Small school in Bryson City churns out leaders in the outdoor industry

BRYSON CITY - Maddie Wikstrom spreads her three days’ worth of backpacking gear across the outdoor classroom's grass in what's known as a shakedown.

In her two years studying in Southwestern Community College’s Outdoor Leadership program, she has learned to break down a pack to the most efficient, barest-of-bones essentials for cooking, cleaning, navigating, performing first aid and getting out of the mountains with her clients alive.

But Wikstrom always packs two secret weapons – extra socks and a bag of M&Ms.

“When it’s cold and nasty outside and people don’t want to be there, it’s important to have dry socks and something to motivate them,” Wikstrom said.

The ability to be an encouraging and dependable leader in the wilderness in the face of slingshots from nature, and from humans, is one of the many bankable skills Wikstrom will take with her when she graduates Saturday from SCC. She already is putting some of those skills to use in her job as the adventure program field supervisors at the Willows at Red Oak Recovery, a substance abuse treatment center for women in Fairview.

Wikstrom is among hundreds of graduates over the past 18 years who can be found working across Western North Carolina and the country in the rapidly growing outdoor adventure and tourism industry and its specialty niche, wilderness therapy.

Wikstrom, 25, was studying psychology at a four-year college in Minnesota, where she said she was burned out. She moved to Western North Carolina to recharge, working as a rafting guide. In a familiar story among SCC’s outdoor leadership students, on her way to the Nantahala Gorge each day, Wikstrom would drive by a nondescript building with a row of kayaks half-buried in the ground out front. The school’s sign announcing a wilderness therapy program intrigued her.

“It has 100 percent changed my life,” she said of the program.

It allowed her to start working weekends while still in school leading canoe trips on Fontana Lake and camping trips in the Great Smokies and the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests for women ages 18-30 going through treatment for addiction and other mental health issues.

“It’s a really awesome opportunity to pass my passion and skills and knowledge on to people who’ve never had the opportunity to get outside before,” said Wikstrom, who plans to finish her psychology degree to combine that with her wilderness therapy training.

“There’s a certain power to wilderness, and I’m a firm believer that wilderness makes you better. When people say they don’t want to go out in the woods, but they get out there and find that nature has a way of stripping away all of the distractions of everyday life and really gets you to focus inwardly on the things you need to be working on, it’s powerful to see those changes in people.”

Starting a movement

Paul Wolf is the guru behind the Outdoor Leadership program, and those kayaks.

Born and raised in Minnesota, Wolf earned degrees in psychology and environmental studies from Minnesota State University Mankato. He worked with juvenile sex offenders and crisis intervention, then earned a master’s in experiential education went to work at Voyageur Outward Bound School in Minnesota, also working with juveniles in a therapeutic model.

He moved to WNC in 1994 to work for the Nantahala Outdoor Center, leading team building and educational programs for youth, church and corporate groups, then went to work for Alpine Towers, a company that builds, inspects and trains people on challenge courses.

With a lifetime of outdoor know-how, technical skills, and a calming, steady, solid voice of wilderness ethics and passion for teaching, he created the curriculum and opened the Outdoor Leadership program in 2000 on SCC’s Swain County campus, with a stockpile of kayaks and backpacks, but no computer, to a first-year class of nine students.

“We were in the middle of this outdoor economy and thought, why don’t we have a program to train people to work in this growing outdoor tourism industry?” Wolf said of his first conversations with the SCC president. “Our classroom is right here. We don’t have to travel. We have the Nantahala and the Tuckasegee rivers down the road, the Smokies, the national forests.”

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The class time is spent mostly outdoors. Students learn everything a good outdoor leader needs to know, from starting a fire and building shelter, to canoeing a mountain river, organizing backpacking treks and facilitating challenge course expeditions, treating a sprained ankle or a snake bite, and almost magically, in this digitally dependent age, how to find their way through the woods without a cell phone. (That would be by using a map and compass.)

The mountains are one of the most sought out destinations when it comes to playing, working and learning outdoors. The Blue Ridge Parkway has the most visitors – 16.1 million – of all units in the National Park Service. The Great Smoky Mountains is the most visited national park, with a record 11.3 million visitors last year.

