Whitewater Raft Guide:
This is where most of our work is. After completing one of our training programs, you will be working on the New River during the Summer season. Known as the "Grand Canyon of the East." The New is rated among the country’s best whitewater runs and is the biggest whitewater in the East.
Once they complete their training, most new guides will spend much of their first season guiding on the Upper New River. This is easy "family-style" rafting and it allows the newcomer to quickly develop the leadership and entertainment skills that every guide needs. It brings you along at a pace that is not overwhelming. When you’re not earning money on these Upper New trips, you can be riding along on Lower New trips and becoming familiar with that more difficult section. As the Summer season unfolds and our customers begin arriving in greater numbers, the best of the rookie guides will find themselves guiding lots of Lower New trips as well as those on the Upper section.
An added benefit of guiding with ACE is that we’re the only company that runs the Gauley river on a daily basis all summer long. These summertime Gauley trips are great fun and they’ll build your river skills quickly. Throughout your time at ACE, we encourage you to ride along and gain experience on more difficult sections. There’s never any charge to you and it prepares you to make some serious money during the Fall Gauley Season.
Most first-year guides will spend their Fall season on the Lower New and the Lower Gauley…and training on the Upper Gauley on their off days. We encourage all our new guides to become proficient on all the rivers we run as quickly as their individual talents allow. We don’t have a lot of turnover in our guide staff and we’ll always schedule the more experienced guides on the more difficult sections whenever possible. Despite this, a large proportion of our junior guides quickly become proficient enough to move up the ladder rapidly.
Once you complete your guide training with ACE, you will be required to fulfill contractual obligations in return for the cost of training which is free to you. These obligations involve your being available for the entire rafting season and will be thoroughly explained to you prior to your being accepted into the training program. You’ll also have to agree to follow a few simple rules of behavior both on and off the river.
Climbing/Rappelling Guide
As a guide in our climbing program you will work with groups of climbers and occasionally "one-on-one" with customers. We do climbs on our own property and in the New River Gorge National River. For the most part, our climbing and rappelling program is geared to beginning levels of ability. We also do custom instructional clinics. We are looking for experienced climbers for this program, but some limited training is available in this program.
Caving Guide
Guiding in a cave is a unique experience that not many get to enjoy. Our caving program is conducted in the labyrinth of limestone caverns in Southern West Virginia. The emphasis is on an introductory level highlighting the highly fragile ecosystem that exists in the subterranean world. We provide all necessary equipment and we’ll train you to guide in caves.
Kayak Instructor
ACE provides several levels of kayak instruction from introductory sessions at the Adventure Center to specialized multi-day clinics on the New and Gauley Rivers. You must be a highly-skilled boater to be accepted as a kayak instructor. ACA certification is required for people to work in this program. Limited ACA Certification training will be made available to our staff. If you are accepted into the ACA accreditation class provided by ACE you will be required to fulfill contractual obligations in return for tuition costs incurred by ACE.
Mountain Bike Guide / Mechanic
We have a full Mountain Bike program at the ACE Adventure Center, complete with rentals and a repair shop. As a Mountain Bike Guide, you will not only lead full and half-day bike trips on ACE property and into the New River Gorge, but you will work as a bike mechanic helping to keep the fleet of rentals in top condition. The mechanic aspect of this program can be utilized as off river work.
Retail Store Salesperson
Our Outfitters Store needs salespeople who are knowledgeable about outdoor gear and clothing. We will train the right person.
Reservations Consultant
Our Reservations Office handles questions from prospective customers, books trips and mails pictures, brochures, catalogs and videos to interested folks. Good people skills are a must. This is indoor work, primarily on the phone. We will train applicants who demonstrate an aptitude for fast-paced, sales-oriented work.
Grounds, Housekeeping and Janitorial Staff
To keep our 1,400-acre Adventure Center attractive to the 40,000 guests who will visit us this season, we need people to work outdoors on the grounds as well as indoors performing housekeeping duties in our chalets, cabins and cabin tents. You will have to show a history of dependability and honesty in your past employment.
Bus and Truck Driver
Experienced drivers needed with CDL. Part-time (weekends) and full-time seasonal positions. You must have a clean safety record and be willing and able to pass a drug test.
