Sarina Chalmers: Navigating a Career in the Outdoors and a Lifetime of Adventure Sport

Evan Arvizu (she/her) ‘25

White Salmon, Washington and the Columbia River Gorge are located on the ancestral lands of the Klickitat, Nez Perce, Cowlitz, Siletz, Yakama, and other tribes and bands of indigenous people who relied on the river for food and trade.

The tribes of the Colorado River Basin have many names for it. The Havasupai call it “Ha'gthayah,” meaning “big river,” and the Hualapai call it “Ha' Ka-Ama,” which means “flowing water.”

The Arapaho people call the South Platte River Niinéniiniicíihéhe'.

Chalmers kayaking on the Futaluefú River in Chile. Photo by Kalob Grady.

Colorado College alumni Sarina Chalmers ‘20 is living the dream: she works as the Program Director for World Class Academy’s (WCA) Kayak school, traveling the world, kayaking, and teaching passionate and skilled young athletes about the sport she loves. She also runs her own hat company, Nobdody’s.

I had a conversation with Chalmers about what she does, how she got her start, how CC prepared her for a career in the outdoors, and the lessons she’s learned along the way.

Chalmers grew up in Atlanta, Georgia and spent a lot of time in the Appalachian Mountains, where her father introduced her to kayaking. It wasn’t immediately a passion, but after a summer of work at an adventure sports company in Western North Carolina post high school graduation, she was hooked.

During her time at CC, she was heavily involved in adventure sports and active in the thriving outdoor community. She didn’t hesitate to expand her athletic horizons outside of just kayaking, despite not having very much experience. One of the sports she explored was mountain biking.

“I showed up with a fifteen-year-old hardtail with caliper brakes that I inherited from my brother. I’m from Georgia, and I didn’t fully understand what mountain biking was yet,” she said.

Nevertheless, she dove into the sport her freshman year and did her best to keep up. She discovered it was one of the best ways to get out into the mountains and explore her new home in the Springs. She ended up falling in love with the sport, the community, and the access that came with CC’s location.

She also continued to kayak. CC’s kayaking community was small, but it was close knit and incredibly passionate.

As a freshman, Chalmers frequently found herself glued to the weather forecast with a pit in her stomach. She didn’t have a drysuit, which is an essential when kayaking in Colorado, where the water stays cold all year. She pushed through, even when the high was 40 degrees, because she knew bailing would disappoint the group and she wanted to be on the water as much as possible.

She explained to me that the whitewater scene around Colorado Springs isn’t great and said it was difficult to paddle as much as she wanted to. Luckily, the group was enthusiastic and made the most of the rivers they could access. “(We) were so fired up on the honestly mediocre kayaking in the area,” Chalmers said.

Every weekend, and even some weekdays, they spent their time driving “too many hours to be-bop down runs” on the Colorado, Arkansas, and South Platte Rivers.

They also took advantage of CC’s many breaks to travel further and access better runs. “Every fall we’d paddle Westwater, and every spring we would drive out to the Columbia River Gorge, a whitewater mecca in the Pacific Northwest and my current home” she told me.

Chalmers graduated in 2020 with an Organismal Biology and Ecology degree, and moved to White Salmon, Washington. She still found ample time to kayak even while she worked at a physical therapy office. She planned to go to P.T. school eventually. She found herself feeling unfilled and craving something new.

When the chance to be a teacher came up at WCA, she jumped at the opportunity. She had developed a passion for teaching while working her summer job at Rendezvous River Sports, in Jackson, Wyoming, during college. This seemed like the perfect way to switch things up.

Photo by Kalob Grady. 

World Class Academy is a traveling high school that provides a high quality “alternative” education that consists of academics, athletics, and cultural immersion. They offer talented and driven extreme-sport athletes the opportunity to travel and do their sport at a high level without being involved in competition.

Chalmers currently works as the Program Director of WCA’s Kayak school. Along with managing the administrative tasks, she runs the academic and travel portions of the program and teaches a class. While she majored in Organismal Biology and Ecology at CC, Chalmers currently teaches Literature and Art. This past semester her course was titled “Artificial Intelligence and Afrofuturism.”

“I am incredibly grateful to have received a liberal arts education. The breadth of my study at CC made me feel far more prepared to teach subjects I didn’t major in,” she said.