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The Pisgah and Nantahala national forests collectively host nearly 5 million visitors a year, and along with visitors to state forests such as DuPont and state parks like Mount Mitchell, the numbers are only growing, creating the need for more river managers and rock climbing guides, ropes course designers, park rangers, wilderness therapy counselors, outdoors skills instructors, and more.

According to the Outdoor Industry Association Outdoor Recreation Economy Report released last year, outdoor recreation in North Carolina generates 260,000 direct jobs, $8.3 billion in wages and salaries and $1.3 billion in state and local tax revenue.

The school was one of the first in North Carolina to provide an associate’s degree in the emerging field of outdoor leadership, and is still considered one of the best when it comes to outdoor adventure and experiential learning, helped in large part by Wolf’s Yoda-like reputation in the field.

He helps to set the industry standards and safety protocols as a member of the Accreditation Council and the Standards Committee of the Association of Experiential Education. The international organization oversees the standards and accreditation processes by the AEE for Adventure Programs and Outdoor Behavioral Healthcare, which includes wilderness therapy.

The kayaks? A nod to the Cadillac Ranch art installation on Route 66 in Texas, Wolf built his “Kayak Ranch” with 10 colorful kayaks on U.S. 19/74.

“They’re all facing due west in the angle of the pyramids,” Wolf said.

If nothing else, it was a brilliant marketing tool. Countless thousands of people drive by the curiosity on their way to the Nantahala River, the Smokies, and other natural wonders each year. The kayaks are featured on RoadsideAmerica.com.

But the SCC program also attracts students from around the country for its solid coursework, from retired military veterans, to those who already have college degrees and are looking for a different career direction, to raft guides wanting to earn more employable, managerial skills, and even an American Idol contestant (Alma Russ).

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Every class in the associate’s degree can be used toward a bachelor’s degree in parks and recreation management at Western Carolina University, which sits just down the road in Cullowhee.

Students can also earn certificates in outdoor leadership, wilderness emergency medicine and wilderness therapy.

“First and foremost, outdoor leadership is a program that works with people, taking them into adventurous situations for some type of gain,” Wolf said. “It can be for recreation or education, or working in the developmental end of field, in the corporate world, and in the therapeutic industry.”

Wolf now has computers in his classrooms, but more of the rooms in the building, which shares spaces with the Cooperative Extension office, are filled with kayaks, canoes and standup paddle boards, camping gear, tarps, ropes, maps and cooking gear.

And there’s the pantry room with racks and racks of backpacking food – rice and dried beans, cheddar cheese, biscuit mix, Fig Newtons, peanut butter, hot cocoa, garlic powder. Students must learn the nutritional value of every food, how to cook it outdoors and feed their hungry followers.

His students range in age from 16-64, learn outdoor philosophy such as the Leave No Trace ethic, business and people skills, along with a battery of hands-on skills courses in backpacking, canoeing, kayaking, ropes courses and rock climbing.

“We’re looking to make highly trained, employable outdoor professionals,” he said. “I could guarantee a half dozen places willing to hire our students.”

Like Wikstrom, all five of this spring’s graduates are already gainfully employed, as well as those still in school

Anna Cole Rickman, 23, from Rabun County, Georgia, will graduate in December but has been hired as the Nantahala Gorge canopy tour manager. She had worked for Wildwater as a raft and zipline tour guide for six years.

“I never would have applied for the manager job if I hadn’t taken this program,” she said.

Mike Waller, 50, is originally from Miami but spent 27 years in the Army as a cook, including five years as a personal aide to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Waller retired two years ago, he moved to Robbinsville, where he had bought land in the ‘90s.

His curiosity was also piqued by the kayaks, which “looked like fun.” He is now working for Graham County Rescue “to give back to the community,” Waller said.

“Our students and graduates are in high demand. Anybody who wants a job, there are multiple choices,” Wolf said. “One of the misconceptions is that these are minimum wage jobs and that’s not true. You can get mortgage paying jobs with this degree.”

The cost is $79 per credit for in-state students and $271 out of state, Wolf said. There is also an online course in which students can take a first responder class through a local provider, but must attend a six-week field expedition.