Food Service Worker
Our food-service department prepares and packs several hundred lunches each day as well as serving breakfast, lunch and dinner in our dining hall throughout the season. Previous food-service experience is a plus but we will train quality applicants who lack experience. This is an extremely hectic part of our business and applicants should expect to work hard.
Bartender
ACE’s Lost Paddle Lounge is a popular full-service sports bar with pool tables and big-screen TV’s. Experienced bartenders needed. Seasonal work…June through October.
ACE Whitewater’s History and Company Philosophy
ACE Whitewater began running commercial river trips way back in 1980. For several years, ACE was among the smallest outfitters in West Virginia and, as late as 1986, took only 2,900 paying customers down the New and Gauley rivers.
In 1987, the present ownership took over and began to grow the company aggressively. This paid off and within 8 years, ACE had grown to be the largest outfitter in the state. This growth has continued since then, culminating in another record year in 2002 when we took some 35,000 happy customers down the river! With the addition of our off river adventures, like Mt. bike trips and climbing trips, we added an additional 5000 more user days.
There are several obvious reasons for this unparalleled growth and success. First of all, we give our customers the best whitewater experience available in West Virginia. From our pioneering efforts with self-bailing rafts, smaller 12 and 14-foot boats, and private riverside lunch spots (with sanitary facilities and hot grilled lunches) to our relentless and continuing improvement of our offerings, we give our customers a whole lot more for their money than they can get anywhere else. Secondly, our 1,400-acre ACE Adventure Center facility gives our customers a "home base" with great lodging and free activities. Everyone, employees and customers alike, appreciates the miles of hiking and biking trails, the swimming beach and the stocked fishing lakes. Our Lakeside Dining Hall serves three meals a day during the season and there’s a lively nightlife scene at the Lost Paddle Lounge. There’s simply nothing like the ACE Adventure Center anywhere else in West Virginia and our customers keep voicing their approval by coming back in record numbers every year. Finally, our staff is head and shoulders above the competition. We’re friendly and we’re highly skilled. We love what we do and it shows…and our customers love being a part of the magic.
Our philosophy is simple: give our customers the highest-quality outdoor recreation available anywhere…and have a great time doing it! Our employees are having the time of their lives and our customers enjoy being a part of the fun. With something like 200 different trips and activities, we can provide a quality outdoor adventure for just about anybody…from easy family fun trips to world-class whitewater thrills. We charge a fair price and provide top-shelf quality in all of our offerings. We treat our employees as family…and we treat our customers as guests. That’s why we have very low staff turnover and very high repeat business…and that’s why ACE is in a class by itself in the whitewater community.
What You’ll Leave Here With
We understand that our guides are on the front lines of the effort to provide the best outdoor recreation experience anywhere. In order to attract the highest quality employees, we have to provide you with something more than just a summer job. Virtually all our top-level managers started as guides, so there’s a career opportunity here if you want it. But even if you only stay for a few seasons, you’ll leave with a lot of invaluable skills…not to mention a lot of irreplaceable memories.
Very few entry-level jobs allow you to develop leadership skills. Not too many people are rushing to follow the lead of the average burger flipper. As an ACE guide, you’ll have control of a boat and a crew. It will be your knowledge and skill that allows these folks a safe and enjoyable passage down the river. It will be your decisiveness that demonstrates that skill and gives your crew the confidence to follow your lead. It will be your personality that enchants them with stories of the river and its history. It will be you that leads them. Many of your crews will be professional types. Doctors, lawyers, highly-paid professionals…they’ll put their trust in you and allow you to lead them in an exciting adventure. Think how few people ever find themselves in such a position. There’s no doubt that every ACE guide quickly develops the kind of leadership skills that most people will never achieve in their entire lives! Whether you make your career in outdoor recreation or go on to other pursuits, those leadership skills will prove invaluable throughout your life.
You’ll be amazed when you discover that most of your customers simply can’t believe that you actually live and work in what has to be one of the most beautiful natural locations on earth. It’s a regrettable fact of modern life that most people live in cities and never get to spend much time in the remote outdoors. Just spending a single summer in "God’s Country" will give you an appreciation for the finer…and simpler…things of life that will last forever. Sharing this gift with a boat full of new friends is priceless.
