Old Souls and New Leaders: Kristin Chewning Bierle
Old Souls and New Leaders: Kristin Chewning Bierle
a Carolina Paddler article
by Alton Chewning
Kristin Chewning was seventeen years old, excelled in school and soccer but wondered how to spend the coming summer. Since she was twelve, Kristin attended the Green Cove girl’s summer camp near Tuxedo, North Carolina. She loved the programs and environment at Green Cove. She enjoyed the people she met, the fellow campers and staff. She especially admired one of the instructors, Gordon Grant.
Editor’s note: Kristin and the writer are not related. In the photo above, Kristin is in the bow.
Gordon has been involved in education for most of his life, working in public schools, various camps, the NOC and NC Outward Bound. In his many years of teaching, he would occasionally meet an exceptional young adult. “I’ve always said it’s enough to make me believe in reincarnation, some people appear to be “Old Souls.” There are kids whose eyes have a maturity and gravity to them, yet they are looking out from this young face… They are not going through all the painful agonies of maturation, I mean they do, but they seem to have a practical gravity to figure out life’s problems and challenges. Kristin was one of them. I just noticed it right off the bat. She had herself together. She was always packed up and ready to go, never disorganized. She was a great student and learner. She listened deeply to what you’re saying and then you would watch her execute it. I’m quite impressed with her.”
Sam Chewning, Kristin’s dad, called Gordon. He wanted to talk about Kristin’s future. Gordon was once a camper at Mondamin, the brother camp to Green Cove. Mondamin was founded by Frank “Chief” Bell and his family in 1922. If the name sounds familiar, it’s the name of the Class IV rapid on the French Broad, near Hot Springs. Bell built on the success of Mondamin and started the girl’s camp, Green Cove, in 1945.
The camps have been seed-beds for many other teaching endeavors. Alumni went on to found camps Kadalea and Chosatonga in Brevard, Falling Creek near Tuxedo and the French Broad Academy in Asheville. The paddling programs at Green Cove and Mondamin are built on canoeing and canoe camping, with a non-competitive ethic. This culture hasn’t precluded graduates from excelling in kayak and canoe competition. Many members of the US Whitewater teams had their start here: people like Jamie McEwan, John Burden, the Howell brothers, and others. Gordon was another USA team member before starting his education career. He is a good person to ask for advice.
Kristin was an exceptional learner and she soaked up what Green Cove had to offer. Her dad asked Gordon what he would recommend for her next step. Grant recalls the conversation. “Without hesitating, I said “Go to Tom Long in Boise, Idaho, and work on the Payette River. He has the best kid’s program I have ever seen.”
When Grant was the head of instruction at the Nantahala Outdoor Center, he learned of Long and invited him to teach a workshop. “I loved the way Tom taught kids. He gave them direct responsibility for teaching other kids. He thrust them into positions of responsibility. I thought, this is perfect for Kristin.”
Gordon describes seeing Tom leading a kid’s class for first time paddlers. “The kids are led into a swimming pool, and it’s filled with floating kayaks full of water. They are just running around on the decks of the kayaks and playing games. They figure out how to get in and out of the kayak with people stabilizing the other end. Then their friends sink the kayak. The kid is going underwater in a kayak filled with water. It’s a completely controlled situation but it’s the thing everyone is scared about. They learn, you just slip it off like a pair of pants. Tom wouldn’t let the kids progress to the next step until they were totally comfortable with getting out of a swamped boat. How to teach rolling? Put on a skirt and get into a swamped boat. Other kids would sink the boat and the paddler would have to put the skirt on underwater and then raise their hand up and the others would let the boat up. Which means they had to stay underwater for thirty or forty seconds, and it was fun not scary. Tom was directly going for the scary situation. Break it down into incremental parts and then you’re dealing with discomfort, like being underwater, but you’re okay. The kids have a solid base and lose most of their initial fear.
Kristin started spending summers in Idaho working with Tom Long at Cascade Kayak and Rafting. She acquired more water and teaching skills and quickly became a kayak instructor. When summer was over, Kristin came back to western North Carolina and worked at Green Cove while continuing her formal education. Kristin was influenced by many people she met during this time. Cathy Hearn, a US slalom racer and later team coach was one. Kent Ford, another US racer, broadcast announcer and educator was another. Kent remembers, “I met Kristin through an ACA instruction program. She proved herself as an impressive ACA Instructor Trainer with a nice style in the boat, and a personality to match out of the boat.”
Kristin continued her education at the University of the South/Sewannee in Tennessee and then returned to Idaho to pursue interdisciplinary studies in Education, Spanish and Economics and then an MBA at Boise State. All was not academics. Kristin met Sean Bierle, another guide and instructor at Cascade Kayak and Raft. They were kindred spirits who loved water and the outdoors but who were also dedicated to helping young people learn and develop life skills. They soon fell in love and their bond became something bigger than themselves. They had a vision.
Kristin and Sean wanted to offer something different for young people. They believed an education can be more than classroom instruction. They felt young people could become leaders by personal growth gained from outdoor adventure, from foreign travel and from critical thinking gained in a challenging academic curriculum. They wanted to start a school that would combine these disciplines and to “build leaders who positively impact the world.” Sean was twenty-one years old. Kristin was nineteen.
Their vision would be named the Alzar School. In Spanish, Alzar means “to raise” or “lift up.” To boost. Since the beginning in 2004, the original concept of the school would evolve, ultimately settling on a semester school program with additional curricula for high school gap students. High school sophomores and juniors would spend a spring or a fall semester at Alzar. The semester would be divided between the Cascade area of Idaho, with the Payette River as a home base and a foreign setting. Searching for the right location, Sean and Kristin traveled to Mexico, China and other locales, ultimately choosing Patagonia in Chile. Patagonia offered unparalleled rivers and scenery, a rural populace and a seasonal climate that complimented the one in Idaho.
