Ann Rose is a farmer living off the grid in rural North Carolina, where she’s spent most of her life deeply connected to the Appalachian Mountains and forests. After a series of droughts made farming more difficult, she found herself stuck and ready for change. At 58, she set out to kayak from North Carolina to the Gulf of Mexico. The journey brought unfamiliar waters, unpredictable weather, and more than a few alligators.
Ann Rose is a farmer living off the grid in rural North Carolina, where she’s spent most of her life deeply connected to the Appalachian Mountains and forests. After a series of droughts made farming more difficult, she found herself stuck and ready for change. At 58, she set out to kayak from North Carolina to the Gulf of Mexico. The journey brought unfamiliar waters, unpredictable weather, and more than a few alligators.
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Ann Rose:
It's so mind-boggling that I'm even saying what I'm saying. I'm a farmer. I don't go anywhere. I don't do anything. But I became just mesmerized with how the water flows out of the mountains, because it all gets to the ocean at some point. I said, "Oh, my God, that goes to the Gulf of Mexico. I bet I could paddle that," and that's exactly how it happened. That's how the idea came to be in my head.
Shelby Stanger:
Ann Rose is a farmer who lives off the grid in rural North Carolina. She's spent nearly her entire life in the Appalachian region and has always felt a deep connection to the mountains and forests she calls home. A few years ago, Ann's farm was hit by a series of droughts, which made living off the land a lot more challenging. She felt stuck and ready for something different, so at 58 years old, Ann decided to go on an epic adventure. The plan was to kayak all the way from North Carolina to the Gulf of Mexico. Along the way, Ann had to face unfamiliar waters, unpredictable weather, and more than a few alligators. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op Mastercard.
Ann's farm is located in the tiny town of Lansing, North Carolina, which has a population of just 155 people. She's been based in Lansing for nearly 30 years. Growing up, Ann moved around a lot with her parents, living on homesteads and in rural communities across Appalachia. One thing has been constant throughout her life, though. She's always spent time in nature.
Ann Rose, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. Tell us about the wild idea you completed in 2024.
Ann Rose:
I kayaked from right downstream from my farm in Lansing, North Carolina, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, almost 2,000 miles.
Shelby Stanger:
Dang. Amazing.
Ann Rose:
I still sometimes have to pinch myself because I'm not sure I did it. Some days I look back and go, "Did I really leave home?"
Shelby Stanger:
So you have this amazing accent, and is this a North Carolina accent, or-
Ann Rose:
It's a mix of a little bit of Yankee, a little bit of foothills, and mostly Appalachian, because I've been in Appalachia. Where I was born in Ohio is Appalachia as well.
Shelby Stanger:
It's so fun. Was nature part of your life growing up?
Ann Rose:
Nature? Oh, my goodness. Since I was a very young child, nature has always been my respite. My mom would go to church and I would run to the woods with my pony, never to be seen til dark, because I just loved being outside with animals and with my little pony I had as a child.
Shelby Stanger:
How old were you when you had this pony? I mean, this is so different than the way I grew up, so I'm just fascinated.
Ann Rose:
God, I was like eight. I was very feral. I call myself the feral, barefoot, tree-climbing, creek-wading, pony-riding tomgirl.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, so you grew up really outdoorsy. Your parents moved a little bit for work, or...?
Ann Rose:
Mm, a lot. Out of poverty, just moving around for work for my parents, yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
But then I read that you became a nurse.
Ann Rose:
Yeah. After high school, which I didn't finish, I had three children, got married, then went to college, so I kind of have always done things backwards, which is totally fine. It worked out great. I went to college to get my nursing assistant certificate, and then I went back and got my licensed practical nurse, and then divorce and moving, and then I got my Registered Nursing Associate's in Science degree after I bought my farm.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm curious about that decision to buy a farm, because that itself is a wild idea. How old were you, and what year was this, do you think?
Ann Rose:
1996. I'm 58 now. Do the math. I was 30-something. Yeah, I got a divorce and a horse, and I needed room for my horse and three kids.
Shelby Stanger:
How big is your farm?
Ann Rose:
28 acres.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow, that's a big farm.
