Keep cool this summer while working on the best whitewater in the East!

Looking to try something new and love water and adventure? Rookie guides at Ohiopyle Trading Post will spend their first season on the Lower Yough, a 7.5-mile stretch of Class 3 whitewater with 18 named rapids. The Lower Yough is the perfect place to hone your guiding skills, as every change in water level presents new challenges, making you a more adaptable paddler! Trips on the Lower Yough include both fully-guided (guides in the raft with guests) and guide-escorted trips (some rafts are guided by the customers themselves, who are helped out by guides in other, fully-guided rafts as well as safety kayakers and/or duckies). Expect to work a mix of both types of trips in your first season! 

Our raft guides almost exclusively work on two sections of the Youghiogheny River, the Lower and the Upper. Thanks to the dams just upstream of both sections, we’re guaranteed water from May-October! Guides are responsible for safely conveying guests of all backgrounds down the river while providing a pleasant experience for guests. Guides are also expected to assist with off-river work, including inflating rafts before trips and cleaning and sorting gear at the end of trips. 

All of our guides are people people who love being on the water, and love sharing that passion with guests every day. Raft guiding is very physical work, so applicants should be prepared to paddle 15+ miles per day during training, while swimming through some rapids and working on unflipping and unpinning rafts. All raft guide positions are contingent upon successful completion of guide training, but applicants do not need any prior experience for training; we will teach interested people all that they need to succeed! We also provide all necessary equipment during training.

We also run trips on the Upper Yough, a 10-mile Class 4-5 stretch of whitewater, with the steepest section of commercially rafted whitewater east of the Mississippi (the “Miracle Mile”). While you won’t be guiding this section as a rookie, you’ll be exposed to it starting in training, and will have the opportunity to get laps in up there on days off, whether that’s in a kayak (if you have the skillset) or riding along with other guides in a raft.  

We believe that the best raft guides are versatile — they’ve seen other rivers, and can paddle other crafts! To support this, we encourage our guides to use company boats (rafts, inflatable kayaks, hardshell whitewater kayaks, etc) when they aren’t working. This may look like getting lots of raft laps in on the Upper Yough, finally learning how to whitewater kayak on the Loop section of the Lower Yough, or anything in between! Many of our guides are multi-discipline whitewater athletes and happy to help you in your progression. We’re located in a true hotspot of whitewater paddling, and we want our guides to get to fully enjoy it!

Guides from out of town are welcome to live in our free guide housing located directly in the Borough of Ohiopyle. The guide house is a roughly 5 minute walk to the put-in, and you can easily walk to everything in town from there as well, including the market and restaurants. We do recommend having a car so that you can get to the grocery store (there is a small market in town with essentials, but for most other things it’s a 30-minute drive to a town with Walmart and other stores). The house has private bedrooms, and once those fill up we have 2 bunk houses which have dorm-style living. All guides living in the house share a kitchen, bathroom, shower, laundry facilities, and communal indoor and outdoor living areas. 

Check out the video below to see one of our guide's edits of a summer in Ohiopyle!