Kasey Austin didn't realize how unusual her childhood was in Billings, Montana, when she was living it. She was one of two children of Dan and Carol Austin, who operated an adventure travel business out of their basement. She never imagined then that she would grow up to manage the guide staff for Austin Adventures and be picked by Outside magazine as its 2014 Family Guide of the Year.
"We always had guides in and out of our house," she said. "We had guides camping in our backyard and all sorts of fun stuff. As a kid just looking up to that was a good time. I loved all those guides. They were great role models."
When asked in grade school to draw a picture representing what she would want to be when she grew up, she drew a picture of herself as a tourguide on a boat in Alaska.
"I don't know why but that was my dream growing up," she said. "I think it was just being around the guiding culture."
It's a subculture few even know the existence of. Most people, if they ever encounter a tourguide, it is when they are mature enough to afford taking an escorted tour. For Kasey Austin, it was a daily experience long before the age when most people experience any kind of guided travel. She developed an early appreciation of a rare profession that few are aware of.
"If you go on any trip with any guides they are going to have a great personality, they are just very outgoing," said Austin. It was magical for her "being around all those outgoing personalities with these fun, crazy stories. Guides are the best story tellers.
"Getting a bunch of them together and getting to listen to where they've been, what bear they came across on the trail, this crazy guest they had on their trip … hearing all their stories was so fun growing up. I can still remember a million of them today that I relay to my guests, some fun history of the company that I heard growing up. It was just a different type of experience growing up than a lot of other kids are subjected to."
Growing Up Adventure Style
As a kid Kasey and her brother Andy did the grunt work of a tour operator office, stuffing envelopes, packing boxes with t-shirts and water bottles for guides to take on trips, answering phones, putting pre-trip planning material in the mail, "and all the boring jobs that no one wanted to do, like filing and things like that," she said. "I found lots of experience in all sorts of places."
In high school she started guiding trips on weekends and during summer vacation. When she went to school, she continued guiding in the summers, but by then she wanted to get away from the family business. "I got an elementary education degree because I wanted to be a teacher."
But while she was studying to be a teacher, she was also growing up and having the kinds of travel experiences that transform people's lives.
When she was 15 her father took her and her brother to South America. For five weeks they wandered around Peru, Ecuador and the Galapagos. She calls it "my jump-off point for loving to travel."
"That was a really eye-opening trip and I realized, Wow, there's a lot of cultures out there that are not like ours at all and they are so interesting." The change was taking place under the surface. While she was training to be a teacher in college, she was gradually realizing that the best education may take place outside of the classroom.
During her first summer after graduating from college she did her usual summer job guiding and when summer was over she had not found a job teaching, so when her father offered her a full-time job, she accepted. But it was still a half-hearted commitment at that time. She still expected to move beyond the family business sooner or later. But her father sent her to a conference of guides, and that was the catalyst for a spiritual transformation that would change what she thought was the course of her life.
"The first week after accepting the job I was like: 'What am I doing? I have no idea what is going on?'" she said. "But when I went to the ATTA (Adventure Travel Trade Association) World Summit in Chiapas during my second week of working for Austin Advntures full time, that's when knew I wanted to do this. It was such an amazing experience meeting so many other people who are in this business and who are making a living at it.
"I always thought it was just the family business, that there was not a lot of this going on. But once I saw other people who were extremely in love with adventure and travel and all the stuff I had grown up with and loved myself it was a huge breaking moment for me where I was like, 'This what wanted to do. This is so cool!'"
Now Kasey gets to be one of those people she grew up admiring, and once she set her sights on guiding as a serious profession she realized she had all the resources and experiences she needed right inside of her ready to go into action.
Facing Danger
But guiding is not all fun. As part of trying to keeping the experience fun for guests, guides have to take the responsibility for any problems that arise.
"Probably the scariest thing that happened was when a little girl in Alaska got in a bike accident," said Austin. "She had to be taken to the hospital, then airlifted from Seward to Anchorage. That was really scary for me, seeing how real things can get very quickly. She hit her spleen and ruptured it. She had to stay in Anchorage for four or five weeks because she couldn't fly.
"It was crazy to deal with, having all the logistics of having to run the trip normally while also going and visiting the hospital every day with the brother who was left on the trip. That was scary. It was a good learning experience for the rest of our guides whenever I tell that story."
Today, Kasey Austin is in charge of managing Austin Adventures' guiding staff, so she spends a lot of time in the office as well as time out in the field.
"If I could, I would probably just go guiding and not spend time in the office," she said. "But now I head our entire guide team, coordinating our entire schedule and all the equipment, making sure everyone is where they need to be when, also handling any problems that might arise.
"That's why it's pretty important for me to be in the office more because I'm kind of the go-to liaison with our guides in the field. So if they have any problems they email or call and say, 'Kasey, help me with this,' and I see what I can do from the office side of things. There are some interesting things that come up. It's fun."
Now she's "over the hump," having turned 25 and is fully committed to work in adventure travel. Though she didn't know where she was headed at the time, looking back at her pursuit of a degree in education, it all makes sense.
"I'd say I'm still putting that degree to work in guiding, but not in a typical classroom environment."
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