Ann Rose:
It is. It is mountainside. It's pasture, because it's too steep to do much with, but I do have some growing land where I do farm now full-time. That's what I went into after I left nursing. And so, I did some terracing, put in a bunch of garden beds, put hoop houses over them, and now I'm growing and selling full-time at the farmer's market.
About 15 years ago, I sold the house that came with the farm and one acre, and I moved into the woods. I have a tiny shack I built with a chainsaw. I've been off-grid 18 years and I'm not changing that ever, not ever.
Shelby Stanger:
Wait, back up. You built a tiny house with a chainsaw?
Ann Rose:
Yeah. I used a chainsaw to cut lumber and things to make my tiny house. It's like 400 square feet. It started out as a 8' by 12', but I've added on as time went by, so it's as big as it's going to get. No more building.
Shelby Stanger:
And you built it yourself?
Ann Rose:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
Ann's tiny house is completely off-grid and powered by solar energy. No matter the season, you can always find her outside on her land. She raises sheep and goats for meat production and grows organic produce like squash, turnips, kale, and tons and tons of tomatoes. It brings Ann a lot of joy to work with the earth and grow food for herself and her neighbors, but it's hard work and things can easily go wrong. In fact, 13 years ago, Ann got very ill from eating some bad canned carrots.
Ann Rose:
I got botulism, botulinum toxicity, from some carrots I canned very poorly, because I still did it like grandma did it. I didn't use a pressure canner. So, 81-day coma. I was in the hospital on a ventilator, and it's very different being the patient after having been the nurse. But I was unconscious, so my raft did not leave the bed rails, basically. So, I got over that and got better and I knew that I wasn't going to recover fully unless I changed the way I ate.
Shelby Stanger:
But you were in a coma for 81 days?
Ann Rose:
The coma was 54 days. It was an 81-day hospital stay because I had to go through the ventilator weaning unit to learn to breathe again to get discharged.
Shelby Stanger:
You're saying this really nonchalantly, like ...
Ann Rose:
Oh, it's because I was a nurse. I just had that attitude because of my nursing history, and that's been 13 years ago though, so I've had plenty of time to recover from that. But then six years after that I developed cancer. I had lymphatic cancer, oral lymphatic cancer, because as a teenager I was a dumb little smarty-pants who thought she knew everything and I smoked and I drank. And I look back now at 58, like God, I wish I hadn't have done that.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay. Well, what do you think helped get you through? Do you think it was your faith, or do you think it was more like what you ate?
Ann Rose:
No faith. No faith. It was 100% attitude, because when they told me I had oral and lymphatic cancer, I said "(censored) cancer." I just have always believed that our attitudes, that personality we have, is what drives us or doesn't drive us. And I think I have a sassy attitude. I always have. And my parents used to call me "stubborn." I'm like, "It's not stubborn. This is independence." So, I've learned to change up the language for myself to help me. I think women are the world's worst at talking bad inside to ourselves, and we have to stop that. If I have a bad day and I've screwed up something, I'm like, I try to find the thing I did good and right and say, "Damn, Ann, look what you did. That was great." And I may be only talking inside my head, but it's changing everything on my outside when I do that.
Shelby Stanger:
Just six weeks after her diagnosis, Ann had surgery to remove her cancer. She was lucky to recover quickly, and five days later was back to work on the farm. Even though she still gets short of breath, Ann stays physically active. For most of the day, she's on her feet chopping wood, planting, and harvesting. In her spare time, Ann loves to kayak and explore the local creek and river near her home. She's been paddling for decades, sometimes with her girlfriends and sometimes alone. 20 years ago, Ann came up with a wild idea to take her kayak farther than ever before.
Let's get into your wild idea. I could talk to you for days about so many things, but you had this wild idea just recently, right, 2024?
Ann Rose:
Well, the idea was 20 years ago, but I let it recede to the back of my mind and I gave up, because I was working and raising three kids. So, the idea had been there, but smothered under life, chapters of life.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, what was this wild idea?
