Meet the Founders: Mike & Stormy McGauley
For the McGauleys, accommodating outdoor-lovers with a range of abilities is personal. Their marriage illustrates the scope of that spectrum.“I’ve always wanted to be a wild person!” Mike says when he and Stormy sit down for an interview for Get Out’s “Wild People” department. When it comes to outdoor recreation, Mike calls himself a spectator. However, he calls Stormy a top-level outdoorsperson. Stormy is an avid hiker, hitting a different trail every week with the Chattanooga Hiking Club, and regularly hiking up to 10 miles per trip.“I can keep up with her on level ground, but for both our sakes, we don’t hike together. She doesn’t know the phrase ‘Can we stop and rest a minute?’” Mike jokes. But what Mike lacks in athleticism, he makes up for in community building, having played a part in many of the city’s prominent conservation efforts.For instance, he served on the board of Trust for Public Land where he helped raise $2 million to save Stringer’s Ridge from development. He also served on the board of Tennessee River Gorge Trust, where he developed the idea for “Bargin’ for the Gorge,” a dinner cruise fundraiser aboard a TVA barge. During the event’s nine-year run, it raised over $635,000, helping earn Mike the TRGT’s Adele Hampton Life Achievement Award for Conservation in 2011.“I knew if we could get people into the gorge, raising the money would be easy. It’s the most beautiful place on earth,” Mike says.Indeed, the McGauleys’ city pride runs as deep as the river canyon itself.“If you can pick anywhere in the world to move to, this is the place to be,” says Stormy, who moved to Chattanooga from Texas in 1984. “I am in awe of the mountains,” she says, listing two of her favorite hiking spots as Fiery Gizzard Trail in Tracy City and Laurel-Snow Pocket Wilderness in Dayton.But for Stormy, the purpose of outdoor recreation is not to push her limit. Rather, she says, it is simply to determine a destination and then reach it, whether that means a 10-mile hike to a waterfall or a stroll across Walnut Street Bridge, where the river view is so compelling, it might make a wild person out of anyone.
There was a time not so long ago when standup paddleboards were uncommon on the Tennessee River. But now, “I walk across the bridge every day and I don’t think a day passes that I don’t see a SUP on the water,” says Stormy McGauley, co-founder of RiverRocks, Chattanooga’s annual outdoors festival held each October.
In 2010, she and husband Mike McGauley helped conceive and organize the inaugural event to showcase the city’s natural resources through 10 days of activities designed for a spectrum of skillsets.
For hardcore athletes there was the Rock/Creek StumpJump, a 50k trail race along the mountainous Cumberland Trail. For greenhorns, there were free classes that introduced new sports – such as standup paddleboarding, which today is considered the fastest-growing watersport in the world, a trend which Chattanooga is now clearly riding.
In addition to outdoor recreation, the early RiverRocks festivals partnered with local restaurants to spotlight healthy food specials. The festival also partnered with eight local land trusts and conservancies, among which half the event’s proceeds were divvied. But these two features have since gone to the wayside.