Carolyn Price (1977)

A WWU volleyball player returns from a weekend tournament and rushes home to Ridgeway Commons. Hunched over her high school graduation present, a Smith Corona typewriter, she writes up an article about the games. Next, she hitches a ride to Birnam Wood to interview the field hockey coach for her other Western Front beat. Back at her dorm, she writes up a second sports story late on a Sunday night.

It is 1973, and her name is Carolyn Price.

Price sprints down High Street, both stories in her hands. Ignoring the Viking Union’s main entrance, she heads straight toward the bottom floor windows and knocks. Her editors open the window and Price climbs in. Two days later, her stories will be published. 

“It was like a college newspaper office in the 70s,” Price said. “I didn’t really know how cool that was, but I knew I had a lot of fun.” 

Price graduated in 1977, the same year Western Washington State College became Western Washington University. “The thing I remember most is that our quarterly tuition went up from $169 a quarter to $225 or something,” Price said.

During her academic career, she worked on both The Western Front and Klipsun Magazine. Her professors included Pete Steffens, Gerson Miller and Ted Stannard — who she remembers always wore a safari vest with “21 pockets in it” to hold film canisters.

Stannard taught students to keep two frames at the end of their rolls of film, because as a journalist, you never know what you’ll come across. This trick helped Price during her first job out of college at the Lynden Tribune, when there was an airplane collision she heard on the police scanner. Price, then 22, brought her camera to the scene where three people had died. The coroner asked her to photograph the bodies. 

“I got some pretty nasty pictures, and pretty soon, I just couldn’t stomach it anymore. I gave [the coroner] my camera and I went and sat in my car,” Price said.

She returned to the Lynden Tribune that night to process the film in the dark room, then called The Seattle Times to inform them of the accident. They asked her to print copies, drive to Bellingham, Washington, put the prints on a Greyhound Bus and send them down to their office for publication.

Price remembers getting a check for “50 bucks or something.”

Price was the first woman in Washington to be a newspaper sports editor. Originally, she did not get the position, because it was given to her male counterpart. However, he quit two months later — with a farewell column that stated he hated following tractors going slowly up the Guide Meridian — which opened up the position again. Price was hired, at $75 less a month than her predecessor. 

Over a year later, she got herself a well-deserved raise after she was offered a job at the Anacortes American Weekly. She told her editor at the Tribune that the Weekly offered her more money (they didn’t), and the Tribune matched it.

Eventually, the Lewis family, who has owned the Lynden Tribune since the 1800s, bought a monthly newspaper in Point Roberts, Washington, a pene-exclave of the U.S.

Next thing she knew, Price was selling ads, writing stories and designing pages, as well as picking the paper up at the printers and delivering it to homes and businesses. At first, she commuted between Lynden, Washington and Point Roberts (four border crossings a day), but she eventually moved to the small beach-front town to manage the monthly paper. 

“That is where I really learned the skills to start my own magazine,” Price said. “If I hadn’t had that job, I don’t think I would have had the skills.”

In the mid-80s, Price was freelancing until she saw an ad in the Seattle Weekly about a bicycle tabloid based out of Redmond, Washington. She worked for the tabloid for six months and learned a lot about bicycle racing.  

Once, Price was assigned to drive Olympians Mark Gorski and Nelson Vails to a track racing event. “They were staying at a local motel and it was my job to pick them up in my little 1980 Datsun pickup,” Price said. 

She remembers how big the athletes’ thighs were — Gorski hanging out the passenger window and Vails straddling the gear stick.

Eventually, after talking to advertisers and readers, Price realized people were in the market for a newspaper that wasn’t just about bicycle racing. Naturally, she decided to start her own publication in competition with her former boss.

Her first issue was eight pages, published in February of 1988. Her second issue was 16 pages. Her third was 24. 

“I started a neighborhood newspaper when I was 10,” Price said. “So, I’ve always wanted to do this.”

Over three decades and many iterations later, OutdoorsNW Magazine, which covers all outdoor recreation in the Northwest, is distributed throughout Washington and Oregon. In 2019, they switched from printing eight times a year to four times a year, focusing more on their digital presence, which Price said was very profitable.  

In 2020, the pandemic affected the magazine because tourism, events and advertising — all things that decreased — are crucial to the publication. Price tries to stay digitally relevant by managing social media, updating the website and writing stories. “I’m just kind of taking it slow and easy right now,” Price said. 

After a long and successful journalism career, Price is looking to pass the torch. The magazine is for sale, and she is seeking out potential buyers. 

“I think part of my passion and my energy for what I’ve done for three decades is waning. I’m kind of tired,” Price said. “I’d like to pass along the magazine to new blood.”