Her CC experience, specifically with the block plan, has also been beneficial while adjusting to the constant travel in the WCA Kayak program. WCA Kayak operates moving from river to river on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, hitting six locations in the seven week quarter. Chalmers explained how every move means creating new routines and systems to keep everything running smoothly.

“It reminds me a lot of the mental shift I made each month on the block plan. So often students at CC become wildly different animals depending on what block they’re in, and World Class operates the same way,” she said.

Chalmers’ ecological training has also helped her navigate the environmental challenges that they encounter while on location. WCA Kayak emphasizes traveling and teaching on threatened rivers. When I asked why, she told me that it’s largely because so many rivers, especially ones with high quality whitewater, are threatened. It’s really hard to avoid. Teaching in these locations not only gives the students access to iconic runs, but also brings their attention to issues that are actively damaging rivers around the world.

The 2022-2023 school year brought them to three areas that are currently under serious threat. The Zambezi River, located in Southern Africa, is in danger from nearby mining projects in Zambia that could be destroyed by the Batoka Gorge Hydroelectric Power Station, a dam project being organized by the Chinese company Power China. The free flowing Oetz River in Austria is also at risk of being completely dewatered, because of a proposed diversion hydropower plant. And in the Ecuadorian Andes, illegal mining is desecrating the many rivers in the region.

“As kayakers, we can’t not feel the impact these dams and hydro stations will have on our favorite runs, the environment, and the local economies surrounding the rivers,” Chalmers said. For WCA Kayak, it’s crucial that these issues are not left out of their programs because these environmental challenges will increasingly impact kayakers and the outdoor community the worse they get.

We also talked about some of the other challenges that come with adventure sports like kayaking.

“To be totally honest, kayaking is a very dangerous sport,” Chalmers said. “Kayaking’s dynamic decision making and risk assessment process is part of what makes the sport so special, but the thrill of managing risk will never help me reconcile the loss of a friend.”

She explained how they manage risk at WCA, creating a safe environment through both constant consideration and technical excellence. No matter how much they try though, neither can completely guarantee safety, especially on Class IV and V whitewater. Accidents can happen in any scenario. “My community and I have been forced to recognize and reconcile with this fact far too often and at the sake of some incredible human beings.”

These facts mean that kayaking can’t be everything for Chalmers: she has plenty of passions and goals outside of her work that help her to maintain some balance.

“Right now I really want to improve my Spanish,” she said. “I have a secret dream of going to culinary school. I also wonder if one day I could work full time for my skull-cap company, Nobdody’s.”

Nobdody’s — Chalmers’ passion project — started two and half years ago, when a friend, Sam, asked Chalmers to sew a neoprene skull cap with a flat brim attached to it. Neoprene skull caps are commonly worn by kayakers under their helmets in cold weather and cold water. They wanted to create a skull cap that looked cooler and offered extra sun protection. Chalmers designed a “five panel flat brim skull cap” to achieve that goal.

The name, Nobdody’s, came from a misprinted bumper sticker that a friend of Chalmers’ bought from another local kayaker. It was supposed to read “Nobody cares how high you run the Little White,” a popular class V creek in Oregon. The typo had “nobody” spelled wrong, creating the mascot Nobdody: “an omniscient being who cares what you’re doing even when no one else does.”

Photo by Kalob Grady

The designs and patterns have continued to evolve and improve as the company grows. Their first drop of 600 hats sold out, and their second round is currently in stock, also selling in retail stores around the country. They're looking to expand into their products and audiences.

With the multitude of successes and experiences have come some big lessons that Chalmers touched on as well. What she stressed the most was appreciating the process. She told me that when you don’t enjoy the process, the let downs that come with “failure” feel really bad.

“Post-grad was stressful for me. I badly wanted goals to work towards, but I was grasping at straws for what my goals should be. As a result, I hated the paths I was on,” she said.

No outcome is guaranteed, no matter how hard you work, so relying on the end achievement to feel validated or be happy can set you up for disappointment. Focusing on the process has lessened the stress and allows her to be more present and grateful.

Chalmers explained, “Kayaking is actually a great way to practice living in the process because no one cares what you accomplish, so you owe it to yourself to have fun in the process.”