Oral History Feature

For today's oral history feature, we sit down with Kathy "KB" Medford. KB was a river guide at the Nantahatla Outdoor Center for 20 years. We asked her to tell us about her time working at the NOC.

“My first day of work I show up, it was early spring and it was during the week, and it had rained all night and I showed up for work, and they locked the doors to the Outdoor Center, everybody went boating, and it was like that whenever it rained – all these small creeks over near Robbinsville – Snowbird and Santeelah – would come up, over in Cherokee, in the Raven’s Fork and the Oconaluftee would come up, and we’d go row in this stuff. It was very challenging but you know being a young person, you just learn fast and being around really good people, you know you really pick up stuff.

I was with a really wonderful group, we kind of honed in on each other, but we’d be teaching all week and you’d think we’d be tired on our days off, but we would go over to the Ocoee and spend a day off paddling. It was great.

The job was all river oriented. When you worked at the Outdoor Center, they ran – rafted – five rivers, and over time you got recruited to go to whichever river to fulfill the needs. They had a very robust teaching instruction program, best in the U.S. and probably the world at the time. So they attracted high-end paddlers, and then they had an adventure travel program that they got going, and they started getting some of the best adventure travel leaders in the world come to work there. And then they had these Olympic-level racers come to work there and I was immersed right in the center of all three factions, so I feel like I’m an amalgamation of influences from all three of these areas.

I saw the huge change in the sport from – I started working there in ’73 – and I saw the change in boat designs – boats came down from longboats, down to real short boats, and made paddling a whole lot easier. I witnessed the development of kayak techniques that weren’t known before and we actually developed some at the Outdoor Center because people were just into it. We didn’t have TV, so there was a big front porch scene, so to speak, and after the day on the river, we’d be around each other, talking about what we discovered or saw. We developed safety systems for dealing with whitewater, setting up safety for rapids, and in the kayak school, we figured out ways of rescuing people upside down to keep them in their boat and “hand of god” rescues, that sort of thing. I saw a lot of changes.
So while I was there, I’d teach all day or raft all day, then we’d go train in the evenings, and the Center really fostered people if they were really good racers. I got to go to the (Olympic) team trials and made the team in ’77 for wildwater and did a lot of racing; made it again in ’89, but also was in the first Olympic sports festival for flatwater, that was probably in ’85.”

Read KB's full interview at https://www.blowingrockmuseum.org/see/play

Photos provided by Houck Medford.