Kayla Carter is a role model for recruiting young people to outdoor pursuits.
A few years ago, when Kayla Carter was coordinating public relations for the Elizabethton (Tennessee) City Schools, she received a letter from a little girl whom she’d featured in a press release for the local media outlets. “Thanks for making me famous for a day,” wrote the child, who was from a low-income family. “It was really cool to see my picture in the paper.”
“And I just cried because I remember the first time that had happened to me,” says Carter, 29, explaining how a newspaper reporter had interviewed her after she, the only pre-teen girl in a Big Wheel race at the Kingsport Motor Speedway, beat all the boys. “I was like, ‘That is the coolest job ever. How do I get that job?’ I had the article posted up on my wall at home for a little while. But that little girl sending me that letter reminded me of that moment in my life.”
In the newly created role of outdoor development manager at the Northeast Tennessee Regional Economic Partnership in Johnson City, Carter now develops programs and builds relationships with community partners. She is also an avid outdoorswoman who helps maintain the Appalachian Trail and inspires other Millennials to do the same.
It was her father, a glass plant supervisor who found solace in nature, who instilled in her “a sense of wonder about the outdoors, the woods and playing outside,” she recalls. “He would always take me to Bays Mountain in Kingsport. We would hike around there and go up to the Fire Tower, ride our bikes or hang out with the wolves [at the animal sanctuary]. We would go out to Steele Creek Park in Bristol to go kayaking.”
From her dad, who loved to draw and write, she also inherited her artistic side. When she was very young, her mom bought her a diary and she began jotting down poems and stories. “I remember always yelling into the living room when I was writing, ‘Mom, how do you spell this word?’” Carter says.
So it wasn’t far-fetched that she chose to major in journalism at East Tennessee State University. Her minor, however, was a bit more offbeat.
“To be totally honest, I was failing French, which was my original minor. I wanted to move to the French-speaking part of Canada and be a reporter there,” Carter says. “But I had a really good advisor who told me that that was probably never going to happen.”
Deciding she’d be a magazine music critic instead, she switched her minor to bluegrass and took up the mandolin “to get a taste of what it’s like to be in a band.” But after graduation in 2011, she opted to stay close to home, landing her first job as a general assignment reporter at The Erwin Record before moving on to writing and page design posts at several other small newspapers in East Tennessee. The variety gave her a well-rounded view of the region, she says, and introduced her to a lot of people, including trailblazers in the outdoor community.
A self-described “dabbler,” Carter became not just an observer, but a participant. “I’m not really a master of anything,” she says. “But I was getting out there being able to explore and then write about it.” In 2014, she took a break from her budding journalism career and hiked the entire Appalachian Trail with her boyfriend Noah. Along the way, she freelanced for the Elizabethton Star as well as for author Zach Davis, who was named the Top Hiking and Outdoor Blogger by USA Today that year. When Carter and Noah summited Mount Katahdin together in Maine near the end of their six-month hike, he proposed. . .
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