KYLE VANOFLEN, OUTLAND EXPEDITIONS

How long have you been a raft guide? 10 years.

What led you to become a raft guide? My love for the outdoors started toward junior year of high school. My parents bought a cabin in Copperfield, Tennessee, and the river was close by. After a while of being too nervous for the water, it just drew me in. I was training my last semester of senior year, I graduated, and a few days later, I was an official guide. I have been doing it ever since.

Tell us about the training process. The best part of rafting is you just have to show up and go through the process to get started. The first few trips you are just a guest in the raft while a senior guide brings you down to show you the lines. Next step is hopping in the back and learning on the fly. Toward the start of full-time season, you get put into rafts with guests and a senior guide, so you get the feel of having inexperienced people in the boat.

What do you love about whitewater rafting? You get to do something super fun and share it with so many people; you also get to show a lot of people a side of nature some of them have never seen before.

What’s special about rafting the Ocoee? You can make the river as easy or as hard as you want to. It’s a pretty low-consequence river as well, so you do have some margin of error. The river community is different here too … at the end of the day, we all hang out and talk about how the day went. It’s just one giant family.

What’s your favorite rapid? Broken Nose. It’s short, but there is a lot going on. It’s kind of technical, so it takes a little skill to get through. You can have some fun at the rapid or go straight through.

Tell us a memorable story from the river. Maybe my third or fourth season we had to unpin a raft on a rock. The guide and all the guests were standing on the rock with the raft basically underwater. It took like eight people pulling a rope to unpin it, and then everyone jumped back into the raft and were on their way.