Nantahala Outdoor Center alumni tell their stories

WILD RIDE

NOC marks 50 years in business

BY HOLLY KAYS OUTDOORS EDITOR

In 1971, Payson and Aurelia Kennedy were living a successful, stable life in Atlanta. Payson was a librarian at Georgia Tech, Aurelia a schoolteacher. They had four kids, retirement funds, and the deed to their house.

Then Horace Holden, an old friend of Payson’s from college and fellow member of Atlanta’s First Presbyterian Church, approached the Kennedys with a crazy idea. He’d just bought a little roadside motel in the Nantahala Gorge called the Tote ‘N’ Tarry, a 14-room complex that also included a small restaurant, gas station and souvenir shop.

Holden wanted the Kennedys to help him run it.

It was a big ask. The Kennedys had a good life in Atlanta, and their kids were nearing college age. They wanted to be able to offer them a higher education should they so desire. So they considered Holden’s proposal and gave him an answer: maybe. As a schoolteacher, Aurelia had summers off, so Payson took a leave of absence from work to give it a trial run. They spent the summer of 1972 living at the little outpost the three had decided to christen the Nantahala Outdoor Center.

As the Tote ‘N’ Tarry, the outpost mostly served anglers and tourists to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Qualla Boundary and Nantahala National Forest, as well as a small but growing contingent of paddlers and hikers on the Appalachian Trail, which crosses the property.

The NOC’s founders envisioned more than a wayside stop for outdoor adventurers. They wanted it to become a home base for people who love the outdoors, the nucleus of a community dedicated to sharing in adventure and giving others the tools they needed to safely do the same. They’d start out by serving both the general public and groups from Camp Chattahoochee, which Holden had founded, and offering food, lodging, shuttles, equipment and instruction for various recreational activities.

Raft trips might be the best way to bring in the revenue they’d need to cover their mortgage payments, Payson suggested. The others agreed, but they all said they wanted the center to offer a wide variety of outdoor activities — not just whitewater rafting.

That first summer was nonstop work, but the work felt like fun. The NOC took about 800 guests rafting on the Nantahala, and another 400 on the Chattooga, with the Kennedys, their kids and most of the staff sleeping in a brick house Holden had purchased from the former owners of the Tote ‘N’ Tarry. The season represented a financial loss, but Payson and Aurelia believed the business could be successful. And they loved life on the river.

The following fall, they made a decision that would change their lives, and the lives of countless others in Swain County and beyond. They sold their house, collected their retirement funds, and invested $25,000 in the business, permanently moving their family to the NOC campus.

The NOC campus looked much different

in 1980. Donated photo

A HALF-CENTURY OF GROWTH

Fifty years later, the NOC is still around, and not in the barely-hanging-on, relic-ofthe-past sense. It’s thriving.

“We did not expect it to be anything of the scope that the NOC became,” Payson, now 89, said during a 2018 interview on the spa-

BY HANNAH MCLEOD STAFF WRITER

Wayne “Wayner” Dickert may not have started paddling until he was 18 years old, but that didn’t stop him from competing at the sport’s highest level when he made it to the 1996 Olympics. For Dickert, NOC was an important part of that success.

“The Nantahala Outdoor Center had a definite impact on me, on my paddling skills for sure,” said Dickert. “I think both the competition fed into what I could give to NOC, but also the NOC gave a lot that fed into my own competitive skills. It helped me grow as a leader. I believe it helped me understand how to build partnerships.”

Growing up as a Boy Scout, Dickert was the only member of his troop who didn’t have his canoe badge. Years later, while undergoing staff training for a summer camp, he was introduced to whitewater canoeing.

“I just kind of had a natural knack for it, so they recruited me into their special paddling adventure camps,” said Dickert.

Dickert continued paddling during summers throughout college until his senior year when friends convinced him to buy a kayak. The part-time hobby became a full-time diversion. After college, he entered the military and for three years of active duty was mainly in the Washington, D.C. area, which happened to be the hotspot for paddling sports at that time.

“There were several world champions that lived there and a really good coach,” said Dickert. “So I kind of dropped in the middle of all that pretty early on, and I was able to get pretty good, pretty fast, just because I was around really, really good people.”

In the 1980s, Dickert began working at NOC, first as a raft guide, then as a canoe and kayak instructor. In the lead-up to the ‘96 Olympics, the NOC created a position for Director of the Nantahala Racing Club to build synergy and publicity between the NOC and the Olympic Games.

“A lot of what I did was coordinate the racing club, do all the publications, connect them with NOC, support athletes, hire coaches, that sort of thing,” said Dickert.

Following an unsuccessful bid for the ’92 Olympics, Dickert retired from competitive canoeing to take the new position at the NOC, but he came out of retirement the winter before the ‘96 Olympic trials. That year, he and his tandem canoe teammate Horace Holden, Jr., qualified for and would go on to finish ninth on the Ocoee River Course in Tennessee.

