Real West Virginian of the Week: Kristen Beverage helps others find confidence in West Virginia’s outdoors

By Hannah Yost, RealWV

CIRCLEVILLE, W.Va. — Kristen Beverage grew up surrounded by the mountains, farms, trails, and quiet places that now shape her work every day.

Raised near Marlinton in Pocahontas County, Beverage has spent her life in West Virginia. Her family roots run deep in both Pocahontas and Pendleton counties, where generations of her family have lived and farmed. Her grandparents’ family farm sits near the Spruce Knob campus of Experience Learning, the organization she now leads.

For Beverage, becoming executive director of Experience Learning was more than a career move. It was a full-circle moment.

“My grandparents’ family farm is actually located on Spruce Knob near the facility,” Beverage said. “My entire life, I have been spending time on the farm, hiking and traversing all over the area.”

Her connection to Experience Learning goes back to childhood. She remembers visiting the organization’s properties when she was young, especially the yurts, which she described as magical. Her family’s connection stretches back even further.

In the 1970s, when Experience Learning was known as Woodlands Institute, Beverage said her grandparents and great-grandparents were among some of the first local residents to meet the organization’s founders when they came to the area.

“We’ve been around since the start,” Beverage said.

Today, Beverage leads Experience Learning, a wilderness and outdoor experience organization that offers programming for both children and adults. The organization’s work is centered on helping people build confidence outdoors, connect with nature, and learn to care for the land around them.

Experience Learning stewards nearly 500 acres at Spruce Knob and nearly 500 acres at Sweetwater Farm, its trail center. Through camps, outdoor programs, and hands-on learning, the organization teaches campers how to manage themselves safely and responsibly in the outdoors while also protecting the ecosystems on those properties.

For Beverage, that mission is personal.

She grew up in the National Radio Quiet Zone, often without cellphone service, and said she is deeply familiar with rural living. Her life has also taken her beyond West Virginia. She has traveled around the world, but the mountains of home have remained central to who she is.

Beverage’s path to nonprofit and outdoor leadership was not entirely linear. She studied finance as an undergraduate at West Virginia University and later earned a master’s degree from Future Generations University in Pendleton County.

After college, she worked with the U.S. Forest Service in Marlinton as a community liaison through the Greening Youth Foundation. That role introduced her to trail development, outdoor education, and place-based learning. She worked with young people on topics such as invasive species management, caves, bats, and watersheds. She even served as a snorkel instructor, taking children into rivers to learn directly about aquatic ecosystems.

That early work helped Beverage see the power of teaching outdoors.

She later became executive director of the Snowshoe Foundation, where she helped support grants for educational programming within the foundation’s service area. She also worked with Partner Community Capital as a business adviser and as manager of the West Virginia Recreational Economies Initiative, a statewide program that helped businesses and nonprofits access technical assistance and support services.

Before stepping into her current role, Beverage also served on the Experience Learning board.

Those experiences shaped the way she sees rural communities, outdoor recreation, education, and economic development as deeply connected.

For Beverage, outdoor learning is about more than recreation. It is about building confidence, competence, curiosity, and connection.

“We’re all about building confidence and competence,” Beverage said.

She believes those lessons matter for campers in West Virginia and beyond. Experience Learning serves local campers as well as children from out of state, many of whom may have had little exposure to camping, backpacking, snorkeling, or outdoor adventure.

In a world increasingly shaped by technology and artificial intelligence, Beverage said outdoor experiences offer something that cannot be replicated on a screen.

“You can’t experience the smell of daybreak on top of the highest point in West Virginia through something artificial,” Beverage said.

That kind of learning, she said, has to be experienced.

Campers cannot fully learn how to plan a backpacking trip without being in the field. They cannot understand a watershed in the same way without getting into the water. They cannot build outdoor confidence without opportunities to try, practice, and grow.

Beverage said Experience Learning works to make those experiences as accessible as possible, especially because many people feel intimidated by outdoor recreation. Even children who live near wild places may never have gone camping or explored the outdoors in that way.

By giving campers those skills early, Beverage hopes they gain the confidence to return to the outdoors with their families or later in life on their own.

The organization offers nearly a dozen different types of camps, and each day can look different. Campers may be tubing down a river one day, hiking ridgelines the next, or exploring the highest point on Spruce Knob. Many campers also learn to participate in the kitchen and help with the daily rhythm of camp life.

For Beverage, mornings on Spruce Knob are hard to beat.

She described waking up, helping in the kitchen, planning the day’s adventures, drinking coffee in a yurt, and watching the sun rise over the ridgeline.

At Sweetwater Farm, Experience Learning’s trail center, campers and visitors can also access miles of mountain biking trails.

The work comes with challenges. Beverage said access is one of the biggest issues facing a rural nonprofit. The organization’s facilities are geographically remote, which can make it harder to get people there. Funding can also be difficult because the area does not have the same level of philanthropic activity as larger metropolitan communities.

At the same time, Experience Learning tries to balance fair program pricing with accessibility for families. The organization offers scholarships and financial aid for local campers who may not be able to afford camp or who can only pay part of the cost. Those scholarships are supported through private funders.

Beverage said it is also important to pay quality instructors livable wages.

Still, she believes investing in outdoor learning and recreation creates opportunity for rural communities.

When people learn to appreciate and care for rural and wild places, she said, they are more likely to take pride in stewarding those places. They may also be more likely to build careers, businesses, or lives connected to outdoor recreation and rural community development.

“There’s the return on economic impact,” Beverage said.

In areas like the Monongahela National Forest region, Beverage sees room for continued growth as more people discover what makes the area unique. Outdoor recreation, she said, can support job creation, business development, and amenities that make people want to stay.

Her advice to young West Virginians interested in outdoor education, nonprofit leadership, recreation, or community development is to broaden their view of what is possible.

She encourages them to look for opportunities, take internships, and try something outside their comfort zones. Her own degree was in finance, but she found that those skills were useful in nonprofit leadership and outdoor recreation work.

“I encourage them to take the leap,” Beverage said.

For Beverage, that leap eventually led her back to a place that had been part of her life since childhood.

Her story is one of deep roots and new opportunities — of growing up in rural West Virginia, leaving room for exploration, and then finding a career that allows her to serve the same landscapes and communities that shaped her.

When she thinks about what she hopes people take away from her story, Beverage said she wants others to try something new outdoors and consider opportunities they may not have known were available.

She also wants young people to follow the career paths that interest them, even if they are unsure where those paths may lead.

“You don’t know where that might take you,” Beverage said.

In her own life, it took her back to Spruce Knob, back to the land her family has known for generations, and into work that helps others experience West Virginia in a deeper way.

Through Experience Learning, Beverage is helping campers and families see the outdoors not as something distant or intimidating, but as a place to learn, grow, and belong.

And for a West Virginian whose roots are planted in the mountains, that work feels like home.

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