Gordon Grant admitted a tinge of jealousy when he learned of Kristin and Sean’s plans. “My whole aim as an educator is to combine the experiential education with the academic education. You do need both. Skills you need to have intellectually to succeed in today’s world. My heart has always been with direct experience and what I’ve found is it’s the “character of education” in outdoor sport that translates so well to other walks of life. I knew Kristin and Sean would be good at that.”
It was quite an undertaking, raising money, buying land in Idaho and Chile, finding teachers and students, developing curricula, encouraging people to believe. Juliet Jacobsen-Kastorff and her husband, Ken, run Endless Rivers Adventures in Nantahala and Ecuador. She says, “I ran into Kristin and Sean years ago when we were all guiding in Costa Rica. Just starting a business is gutsy. Starting a school that would have campuses in two separate locations – one being in Chile, is even more gutsy. I am impressed with their mission of creating an opportunity for kids that emphasizes leadership – using both the Idaho campus and abroad. I really like the way they have created a program that puts an emphasis on traveling outside the US and on really integrating into the community they spend time in.”
Alzar functions on six principles: leadership development, academics, cultural exchange, outdoor adventure, service learning and environmental stewardship. The school is small, about thirty to forty students per semester. Staff are carefully chosen and live on campus. Students live in yurt dorms and enjoy modern classrooms and facilities.
The settings for the campuses are spectacular. Grant observes, “They sit on 400 acres of beautiful property on the Payette, just below Cascade Lake in McCall, Idaho. You could not ask for a better location because there are really good Class III’s just below them.” Upstream is a world class whitewater park at Cascade. Farther upstream is the North Fork of the Payette with some of the most challenging whitewater in the nation. Alzar is also affiliated with Confluences River Expeditions on the Main Salmon and conducts student expeditions there and elsewhere in the West.
The Chilean campus, called Base Patagonia, is situated in the Aysén region of Chile. The spring semester starts in Patagonia and finishes in Idaho. Idaho is first in the fall. This is to take advantage of the climates in each area. Students explore the towns, lakes and rivers of the region while taking classes in a dazzling setting. Spanish classes include study of local culture and history.
Alzar is a member of the Semester Schools Network, an affiliation of alternative schools with similar goals and varied emphasis. Kristin compared the Alzar School to the Oxbow School in Napa, California. Oxbow approaches a diversified education with an emphasis on the arts, Alzar with a focus on outdoor adventure.
Alzar attracts motivated students, ones who may not be challenged in other settings. Kristin shares, “The students we get are looking for more from education. They find us. Then it perpetuates through word of mouth. All these great young people who come through become leaders in their communities and see what education can look like outside the walls of institutions.”
“We work to create access to our programs, sometimes it’s how they are finding out about Alzar, sometimes it’s financial access, sometimes it’s peer support, all sorts of different ways we’re really trying. We want to have great young people come through our program and not have it be limited by other factors. It’s something we work really hard at, and we know we have a lot more work to do.”
Kent Ford explained some skiing/kayaking/outdoor schools focus on top end achievement in a sport, like Class IV-V boating. “Alzar has found a unique niche of outdoor leadership combined with academics. The only thing close is NOLS semester courses, which focus on outdoor leadership but lack the academic prowess.”
Kristin explains their approach to paddling. “While some of our staff enjoy having the North Fork of the Payette as our back yard run, we do not run the North Fork with students. For us the outdoors is a tool for achieving Alzar’s mission of developing leaders. Our benchmark for success is within the personal growth that comes from engaging in the activity instead of achieving class V technical skills. We travel to incredible places both in the US and the American West and have permits on exceptional whitewater. Students who are excited about whitewater invariably improve, and many go on to work as raft guides or instructors in the summer or engage with their college outdoor programs, but no, we do not run class V with students.”
Grant admires this approach to river learning. “They are teaching these kids all that goes into a safe river trip, to have a really exhilarating and sometimes frightening set of rapids you are going through and knowing your group must work together to safely negotiate them. There’s just no better metaphor for leadership in institutions.”
The Alzar School is thriving. Kristin and Sean have a growing family: two children of their own, the many young adults Alzar touches, the staff, instructors, and parents of the students. There is much to do to manage this burgeoning family and a school in two hemispheres. As Juliet notes, “This is not all the glamorous jobs; it is the accounting, bookkeeping, paperwork, regulations administration… and Kristin has been that person. Even with all she does as a business owner and a mother, it is inspiring to see her enthusiastically hop on a river and continue to challenge herself as a kayaker.”
One day Gordon Grant was in his office at NC Outward Bound where he worked as the Education Director. Visitors came to see him. It was Kristin and Sean. They were on the East Coast recruiting for Alzar. Kristin told him, “I had to stop by and thank you for sending me on my life’s path.”
Now thirty-nine, Kristin continues to explore how she will best spend her time. Sean and Kristin will be on sabbatical this summer. Alzar will continue to sponsor Camp Cup, an annual event held this year on July 10 and 11 at the NOC. Camp Cup is a chance for campers from all over the region to compete in slalom races and to enjoy the company of other young people. Juliet and Endless Rivers will be there along with Alzar grads, assisting with the races, the ice cream social, the good fun. If you’re still in the area after Week of Rivers, come by and see what the next generation is bringing.
For more information on the Alzar School, see https://alzarschool.org
See both articles:
“Old Souls and New Leaders: Kristin Chewning Bierle”
“Old Souls and New Leaders: Emily Stokes”