Ann Rose:
Okay, so I live in the mountains and I have a little stream on my property that runs into a bigger stream, into a bigger stream, into a river. And one day when I was doing home health nursing, driving up through Ashe County, up by the North Fork of the New River, I'm looking at that water and I'm like, "Where is all that darn water going all the time?" It runs all the time.
And I had just left seeing a patient who met me in their backyard. He was 90 and wasn't standing on a cane, and I was looking. I was mesmerized. I didn't hear him approach me from the house because I was mesmerized by this spring in his backyard, a pipe eight inches across, that was just shooting water out of it, like a full stream of water into a little rock branch in his backyard. And he walked up to me and he said, "Yonnasup?" And I was like, "Excuse me?" And he said, "Yonnasup?" and I realized he meant, "Do you want a sip of water?" because that stream coming out of the side of that mountain was pure spring water. And he reached down and took a drink with his hands, and I was like, "Oh, okay, I'll do that," which I drank out of springs before, but he invited me and I thought, "Why not?"
And when I left his home, I watched the creek from his house and I became just mesmerized with how the water flows out of the mountains, because it all gets to the ocean at some point. So, I started thinking about it and I broke out the old paper road atlas and I went, da, da, da, da, da. I said, "Oh, my God, that goes to the Gulf of Mexico. All of my water here goes to the Gulf of Mexico. I bet I could paddle that." And that's exactly how it happened. That's how the idea came to be in my head.
Shelby Stanger:
What year do you think this was?
Ann Rose:
That was in 2005.
Shelby Stanger:
So, you had this idea in 2005. Were you still divorced at the time? Or ...
Ann Rose:
Yeah, I'd already been divorced. I lived in Ashe County with my children. The primary reason I probably put it on the back burner was because I was still raising my children. So, once they were gone, I did think of it, and I thought, "Well, I'm farming full-time. What season can I leave and not lose crops and not get crops planted? When is the right time?" And I argued with myself for a few years because I was procrastinating. Part of that little voice in your head was going, "You can't do that. You have too much work to do."
Shelby Stanger:
The idea to kayak to the Gulf of Mexico had been percolating in the back of Ann's mind for years. She wanted to make it happen one day, but at the time, her life was too busy to take months away from her farm and her kids. In recent years, the region where Ann lives has been hit by several consecutive years of drought. Ann started to grow frustrated. The lack of water made it almost impossible to grow crops and maintain the farm. She needed a break from the daily grind, so she decided to turn her 20-year-old dream into a reality.
Ann Rose:
So it was in the spring before I went, I was just at the coffee shop going, "I think I'm going to do it. I think I need to do it." Because the four years prior to the trip, my farm was really scalded. We didn't have much rain. My farm was failing because I ran out of water. The temperate rainforest atmosphere of the mountains was diminishing, and it was hot and it was muggy and it was dry, and my pasture grasses were dry. And my spring on my farm had dried up and I was pumping water out of the creek below my farm and hauling it back onto my farm. So, I had this (censored) it day and I'm like, "(censored) it, I'm leaving. I am not doing this another year and go in the hole and spend my savings and not have crops to take to the market after the month of July because it quits raining."
Shelby Stanger:
So it sounds like you had a bad drought year, like you had a year with no water.
Ann Rose:
Four years in a row.
Shelby Stanger:
Four years and you're over it.
Ann Rose:
So I was at the coffee shop whining on my laptop, because I go to the coffee shop for internet because I don't have internet. And this young lady walks in and she said, "My friend Brittany wanted us to meet," and I had mentioned it to a few people in the farmer's market, summer before, and she says, "I'm a 'documentarist,' and I heard you're going to take a long kayak journey and I'd like to film it," and I went, "Really? I'm just kayaking." I still didn't think much of the whole journey.
For me, I was running. I was getting away from some failing farm business. I was at that point, I was just like F it, I'm leaving. And that was the attitude I had when I left. I'm like, "I'm out of here, y'all. I'm tired. I'm older. I can't farm like this anymore," because I can't haul water like that magnitude of hauling water. And I was like, "I mean, yeah, if you want to, you can film it, but I'm not sure why." She's like, "It's a long journey. I think we should film it." And I said, "I'm too old to wait. I have to do it now or never. I'm leaving in three months. Could you be ready?" She's like, "I guess."
