Meet Samara
Samara’s lifelong fascination with rivers began as a child, dangling off the stern of her mom’s kayak. She quickly progressed to paddling inflatable kayaks down the American River with her friends and family. As soon as she was able, she enrolled in whitewater guide school to become a commercial guide. Her river guiding took her throughout California, Oregon, Utah, and Arizona.
Learning from the World
She enrolled in the Woolman Semester School, a residential school specializing in Peace, Sustainability, and Social Justice via weeklong road trips and applied projects.
Inspired, she attended Hampshire College to study river conservation. She traveled to Thailand in a study abroad program. There, she paired ecological assessments with interviews with local villagers (in Thai) to study their relationship to the mountains, oceans, and farmlands.
A year later, she rafted, road-tripped, and backpacked throughout the Colorado Plateau as part of Prescott College’s Grand Canyon field semester. She lived with tribes and park rangers, pairing literature with lived experiences to begin to understand how the National Park manages their national resources and for whom.
While natural science and resource management remained constant themes, she grew fascinated with the methodology of ethnographic research. Ethnography utilizes observations, interviews, and contextualized lived experiences to illustrate how groups of people perceive their world. With a waterproof notebook tucked into her PDF pocket, she spent her final year at Hampshire College documenting the process of how river guides fall in love with their rivers and the lengths they will go to protect them.
A Confluence of Rivers and Education
When Samara isn’t teaching classes on multi-day rafting trips, her ripple effect extends into these river education programs.
Samara is a Contributing Host with The River Radius Podcast: a cultural nexus of people, rivers, and boats with Sam Carter.
Samara is on the board of Rivers for Change, supporting source-to-sea programming and logistics.
Samara is the Executive Director of Reading Water. Mic in hand, she flourishes in the river world as an educator, storyteller, and audio producer.