Finally, at ACE we can provide you with something that you don’t often find…while learning these skills, you get paid. With 40,000 guests to care for, we need lots of help. ACE guides, even the new ones, get a lot more work than do guides for many other companies. During the height of the season, it’s not unusual for our guides to work six or seven days a week if they want to. We provide a place for you to live at no charge and there’s so much to learn while you’re here. Any of our activities, kayaking, mountain biking, climbing, riding, caving and rafting…they’re all available to you at no charge when space is available. With so much to do, you’ll find it’s easy to save money while you’re here.
Full-Time or Part-Time
Our employees are either full-time employees or part-time employees. Since any outdoor recreation business is busiest on weekends, we need lots of guides who only want to work on Saturday and Sunday. Many have "real jobs" in the "real world" and are thrilled to pick up a nice additional paycheck guiding on weekends. We’re always on the lookout for quality individuals who only want to work on weekends. We’ll train you the same way we train our full-time guides except that we’ll only train on weekends. When you send us an application, we’ll send you a syllabus for our 8-week weekend training program that begins in mid-March.
To be considered a full-time employee, you’ve got to be available for work at any time throughout the rafting season. We post the schedule a week in advance so you’ll know your days off at that time. Because we need to count on our full-time employees being available, we can’t allow them to take extended time off during the season.
During the early part of the season, it’s not uncommon for us to have more off-river work that guiding work. Full-time employees have to agree to work in one or more off-river assignments to compliment their guiding days in order to fill a full work week. Examples of areas of off-river work that our full-time guides do are: reservations office, trail building, grounds maintenance, equipment repair, food service, bartending, and off-river guiding such as climbing/rappelling, mountain bikes, horses and caving. Especially during July and August, the vast majority of your days will be spent guiding on the river. But in the early part of the season, you’ll need some off-river days to fill out that paycheck.
Full-time guides can, of course, choose the type of off-river work they’ll do. There’s hearty outdoor stuff like trail building and grounds maintenance and there’s office work like telephone reservations and food service. Full-time guides will choose an area they’d like to work in and then they’ll interview with the appropriate manager to secure the job.
Here’s the most important thing to remember about off-river work. Since full-time guides are making a commitment to ACE, they get priority for river days. So volunteering for off-river work actually gets you more days on the river!
Any guide who doesn’t want to perform some type of off-river work is considered a part-time guide. We never require that you work off-river but we do give scheduling priority to those who have made the commitment to be full-time employees.
Benefits Include:
Unlimited river trips for staff based on availability.
Six complimentary trips for family and friends, some restrictions apply.
$25 lodging rates for family when available.
Free training
Free camping refundable deposit required.
Meal discounts.
Opportunity for pro-purchases.
Flexibility in scheduling.
Training and skill development in the recreation industry.
Leadership opportunities.
Drug/Alcohol Free Workplace
ACE Adventure Center. is committed to a safe environment for its Team Members and Guests. Pre-employment and random drug/alcohol testing is required for CDL drivers. Post-accident drug/alcohol testing is required of all employees filing a workman’s compensation claim. Any employee allowing drugs or alcohol to effect their work will be terminated.
Personal Appearance
A professional and well-groomed appearance is an essential ingredient in ACE’s success. We request that you have 3 earrings max, no lip, eye, nose rings and no tongue studs. We rely on your good judgement and commitment to ACE. to accept this basic condition of employment. Your conduct on the job, after hours, and in the community is a reflextion of you and of ACE Adventure Center. Please plan to respect yourself, your peers and ACE.
Pet Policy
In consideration of and safety for our Guests, employees and your pets, pets are not allowed on ACE. property unattended or in ACE. housing. If you must bring your pet with you, please make other housing arrangements. ACE.'s property has no housing facilities for your pets.
Housing
All employees using ACE Adventure Center. housing are required to participate in a maintenance and cleaning program for living areas.
Documents Needed
Upon arrival for employment at ACE be prepared to produce a valid DRIVER'S LICENSE and one of the following documents to complete the employment process. Non U.S. citizens must have a valid U.S. work permit.
Passport
U.S. Social Security Card
Birth Certificate