Following the ‘96 Olympics, Dickert took a job with USA Canoe and Kayak as the Slalom Development Director, helping to train coaches and develop kids’ programs that could feed into the Olympic team. Years later, Dickert and co-author Jon Rounds would win a National Outdoor Book Award for their book “Basic Canoeing: All the Skills and Tools You Need to Get Started.”

In 2000, Dickert found his way back to the NOC as director of the paddling school and would later become an ambassador. In this role he was tasked with building the regional relationships that helped sustain the NOC through its 50 years, connecting with summer camps and other programs that bring groups to explore rivers throughout the region all season long.

Since July of 2011 Dickert has been serving his community as pastor of the Bryson City United Methodist Church. His passion for ministry grew out of a riverside ministry for boaters and other outdoors folks he had helped to start on the campus of the NOC called River of Life.

“I loved working with kids, and I was really involved in youth ministry at another church that I was attending and loved it, so I thought I was going to go into youth ministry,” he said

While Dickert’s work for the NOC is unofficial these days, after its 50 years of existence, he sees the impact it has had on his community.

“NOC was an outlier for sure at first, because it was seen as a bunch of river hippies by the local community,” said Dickert. “The integration, as people have left NOC to move to other jobs — teaching, the medical field, all kinds of other jobs — that have that NOC background, those relationships that have been built over the years have helped integrate both the NOC and the local community to work well together. Economically, the NOC has had a significant impact on our community, on the community of Swain County and it still gives back. The money that flows through it into the local community has been pretty significant for a long time.”

Olympian Wayne Dickert has been paddling

most of his life. Donated photo

Aurelia Kennedy, co-founder of NOC, smiles during an adventure in the center’s

early days. Donated photo

cious deck of the home he still occupies on f NOC’s campus. Aurelia and Holden have both since passed away. “We expected it to be a small family and friends group that would operate on a very much smaller scale. The first few years, the only heat we had was a potbellied stove, and we would spend our winters sitting around that stove doing crafts to sell in the summer and making spray skirts to sell.”

Hard work, fortuitous timing and an enticing company culture that soon drew world-class paddlers to work at NOC put an end to those lean days. The year NOC opened, whitewater canoeing made its Olympic debut and the movie Deliverance popularized paddling — especially on the nearby Chattooga River, where the movie was filmed. In 1975, a year that Payson would come to see as a turning point, the NOC recruited an influx of top-level staff who, in turn, encouraged their friends in the paddling community to come work there. By 1980, NOC was turning a profit of $250,000 on an annual revenue of $4 million.

While NOC declined to release its current revenue and profit numbers, revenues are now “much healthier” than they were 40 years ago, and NOC has grown to become the largest seasonal employer in Swain County, as well as an anchor attraction for the region’s swelling tourism industry.

Celebrate 50 years

NOC is hosting a party 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday, June 11, to celebrate a half-century as leaders in outdoor adventure.

At the main campus in Swain County, event highlights include a vendor village from 1-5 p.m., $20 fun passes for kids, a craft/artisan market, book signings by local authors 1-4 p.m. in the Outfitter Store, community booths with nonprofit partners, giveaways, contests, prizes and live music — Gypsy & Me 1-4 p.m. and Big Deal 5-8 p.m.

All eight NOC locations will hold celebrations that day. For more information, visit bit.ly/NOC50events.

In accordance with the founders’ vision, NOC is not just about whitewater — in fact, only 10-15% of NOC visitors do a river activity. It’s now spread across eight locations, with the main campus in Swain County offering more than 120 land-and water-based activities, including restaurants, lodging, kayaking, ziplining, mountain biking, hiking, canoeing and tubing, as well as rafting. It hosts outdoor education courses in paddling and wilderness medicine and serves as a home base for international adventures.

When planning marketing strategies, the Swain County Tourism Development Authority keeps NOC’s offerings front of mind.

“We specifically target the outdoor enthusiast, and the NOC’s campus complements our overall plan with multiple activities in one stop — whitewater rafting and kayaking, zipline, biking, the adventure park, treetop adventure nets for children and dining opportunities,” said TDA Executive Director Mary Anne Baker. “When visitors realize they can plan a vacation in Swain County that includes not only the world-class Nantahala River at the NOC, but also the multiple adventures in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, along with the Great Smoky Mountains Railroad and a bustling downtown, the NOC plays a major role in a vacation itinerary.”

WHITEWATER INNOVATORS

The longevity, continued focus on the original mission and popularity of the product represent a level of success that’s extremely rare in the business world, said Colin McBeath, who recently rounded out his first year as NOC’s newest president.

“Not a lot of companies make it to 50,” he said. “A lot of them get bought, they close, they fold. They change their name. NOC has been pure outdoor leisure recreation for 50 years. That’s amazing. There are not many companies that are that fortunate. There aren’t, and it says something about the vision that Payson has.”

The vision was partly about revenue — after all, the founders had to make a living —