Shelby Stanger:
Ann Rose is a farmer who lives off the grid in Lansing, North Carolina. In 2024, she kayaked nearly 2,000 miles from her farm to the Gulf of Mexico. She started in a local creek in Lansing and paddled northwest to meet the Ohio River. From the Ohio, Ann connected to the Mississippi River, which she took all the way down to the Gulf.
Ann worked with a filmmaker named Haley Mellon to raise money and document the journey. They rigged cameras to the boat, which was a 10-1/2'-long Hobie kayak. Most of the time, Ann used a paddle, but the kayak was also equipped with a rudder and foot pedals. The boat's internal storage could hold a few weeks of supplies. Since the trip lasted for months, Ann met up with Haley periodically for supply drops and repairs.
Day one, you had, like, 200 people come out to meet you in your hometown just to send you off.
Ann Rose:
Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
That had to have been really emotional. I mean, do you even know all those people?
Ann Rose:
No. I might've known, maybe I knew, 30 or 40 of them, but I didn't know them all by name. I recognized faces. It was pretty incredible. I was so touched and honored that they came out to say, "Get out of town." I didn't really realize that people would want to see me take off and go and do this. I told myself, "They're just here to see me fail, so I'll show them." That's that voice in your head that tries to talk you out of doing things, so my sassy attitude said, "I'll show them. I'm going to show them. I'm going to make it to the Gulf." And the other part of my brain was saying, "God, all these people gave me money. I can't let them down. They gave me their hard-earned money. I have to make it. I absolutely have to." So, you have that little internal battle with your little voices in your ... I do, anyway. They never shut up.
Shelby Stanger:
Do you remember those first few days? What were they like?
Ann Rose:
It rained on me the whole first day, and I'm like, "Oh, why am I leaving? It's raining now." The first four days, the film crew was with me. After that, I was just wearing GoPros. We had them on the front of the boat looking at me, I had one on me looking out, and I just had a solar panel to charge batteries to keep the GoPros filming, and I had no idea if those things were even recording or not when I was going.
Shelby Stanger:
Let's talk about what was on your kayak. What did you pack on it?
Ann Rose:
I had a couple of dry bags, one full of food, one with kitchen gear, and then the bigger bag had a hammock and a small tent, like a little cocoon tent that you just slide into feet first, but my hammock also had a mosquito net over it. You could zip into that as well. I took both of those and I took a couple of changes of clothes. I don't know why. I stunk so bad the whole time, I didn't even need to change, because the water ... I bathed in the New River. I was afraid to bathe in the Ohio and the Mississippi, because of just the pollution there. And there's no place really where it's not industrialized. There's very little areas of those rivers that are natural.
Shelby Stanger:
Did you have safety equipment?
Ann Rose:
Life jacket. In the State of Virginia, you're required to have a life jacket, a safety whistle, and a knife. I got to the Ohio River before I realized I needed a flag on my boat so the ships could see me, because I'm so tiny, on a kayak, which my cousin Kathy fixed up for me with some crap we bought at Dick's Sporting Goods, with a bright orange hunting vest we cut up and stuck it on a piece of PVC pipe, and I took it all the way. It worked all the way.
I had a Garmin, a mini Garmin that my neighbor, who does a lot of large animal hunting, loaned me so my kids and my immediate family could track me and see where I was. So, if I got separated from my boat or my phone, I could still communicate with that with a short few words, text. And it gave me weather updates, because I did not have much cell service the entire way. Very little cell service.
Shelby Stanger:
Where exactly were you sleeping?
Ann Rose:
I did a lot of stealth camping, so that's like where you sneak and hide and don't let anybody see where you're at, because you're a little freaked out about where you're at. So on the Ohio River, the river banks are covered by factories or chain-link fence, so there's not many places to get out. So paddling, it's getting dark, and I find this small tributary coming into the river, and it's between two barge stacks. And I paddle in there really hard and I get up in the waterway, and I'm exhausted. I am beat by the heat. I get up about 50 foot of this little tiny tributary, barely deep enough to float my boat, and I'm so exhausted. I pull my boat up and I laid down my camping mat and I lay down. I don't put up my tent, my hammock. I don't drink water. I just laid down, and I lay there just like ...