Thomas Wagner, one of the school’s instructors, said the program suits people who like to learn through doing, getting their hands dirty, and those who genuinely like people.

“We have qualified individuals, those who have the hard skills, are good paddlers, good rock technicians, understand how ziplines work, but also have the soft skills, the people skills,” said Wagner, a former instructor with Outward Bound and the Nantahala Outdoor Center.

“If you’re an Olympic paddler and you’re a jerk, you shouldn’t be around other people. You don’t have to be the best, but you have to understand how to teach and how to work with people. The tourism industry doesn’t exist without the people.”

Warming up to wilderness therapy

When Wolf launched the wilderness therapy curriculum eight years ago, it was the first in the country to offer undergraduate credentials. It now attracts many people who are already licensed therapists and need to learn more about the outdoor setting.

The growing field, also known as outdoor behavioral healthcare, uses outdoor adventures to help treat youth and adults with a wide range of mental health issues, including ADHD, autism, depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, addiction, self-harm and many other disorders.

Wolf said research shows that young adults who go through wilderness therapy show fewer emotional struggles with depression, stress and anxiety, by taking the growth they experience, applying it to their daily lives and maintaining it for more than a year after treatment.

The therapy has gone mainstream. Last year, a billable code was established for wilderness therapy to be charged to health insurance. Without it, treatment can cost upward of $500 a day.

WNC continues to be a hub for wilderness therapy. The Outdoor Behavioral Health Council held its annual regional symposium in April in Asheville, where Wolf was a presenter. There are many centers based in the mountains including Red Oak Recovery, a substance abuse center for men in Leicester, which is soon to open a center for young adults near Forest City, The Willows, SUWS of the Carolinas in Old Fort, Full Spectrum Farms in Cullowhee, and others.

Starting pay for program managers is about the same as for starting teachers in North Carolina, Wolf said.

Matt Draughon, 31, had retired early after serving nine years with the Marines, and wanted to transition into the outdoor industry. He had never rock climbed before coming to SCC, but showed off his Spiderman agility and knot-tying and quick problem-solving skills learned in the school’s indoor gym as well as out on real rock.

“When we graduate, we have the qualifications that industry leaders are looking for right out of the gate,” Draughon said. “Paul’s setting us up for success.”

With a wilderness therapy certificate, Draughon is now working at Full Spectrum Farms, a center for adults on the autism spectrum where they learn life skills through art, outdoor and equine therapy.

“Any time you’re outdoors, not in a super stressful environment, you’re more apt to be creative. When working with therapy animals, their whole body position, everything about them changes, and they can really open up,” he said.

John Brown, 27, who graduated from the Outdoor Leadership program in 2016, is now the operations manager at Red Oak Recovery, where young men come for 60-90 days to recover from substance abuse.

“Addiction takes over, and people lose all emotion or desire to do other activities, so just being outdoors, having fun, provides them something that they can carry along with them in their recovery,” said Brown, who added that all expeditions are “challenge by choice,” and no one is forced to participate in the activities such as backpacking, canoeing, horseback riding and fly-fishing.

Brown, a former land surveyor, said he has found his calling and thinks everybody, whether they plan to go into the outdoor industry or not, should take Wolf’s program.

“It’s boiling life down to the basics, how we survived on this Earth as humans, and brings it back to this day and age – risk management and plan ahead and prepare," Brown said. "That’s the first rule of Leave No Trace. As with anything in life, if you follow a code of ethics, plan ahead and prepare, most of the time, you will be doing better than the person next to you.”

Wolf said he’s proud of the quality of graduates who come out of SCC, but also the lasting, fatherly bond he’s made with his students. He keeps in touch in person or through Facebook, has been asked to officiate at two students’ weddings, and even an untimely funeral.

“Instilling that mindfulness into folks and have them come back and tell me stories and give me a hard time, has been great," he said. "I get to watch them grow and be their sounding board, when they come back and talk about when life was simpler and now they’re managing huge groups of people.”

Learn more

Southwestern Community College is now accepting applications for its Outdoor Leadership program. Visit www.southwesterncc.edu or contact Paul Wolf at pjwolf@southwesterncc.edu or 828-366-2003.