I’ll be around if people need me.”
That will be part-time though, because her retirement plan includes returning to her roots on the family farm and spending more time with family.
“The farm – it needs a little tender loving care,” she said. “I’ll be spending a good bit of time there. I’m a farm girl. It’s second nature. I don’t know if I’m a very good one, but I’ll give it a go; trying to run equipment. I know how to use my fence mending tools pretty well.”
