A family's 50-year tradition keeps going strong

Richard and Melissa Kremer have been organizing camping and rafting trips to Appletree Campground since 1983, welcoming friends and family collected over decades of pastoral work to catch up and recreate along the Nantahala. Melissa Kremer said they started the trips alongside family and close friends with an excursion to Tallulah in 1974, later holding bi-annual trips to various campgrounds. The first trip of each year is to Appletree Campground in Topton on the second weekend of June, with a fall trip the second weekend of October at other campgrounds. A group of especially close friends and family recently held their 100th trip from June 12 through 14, including some of the Kremer children and grandchildren. Over the years parties have traversed the New River, the Ocoee, the French Broad, the Tallulah, and more, but have settled on the Nantahala River in Macon County for most of their trips. They went down first with inner tubes and now with rafts through Nantahala Outdoor Center. Since they first started camping at Appletree in 1981, the Kremers have left the site only twice: once during the COVID-19 pandemic and once in 1996 when the FBI took over Appletree for during the Eric Rudolph manhunt. However, Appletree has been their most consistent destination, and the party now regularly books campsites A and D to have plenty of parking for their groups of up to 50 people. Most years they have between 30 and 35 guests with 47 this year. They have witnessed collapses and the re-building of shelters and got to make use of new bathrooms installed ahead of the 1996 Olympics. The Kremers get the food, book the site and invite friends through an ever-growing email list of collected acquaintances. Richard Kremer was a pastor and being stationed across North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Virginia and Kentucky, gathered an assortment of close friends from the towns where they lived. Their twin sons live in Greenville, South Carolina, and in Utah, adding to the variety. "Anybody who's come fairly recently, we send a general email to in about January and say, 'This is the weekend it's going to be, just put it on your calendars, feel free to invite other people,'" Melissa said. "It becomes intergenerational, because people who came with us when they were not even married, or were first married, and then their children came, and now their children get added. It's a very fluid group … up to the limit that we can have at the campsite." The Kremers prepare hot dogs and hamburgers on Friday evening as guests check in. They serve a light breakfast on Saturday ahead of the river trip, steaks for dinner on Saturday, and a hearty traditional breakfast on Sunday before everyone returns home. The Kremers let all their guests know exactly how much the meals and campground will cost once distributed between them – typically between $40 and $50. Those who don't help out around the campground get to clean the dishes on Saturday night. "We usually have a couple new people. We'll have people who maybe haven't been in five to 10 years," Melissa said. "That happened this year, a family that hadn't been in 10 years was able to come, and people make friends. Our friends from Kentucky are now good friends with people in North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, all over the place." They've befriended the campground's hosts over the years, exchanging Christmas cards, and made connections with friends of friends, always looking to keep up at the events. The Kremers now have three generations attending, and Melissa said the O'Daniels from Kentucky now have two to three generations coming. She said the attendees range in age from 70 to three. Stew Kremer, the oldest of the Kremer twins from Greenville, said he has gone to Appletree every year since he was 10 months old, missing reunions only in recent years following the birth of his children. He brought his first, now four-year-old child, to the 100th trip this year. He said, "It's essentially a reunion every year from my parents and friends, family … anybody they've picked up along the way knows that the second weekend in June every year they're going to descend on Appletree and go do the Nantahala River. It's become a kind of rite of passage for different friends over the years. I mean, we started inviting our friends when we were pretty young, and then now our generation makes up a good number of the people that go." Stew Kremer said it is always fun to go over a short waterfall in an inner tube – trying to stay in the tube while rafters go by in inflatable boats. He said, "You get slipped out of it probably about 75% of the time … there's always some fun wipeouts." Melissa Kremer said there has been a fair share of stories to come from the last 52 years of tradition. One night, a young couple went on a walk in the dark and got lost, eventually passing over a ridge out of earshot and having to sleep in a pile of ferns while the rest of the campground formed search parties to try and find them. Melissa said the campground host picked the couple up the next morning walking the wrong way toward Andrews. One young man brought a girlfriend up to the campground, where they later got engaged in a field at Appletree. They now bring their children up to the campsite with them. They've seen lots of wild dogs and at least one close call with a rattlesnake, but have never had to deal with bears. Bernadette O'Daniel, who with her husband are close friends of the Kremers from Kentucky, said they have been going on the trips since 1982, when they were in their early 20s and recruited to do some whitewater rafting along the Nantahala. The loved the trip the first time, and eventually, they felt brave enough to try the Gauley River in West Virginia, fresh off the confidence of navigating the Nantahala's Class 3 rapids. "We thought we were so big and bad until the river ate us up and nearly killed us," she said. "We've managed to make most of those in the 40 years that we've been doing it." Their oldest, TJ, started coming when he was 12 years old, enough to keep his wits in the rapids, and now he brings his four- and six-year-old children with him on trips, though their grandmother watches with them on the banks while grown-ups go down in the water. Stew Kremer said, "Taking my kids this year, like having my kids out there for the first time, seeing them experience the Appletreee Campground by itself ... there's no cell phone service, there's no excess, so you just go back and it reminds me of growing up in the '90s, before that was our world." "Seeing my kids go out there and then do the same things that we did, like playing in the creeks and building dams and hunting for salamanders and going out once it gets dark and looking at the lighting bugs in the gorgeous filed that's right there – it's really special," he said. Shelby Powell can be reached at reporter@thefranklinpress.com.

A family's 50-year tradition keeps going strong

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