Last summer, a group of young kayakers set out on a historic trip down the Klamath River, from its headwaters in southern Oregon to its mouth south of Crescent City. It was a trip that would have been impossible even a scant year before, when hydroelectric dams were still diverting miles of water and leaving large chunks of the waterway high and dry. The old river bed was, in some spots, crowded with trees that sprouted at the bottom of river cliffsides; before the dams were removed, they had to be ripped down and helicoptered out so the river could once again course through its tracks. 

The trip marked a “first time in a long time” occasion for the kayakers as well: it was the first time people had traversed the entire length of the Klamath in over a century. The core group was composed of several dozen Indigenous teenagers from tribes across southern Oregon and northern California, some of them were from the Hoopa Valley here in Humboldt, a landscape dominated by the marriage of the Trinity and Klamath rivers. The excitement created by the expedition has raised interest in water sports in the region, but, until recently, it was bereft of any organization with a singular focus on fostering the area’s swimming talent. 

The valley’s getting its own swim team, the first USA Swimming-sponsored team on Native land, according to coach Kelly Nathane and the team’s board president Mary Ruffcorn-Barragan. Laying the groundwork to construct a team has been a years-long project, Nathane and Ruffcorn-Barragan told the Outpost earlier this week. When she and Ruffcorn-Barragan talk about the confluence of positive effects they’re hopeful it’ll carry to Hoopa, they make it sound almost preposterous that there isn’t one already. 

“I want them to know that they can be leaders in their community,” Nathane said. “Because we are a water-based community. Everything revolves around the rivers.”

Hoopa has had a pool for years, constructed at the Neighborhood Facility next to the tribal headquarters sometime in the mid-’70s with funds donated by community members. It’s outdoors, 25 yards long, with a view of the hills and forests. There are remnants of old competitive infrastructure: a black stripe runs the length of the pool, old hooks for lane dividers jut from the wall, and there are indentations from diving blocks long since removed. It closes during the winter. 

Getting it ready for heavy, consistent use has taken a lot of work. Pumps had to be cleared, filters fixed, the water cleaned. Nathane had to learn more about pool chemicals than she’d ever wanted to. (“I’m not a chemist.”) Communities often end up benefiting from new swim teams rehabbing old pools, Ruffcorn-Barragan said; they have the drive to clean it up, and then everyone starts swimming there. It was often green before the revamp, Nathane said, but that didn’t stop everyone. One guy, an older regular named Kenny, swims in it no matter the condition of the water or the temperature; he bragged to Nathane that his heart was in “tip-top” shape.

“It’s been around a very long time,” Nathane said. “It has been through a lot of phases. I hear from all the elders, you know, ‘We used to come here, and we jumped off the diving board, and we would have so much fun.’ This pool has been through a lot of phases: lot of love, not a lot of care, lot of love, not a lot of care. It’s just been up and down and up and down.”

Nathane — well-tattooed, 46 years old, a champion gesticulator and Red Bull-swiller clad in camo pants and Chelsea boots — has been a swim coach for decades. She was with the Humboldt Swim Club for 20 years, and began coaching swim lessons in Willow Creek in 2016. She moved to Salyer in 2024 after her children graduated from Arcata High School. Living there comes with its own set of challenges — on her way to our interview, a random construction stop on the highway delayed her a tad — but she loves it. 

When she began coaching lessons in Willow Creek in 2016, she was struck by how many of her students were poor swimmers, scared of the water despite being surrounded by it. Their parents are scared of the water too. One of her student’s parents refused to teach her kid how to swim, or even to go in the water. The kid learned, Nathane said, and lost his fear. 

“We are not in the middle of Kansas, where there’s no water,” Nathane said. “We are on so much water. It’s insane. It’s so important. If we’re at the river, we’re just like, ‘Oh God. Oh my God. Oh my God.’ I just want these kids to be safe.”

Willow Creek doesn’t have its own community pool. Nathane teaches her lessons in a resident’s backyard pool, an L-shaped in-ground pool with just enough room for a dozen kids. When she learned Hoopa had its own full-size pool, it seemed nonsensical that it wasn’t being used, and she also started teaching lessons in Hoopa in 2018. (For a time, she was coaching there, in Willow Creek, and in Arcata. Summers are busy.)

Hoopa residents have asked Nathane to start a swim team since 2020 or so, she said, and the idea intrigued her. The pandemic delayed her efforts for a few years, but she and Ruffcorn-Barragan have spent the last year or so figuring out the organization’s structure and how to make joining the team affordable. 

