Emily Yearwood: Owner, Guide, Marketing Director, Northern Outdoors

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I first sat in a raft on the Kennebec River. I know I was too young to paddle, so I sat in the middle, holding on and grinning ear to ear. I didn’t know it then, but that was just the beginning of my life being intertwined with the river. My dad, Jim Yearwood, joined Northern Outdoors as a river guide in 1981, five years after Suzie and Wayne Hockmeyer descended the Kennebec gorge and started the first commercial rafting company in Maine. My mom, Susan Bruce, stood on the rocks at Nesowadnehunk Falls taking photos of rafts while she was 6 months pregnant with my brother. I grew up at Northern Outdoors, or “the lodge,” hearing river stories from the guides of the ’80s and ’90s. I understood this place wasn’t just my dad’s job.

It was our family.

After working various jobs around Northern Outdoors, I trained and joined the guide staff in 2006. My full-time guiding years through the 2010s are still some of my favorite memories. There’s nothing like the camaraderie of running a river with a team you trust, both on the job and on our days off. And then there was the guiding itself — meeting new people, watching familiar faces come back year after year, loving every chance to share this special piece of Maine with them. My husband, Zach, trained to be a river guide in 2011. We now have two boys being raised the same way I was: on the water and in the woods, around our families and friends who feel like family.

In 2024, my brother Paul, his wife Mona, Zach, and I became the new owners of Northern Outdoors, buying the business from Suzie Hockmeyer, my dad, and longtime business partner, Russell Walters. Nearly fifty years of work and reputation were passed along, and we felt the weight of it. But we also felt ready, having spent our whole lives training for it, whether we called it that or not.

This summer, Northern Outdoors celebrated its 50th anniversary! We pioneered commercial rafting on the Kennebec, the Dead, and the Penobscot Rivers, back when there were no helmets, no self-bailing rafts, and no guarantee any of it would work. Suzie, Wayne, Jim, and Russell built something out of a love for the rivers and this place, and a willingness to go first. On the other side of that half-century, we feel a real responsibility to carry it forward: team members who become family, guests who return year after year, and wilderness that still feels wild.

What I love most about this job hasn’t changed: the people. Over 20,000 guests come through our doors each year for rafting, snowmobiling, ATVing, fishing, hunting, or to visit the brewery. Many come back year after year for their favorite guide, the riverside lunch, and the sense of joining something bigger than a single trip.

If you’ve never been, our 50th season is a good excuse to come see what this is all about. And if you have, come back. There’s a good chance one of us will greet you at the brewpub- or on the river. Cheers to 50 more years!