49er Festival Partner: Visit Tuolumne County

Where the Hell is Groveland? You’ve seen it on the t-shirt* and undoubtedly heard it countless other times from friends-of-friends, distant relatives, professional and business contacts, and beyond. 

We can thank Visit Tuolumne County for the number of holiday-makers who know the answer to that question and who, in 2024, spent nearly $308 million when they chose to come here. In exchange for their awesome vacation experience, their hard-earned cash supported 2,700 tourism-dependent jobs (not including Chicken Ranch Casino/Resort and Black Oak Casino/Resort staff) and added more than $24 million dollars to Tuolumne County’s general fund. The State and Local tax revenue equates to more than a thousand dollars per household across the County.

But it doesn’t stop there. Part of Visit Tuolumne County’s annual (but seriously diminishing) budget supports community development and major events across the county. Once again, we are beholden to Visit Tuolumne County for sponsoring the 49er Festival as a Festival Partner, extending our outreach far beyond what our unincorporated community could afford on our own.

Visit Tuolumne County’s reach is both domestic and international. That means constantly packaging and pitching stories and hosting opportunities for influential travel journalists, bloggers, and event planners to write about our unique vacation destination, and collaborating with Visit California and Brand USA to be included in their more robust advertising and PR campaigns. Combined, these efforts entice US and foreign visitors to choose Tuolumne County over other vacation destinations on global consumers’ bucket lists.

So when an Executive Order is issued to increase National Park access fees for foreign visitors, Visit Tuolumne County and its powerful and better-funded tourism partners are right on top of the issue, ensuring that international visitors know that they will be welcomed and treated to lifelong experiences here in Tuolumne County…experiences you can’t get anywhere else in the world.

The Tourism Spending numbers prove it. If we build it and Visit Tuolumne County promotes it, the visitors will come. But it’s still up to us to deliver on the promise we make to those travelers. The 2025 49er Festival, celebrating Tuolumne County’s 175th anniversary, will deliver on that promise, thanks in part to Visit Tuolumne County’s sponsorship of our most popular annual event. And the commitment of our tourism-dependent small businesses to make it so. 

*Where the Hell is Groveland T-shirts are sold by our most historic continuously-operating enterprise, the Iron Door Saloon, which is featured in today’s STCHS article on Historic Buildings that built our 175-year-old economy.