For 15 years Nantahala Outdoor Center instructors have been teaching kids and teens how to maneuver the waters of Western North Carolina during its summer camp programs. 

Adam Clawson of Bryson City spent some of his best days on the water. At 8 years old, he tied a rope around the middle of an old inner tube to fashion a canoe, and with a borrowed paddle, learned to maneuver the rapids of the Nantahala River.

If discussions between Nantahala Outdoor Center and Jackson County continue to move forward, the outdoor recreation giant could start work this year on an adventure park and outfitter store in the tiny town of Dillsboro. 

If the stack of boxes piling up on the counter of the outfitter store at Nantahala Outdoor Center is any indication, thru-hiker season is coming fast. The parcels of food, reminders of home and creature comforts are welcome diversions from the travel-light lifestyle on the Appalachian Trail, where miles are many and luxuries are few. 

“A lot of people ask about what you’re thinking about [on the trail],” said Youngblood, an 18-year-old hiker whose off-trail name is P.J. Coleman, as he sorted through his just-opened box of mail drop goodies. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, you’re thinking about food.”

It wasn’t until Brad McMillan got his canoe on the water that the moment hit him. He’d been preparing for this for a long time, both mentally and physically, and he’d just watched his three friends in kayaks descend the falls before him. But once in the water, he struggled to keep the calm of that preparation. Nothing makes the idea of running a 70-foot-high waterfall more concrete than, well, pushing off to run a 70-foot-high waterfall. 

Sitting at a picnic table alongside the Nantahala River, Charles Conner watches the fast moving water. It’s may be a peaceful sunny morning at the Nantahala Outdoor Center, but it’s the calm before the storm.

“Right now, we’re really excited but anxious because there’s so much left to do,” he said. 

It was a rather strange place to have a life-changing epiphany, but there he was, on the set of a British reality TV show in 2007, deep in the bowels of the Borneo jungles, when Jonathon Bryant found a purpose in life. 

Set in some of the most remote jungles on the planet, “Adrenaline Junkie” was shooting its third series. Starring Jack Osbourne, son of the famous rocker Ozzy, and five tag-alongs, the show took viewers through the primitive Pacific island, encountering wild boar, bloodsucking leeches and the secluded people of the Penan, exotically adorned with drooping ear lobes, weighted earrings and body tattoos.

When Rob Kelly climbed behind the wheel of a bus two Saturdays ago for a relatively routine assignment shuttling paddlers up and down the Nantahala River, little did he know he would soon be face to face with death and hold a fellow kayaker’s life in his hands.

When Nantahala Outdoor Center burst onto the whitewater scene 40 years ago, it became ground zero for a new world of paddling — one where boundaries of the sport were being pushed, old paradigms were being broken, and new realities were being forged.

Paddlers wanted to be a part of it, and as a result NOC rapidly amassed a deep bench of the most elite canoeists and kayakers in the country. It was one of the few places where paddlers could make their living at their sport.

“The cadre of people we had here was unbelievable in those early days,” said John Burton, a former paddling Olympian and one of the early NOC pioneers who still works at the company today.

The dizzying concentration of paddling greats at NOC created a buzz around the Nantahala that was integral to its early success.

“This has been the center of expertise in the paddling world,” one of NOC’s founders Payson Kennedy said.

NOC was appealing to paddlers who reveled in the minutiae of the sport — particularly as they experimented with new ways of teaching the growing masses, said Bunny Johns, another NOC pioneer and one of the top female paddlers in the country in the 1970s and early ‘80s.

Staffers would spend hours dissecting the mechanics and physics of paddling in order to hone their teaching techniques — translating the fluid, almost intuitive body movements into anatomical step-by-step instructions for beginners. Take the roll, for example, a move kayakers yearn to master.

“Before, it was like, ‘You do your body like this,’” Johns said, rotating her body and lunging her arms in the mock-movement of a kayak roll.

Over dinner, instructors would share strategies for getting students to keep their head down through the roll, or how to pick up with their knee.

“They pioneered a fairly elegant way to teach people how to do the roll,” Johns said. “It was so exciting that people talked about it all the time.”

By year three, six of the paddlers from the 1972 U.S. Olympic team were staffers at NOC, launching a tradition of greatness on the Nantahala that persists today.

Kennedy admits he can’t take credit for the strategy, however.

“It just kind of happened,” he said.

What began as an accident proved an invaluable business strategy.

“It established real street credibility,” said Mark Singleton, the head of NOC’s marketing department from 1990 to 2002.

Come to NOC, and you would be paddling among the greats. But by the 1990s, the company was getting further removed from that aura.

“You had to go back to the first 1972 Olympics to get that,” Singleton said.

Not wanting to rest on past laurels, NOC leaders realized they needed to proactively position themselves at the center of the elite paddling world.

Further, the paddling competition of the 1996 summer Olympics would be staged on the nearby Ocoee River. It was a time to shine, and an opportunity they didn’t want to squander.

“We wanted to have a big presence around that close-by Olympics,” said Wayne Dickert, a top national paddler and whitewater author who worked at NOC for two decades.

The challenge, however, was to consciously replicate the natural attraction and draw NOC had for pro paddlers in its early days. NOC no longer had a lock on the river outfitter market for paddlers wanting to make their living on the water while training. There were other places they could go and have access to whitewater as a job perk.

To lure them, NOC put up the money to hire and pay a director for the Nantahala Racing Club in the early 1990s and continuing through 1996. Anyone racing under the banner of the club would have access to a formal instructor, training regimen and organizer.