All you can hear is the hum of the factories on either side, just buzzing and whirling and clanking, and it just reminded me of some weird movie from the '70s. And I'm laying there, and this little fawn comes out of the woods, steps over me, and I'm just looking at it. I didn't move anything but my eyeballs. I just laid there. A little spotted baby fawn steps over me and goes and gets a drink of water from the stream and comes back over me, and hops back into the woods, and I just giggled for an hour. I was so thrilled to see that there was a wildlife thing in that part of the river where it was so mechanized and full of industry and noise and stinking pollution and rotten fish, and this little deer just comes right out and steps over me. It just gave me a lot of joy to see that baby deer there at that minute.
Shelby Stanger:
That's amazing.
Ann Rose:
And I just laid there and slept all night.
Shelby Stanger:
Cowboy camped. I love it.
Ann Rose:
Yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
Cowgirl camped.
Ann Rose:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
After three weeks on creeks and tributaries, Ann reached the Ohio River, where she had to navigate around massive barges and ships. There were places where she had to take her kayak out of the water and drag her stuff over land, because dams or turbines made the water impassable. While she saw a lot of friendly wildlife, like the fawn, she also had a number of close calls with alligators.
Ann Rose:
The first encounter was Baton Rouge. I had paddled over to get out of the river and something under my boat did a big swirly-whirly, and it was like, "Woo, that's a big damn catfish," is what my brain said. And I got out of my boat and looked back and I went, "Holy (censored). That was not a catfish." That was my first encounter, and then I was more aware looking out for them, because they don't chase you down, but if you get in their home, you could have trouble.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow.
Ann Rose:
Yeah, I wasn't prepared for that. I did not do enough alligator research before I left.
Shelby Stanger:
Wow. It sounds terrifying.
Ann Rose:
It was.
Shelby Stanger:
What was the most difficult part of the trip? Was there ever a part where you just wanted to give up and turn around, or no?
Ann Rose:
Yeah. I got to the 'Coal Hole,' which is a nickname given to the area where there are six or eight giant loading ports where all the ships meet. The barges unload, and the big ships get loaded and they go back out to sea. So I had been traveling on the rocky shores, trying to stay out of the lane of all of the big sea-bearing ships. I think I was three or four days before the end. And there's this, I don't know what the correct word is, but when they moor a lot of barges together, it's like a big parking lot of barges, and they're all tied down, and they're big as a Walmart parking lot. There's like 100 of them tied together, and there's this little narrow path between the barges and the rock shore. So I'm like, "I have to go through there because I don't want to be out in the shipping lane."
And so I started through there, and right when my brain said, "You better not go there," two alligators spun under my boat, almost flipped me out into the river, and broke my rudder off the back of my boat. And I was stranded, because in that water I really couldn't paddle good enough, because the pedals are much faster than the paddling, so I can't pedal without a rudder. I could have used my paddle, but I was just freaked out. I was freaked the (censored) out, and I called Haley and I said, "I need help," because the boats were just on it. I mean, the ships were just one after the other. The waves are 10 foot high.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, and you had alligators underneath of you, so what did you do?
Ann Rose:
Oh, well, they spun out and left, as far as I know. They were not attacking me. But later we figured out what the problem was, and it was on me, because the fins on the underside of the boat, under my pedals, what I was swishing to get through the waterways, they're modeled after how a penguin swims, and a alligator's favorite food is a duck.
Shelby Stanger:
Oh.
Ann Rose:
So they were hitting my boat thinking I was a duck, checking me out to see if it was a wounded duck that they could eat.
Shelby Stanger:
Got it. Wow.
Ann Rose:
But I had to call Haley and get help, and she brought some people that were carrying film crew, and they came and they fixed my rudder. It was repairable. So yeah, that was the most terrifying moment because I really thought, I'm like ... And you know what my brain did? My brain said, "If they knock you out, breathe in. You don't want to live for the tearing apart part. Just get it over with." That's exactly where my brain was, because I'm like, "If they get me out of this boat, they're just going to tear me into pieces. I might as well drown and get it over with," because I didn't want to live through the tearing me up part.