Swimming is an expensive sport. It’s an “inaccessible” one to a lot of communities, Ruffcorn-Barragan said. The cost of travel, equipment, club fees, coaching — it adds up. Humboldt Swim Club charges their swimmers up to $205 every month, plus another $550 every year for miscellaneous fees. (There are discounts for families and scholarships for the financially challenged.) Many tribal members don’t have that kind of money. Detailed data on the average income on the reservation and in the valley is sketchy, but somewhere around 20% of all the area’s residents live under the poverty line. The cost to join the team will be based on a sliding scale based on income, but because of the area’s impoverishment, the team’s leadership managed to reduce their insurance premiums down to $5 per member annually from more than $80. They’ve managed to snag grants from Pacific Swimming and for diabetes prevention through the K’ima:w Medical Center in Hoopa, which paid for a pace clock, equipment, and gear. They’re working on figuring out transportation for swimmers who live far from the pool. They reached out to other teams, who kicked some old gear in too. The Palo Alto Swim Team gave them swim goggles, suits, parkas, and fins. 

The club’s logo. Artwork by Sorren Richards.

Membership will be open to all swimmers ages 6-18 who live in the area, including communities up and down Highway 299 and 96. They just need to be able to swim face-down. If that’s beyond a prospective member’s abilities, there will likely also be an informal group for complete beginners. Tryouts are May 1 and 2; practice begins later in the month.

The team is a member of Pacific Swimming, USA Swimming’s administrative subdivision that includes counties up and down Northern California and into Nevada. Pacific Swim has more than 100 member teams and more than 13,000 swimmers spread across them; the subdivision of the subdivision the Hoopa team belongs to goes from Del Norte County to San Francisco. The organization is an alternative to high school-affiliated teams and club teams with their own leagues. Nathane and Ruffcorn-Barragan envision the Hoopa team competing with teams across the division, practicing two to four times a week, split into groups based on each swimmer’s skills. But — for a while, at least — the group’s main focus will not be on producing champion racers.

Learning how to swim well opens doors and deepens knowledge of oneself, Nathane and Ruffcorn-Barragan said. Ruffcorn-Barragan likened it to understanding your own “buoyancy.” Solid swimmers are safe in the water; Nathane said she never worried about her kids playing around in the rivers when they were young. Solid swimmers can earn money lifeguarding, or passing their skills along to others as a coach. Creating a swim team is, in some ways, akin to an economic development program. 

“They always have a job,” Lawre Maple told the Outpost. Maple is the aquatics director at Cal Poly Humboldt; her own daughter is a scuba instructor in Monterey. 

“We want these kids to be able to have jobs,” Nathane said.

“And life skills!” Maple replied. “If they want to get out of Hoopa, come back with a better education, [they’ll have a job].”

Giving their students job skills is important, they said, but gaining a love for the water, losing that fear like that student did, is imperative. You can learn to swim in a river (the traditional way), but it’s far more dangerous. 

“The connection to water is so important,” Nathane said. “You don’t want these kids to lose the connection to the water. And if you have fear of water, you lose your connection to it, you know? I mean, yes, be cautious of water, but understand it. And a pool is a great space to be able to understand water, you know, it’s controlled — it’s controlled water.”

The social benefits are significant, they say. Though swimming is an individual sport, they’ll still train with a team, make friends with one another and learn how to get along despite any differences. Swimming is also a sport that shows off a lot of skin. Racers compete in next to nothing; it becomes a point of pride. Nathane said one of her protegees, an “incredibly” fast teenager who helps her out with her lessons, wears a hot pink Speedo to practice. The younger kids don’t understand why he’s in “his underwear,” she said, but they eventually stop noticing. The human body stops being something strange. People become comfortable with themselves and others, they said, and the training breeds confidence.

“You’re in a bathing suit around your peers from the age of six through high school, and maybe even in college,” Ruffcorn-Barragan said. “Still, as an adult, I feel more comfortable in my bathing suit, sitting in this room, than I do in my clothes…that confidence in your body transfers to confidence in the water, and confidence in, like, everything else in your life.”

To Ruffcorn-Barragan and Nathane, swimming is a type of freedom. A swim rids them of stress, centers them again; they hope sharing that feeling with the swimmers on the team will help them in every aspect of their life.

“If you’ve got your head down, underwater, putting in the work while you’re swimming — it’s the best,” Ruffcorn-Barragan said. “Similar to a runner’s high.”

Nathane replied. “I always tell this to kids,” she said. “‘If you learn to swim and you go underwater, guess what? Nobody can really tell you what to do under there, because you can’t hear ‘em.’ I can just go underwater, and no one can really bother me under there. It’s just you. It’s just you under there.”

Correction: a previous version of this article misidentified the location of the mouth of the Klamath River. It is south of Crescent City, not north.