“Before, it was just a bunch of NOC staffers, a bunch of guys who said ‘Hey, we are the Nantahala Racing Club,’” Dickert said.

The plan worked. Ultimately, six out of the seven paddlers on the 1996 Olympic Team trained at NOC.

“It was a renewal of NOC’s commitment to the highest levels of the sport. It gave us something we could really hang out hat on in terms of our marketing,” Singleton said. “It didn’t only drive business, although it was certainly very successful in that, but it also helped to reinforce an athletic culture.”

The man tasked with making it happen was Joe Jacobi, who was hired as that first-ever director of the Nantahala Racing Team. Jacobi knew first hand what a great place NOC was to work while training. Jacobi came to NOC as a dishwasher in 1989 while training as an Olympic hopeful for the ’92 games.

“It was the perfect job to do while training,” Jacobi said, who washed dishes in the morning and evening and filled his days with river workouts.

Jacobi was 19 when he came to NOC, and he describes those early years as magical. He lived in company housing, had a company meal plan, used the company laundry. He didn’t have to worry about the hassles of normal life, like grocery shopping or commuting to work. His life was self-contained and revolved around the river.

“The support of the NOC community, I couldn’t put words on what that meant to me,” Jacobi said.

One of the biggest perks he remembers: the company meal plan.

“When you are training, you get hungry a lot, and the whole food thing was very appealing to us,” Jacobi said.

Aside from the food itself was the dinner table conversation.

“The quality of conversation we would get into about kayaking and paddling and how paddling was taught and sold and how you would accomplish results on the elite side of it was stimulating and engaging,” Jacobi said.

Meanwhile, the star paddlers were worth their weight in gold when it came to NOC’s appeal for guests. Sutton Bacon, who would later become NOC’s president and CEO, paddled on the Nantahala as a child during those years. Bacon ticked off the Olympic paddlers he rubbed elbows with as a boy while paddling on the same river as them — there’s been 22 Olympic paddlers on NOC’s staff in all its 40-year history.

“I remember NOC vividly in the ‘90s, which in many ways was the heyday of NOC,” Bacon said. “Part of it I would have to caveat as nostalgia, but there was an electricity. All the paddling experts who were writing the books and producing videos were NOC staff members. That level of energy was probably the biggest remembrance as an NOC guest years ago that I want to make sure we replicate today.”

Horace Holden remembers the deal like it was yesterday.

He set out from Atlanta with a few blank checks in his pocket and a portable typewriter on the back seat of his car. He checked in to his favorite room in the 14-unit Tote ‘n’ Tarry motel, a mom-and-pop on the banks of the Nantahala River that catered to paddlers, and waited for an innocuous moment to strike up a conversation with the owner, Vincent Gassaway.

“I didn’t want him to think I was very interested,” Holden recalled. “I said, ‘How did your summer go?’ and he said, ‘Not too well.’ I said, ‘Well, you’ve never thought of selling this place have you?’ And he said, ‘Well I’ve thought about it.’”

A few minutes later, Holden went back to his room, typed up a contract and wrote a $1,000 check as earnest money to buy Gassaway’s motel, gas station and 40 acres on the river.

Forty year later, as Holden toured the grounds of the Nantahala Outdoor Center flashing his signature charismatic smile to the throngs of tourists and seasonal employees already swarming the place in these early days of summer, it’s easy to see how Holden transformed the isolated gorge into a bustling outfitter’s campus and one of the most successful river operations in the country.

He’ll claim the recipe for success lay with the Nantahala itself. But in fact, it was Holden’s own infectious idealism that carried the vision forward.

Holden had been staging paddling races on the Nantahala River since 1969. By 1971, the race was attracting hundreds of paddlers eager for competition venues in the growing sport of whitewater.

“The third year I said ‘Let’s call it the Southeastern championship,’” Holden recalled. “They said ‘You can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Why not? It’s the Southeast.’”

If Holden can think it up, he’s apt to try it.

Years later, Holden learned that Gassaway had bragged about the deal to the owner of a filling station up the road.

“Finally, I found somebody who was fool enough to buy the place,” Gassaway allegedly said of Holden.

Holden simply had a hunch — a hunch something here would work. What exactly, he wasn’t quite sure, but something.

At the time, Holden ran a summer camp in Georgia, and originally envisioned the Nantahala as a great outpost for his camp. Or maybe as a whitewater teaching center and paddling clinics for canoe clubs.

For good measure, Holden figured he could always serve up guided raft trips to help cover the annual mortgage.

But Holden, who was dedicated to running his summer camp, realized he needed a partner. He turned to his childhood friend, Payson Kennedy. The two had attended church together as boys.

“He was honest as the day was long,” Holden said, when asked why he picked Kennedy. Plus, Holden thought, Kennedy worked at Georgia Tech and had his summers off, giving Kennedy flexibility to oversee the yet-to-be-determined venture on the Nantahala.

“I asked him ‘Would you like to start a little canoeing operation?’” Holden recounted.

Kennedy was already looking for a lifestyle change and was about to go work for Outward Bound wilderness school when Holden approached him. Kennedy sold his house to raise money to become a co-founder of NOC along with Holden. The two would ultimately remain the majority stockholders for 40 years.

When asked about how he knew it would work, Holden says he didn’t.

“You can’t know. You can never know,” Holden said.

Somehow, though, it seems like he did.