Shelby Stanger:
Ann, you are one bad-ass woman. So okay, you survive these alligator encounters, your rudder is fixed, and then after that moment, you're so close to the end.
Ann Rose:
Yeah. I had told Haley, I said, "I think I have to quit," and she's like, "You've only got 50 or 60 miles to go." I'm like, "Okay, never mind. We're going." I was like, I so close to the end, for sure. I was just exhausted. I was stressed out. I was sunburned all to hell. The damage I did to my skin will never be repaired, even through sunscreen, through lotion, through hat, through UV clothing. I was frazzled at the end, but I had enough energy to pop a champagne cork when we got to zero.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, that must've been pretty crazy. You had to feel really good about yourself. This was a 20-year plus dream in the making.
Ann Rose:
Yeah, yeah.
Shelby Stanger:
You made it happen. How do you think this trip changed you?
Ann Rose:
Definitely a bunch of changes. So go back to botulism, having been sick and recovered, having had cancer and recovered, those two events humbled me quite a bit, and this has just been the icing on the cake. Humbled me to see the support of my neighbors and my friends and my people in my village. It's humbled me to see how many people ... There were people on the river. There's all these social media pages. You can say, "Hey, I'm at mile marker da, da, da, da. I'm out of water." People just show up. They just show up. The river angels, like the Appalachian Trail has the trail magic people, the riverways have river angels, and they just show up.
This one guy picked me a gallon bag of muscadines from his vine and left it by the river under a certain hotel parking lot and said, "I got to go to my kid's ball game. I'm leaving you this bag here." And I was out of water and food that day, and that was right below Baton Rouge. And I seen him running back to the parking lot and I was like, "Hey, what's your Venmo? I need to pay you for the groceries." And he just waves, like, "Go on." And so, I had food for three more days. He just brought me a bunch of whatever he could grab at the Dollar General, and that's what I had until the next day that I could get out of the river. So, it was people like that that were just incredible to just show up, don't know me from Adam, and just bring me food and water.
Shelby Stanger:
After 82 days on the water, Ann finally arrived to the Gulf of Mexico. It was a triumphant finish, but she was confronted with an unexpected surprise on the other side of the finish line. The day that Ann completed her trip, Hurricane Helene made its way up to North Carolina and devastated Ann's town. Her house survived, but she had a fair amount of water and roof damage, and many of her neighbors lost their homes.
What was that like coming off of this high? I just did the thing that I wanted to do my whole life to then, you know, your community.
Ann Rose:
I did have that little part of me that was sad when I got home because there wasn't going to be a welcome home party. I felt that a little bit, but I was so in the throes of the disaster and the recovery, that faded in 10 seconds and I was like, "Where do you need me? What do you want me to do? Put me somewhere." I didn't take the trip for a coming home party. I took the trip because I wanted people to be aware of water, and water is what destroyed that town and all the towns in Western North Carolina right now. So, the irony of it all is just still mind-boggling.
I have a logo T-shirt that says "Stronger than the current," because that's a phrase that I just spit out when I almost got sucked under a barge, and Haley's like, "Oh, my God, that's your logo." And I'm like, "Okay, I'll keep that." And so, we were filming back at home after the storm, and I did this little bit about the town and how we were all working together, and I said something like, "I know that my people in this town are stronger than the current," and so it's kind of become a little thing now, because we are. We've pulled through it and we're going to be okay.
Shelby Stanger:
Over the past year, Ann's community has banded together to rebuild their town. While she's been focused on the recovery of Lansing, Ann thinks about her kayak journey often. She's excited to share the adventure with folks as Haley's film makes the rounds at various festivals. The movie is titled River Warrior. You can find out more about it on Instagram, @riverwarrior2024. To keep in touch with Ann directly, you can follow her on Instagram, @rosemountainfarm. That's R-O-S-E M-O-U-N-T-A-I-N F-A-R-M.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hanna Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow this show, take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.