My buddies Mark, Tom, and I went down to the Amtrak station in my hometown and jumped on a train. It was 1971, and I was fifteen. I was setting out on what is still my life’s biggest adventure.1
We were headed to Wyoming, to do a month-long course at the National Outdoor Leadership School, NOLS (pronounced “knolls”). Before I returned, I would go without food for three days, learn how to cross a raging mountain stream, make a “technical peak ascent”, make yeast bread using a campfire, and learn the best way to kill flies.
The previous year, Tom had seen a TV show about NOLS <
which had just created a course for teens, the Adventure Course. It was a 35-day backpacking trip in the Wind River Mountains, including rock-climbing and mountaineering, culminating in a 5-day Survival experience, where students traveled dozens of miles on foot with no food provided, only eating what they could forage. Now that I think of it, perhaps that was the first reality show…
Inspired by the show, Tom had gone to Wyoming by himself, taken the course, and survived; he regaled us with stories of his exploits all year. I was determined to follow in his footsteps, and my friend Mark was game as well. Mark and I would join the Adventure Course. Tom, as an Adventure graduate, was going to join an Instructors’ Course.
Mark got me a job where he worked, washing dishes at a university dorm, which was an adventure in itself.2 Since we were in high school, we could only work evenings and weekends, and I needed to save what seemed an astronomical sum at the time, seven hundred and fifty dollars. The course tuition was $450, and the train ride and incidentals, we reckoned, would cost $300 additional. My dishwashing wage was $1.75/hour.3
At the end of the school year, I had most but not all of the funds I needed, and my dad pitched in a few hundred bucks so that I could make the trip. That was not easy in my always-cash-strapped family. I remember him making a joke about deficit spending. I believe Dad’s partner convinced Dad I needed to go. Thank you, Susan, and thank you, Dad!
I don’t remember much about the train trip, but I know we were beside ourselves with excitement to be traveling cross country unsupervised. The closest Amtrak stop to Lander, WY, where NOLS is headquartered, was Rawlins, 100+ miles away; we took a Greyhound bus from there. We stayed overnight in Lander’s Noble Hotel, a 1918 edifice the school had recently bought. The hotel had an Old-West feel, with bison and elk heads mounted high on the walls of the lobby.
photo by Centerbrook Architects
The next morning, we mustered outside to get our gear for the 5-week backpacking trip commencing later that day. There were long testle tables covered with expedition clothing like Salvation Army wool pants. No high-tech clothing for 1970’s-era NOLS students; we wore all wool clothing, mostly well-used already.
Each of us was issued our share of climbing equipment: ropes, pitons, carabiners (‘pitons’ and ‘carabiners’ were new words for me). When it came to climbing, fancy ropes like Perlon were outside NOLS’ budget. We trusted our lives to basic Goldline ropes; you can bet we checked them for wear every time we used them!
NOLS’ leader and creator, the renowned mountaineer Paul Petzoldt, came out and kibitzed with us teens as we gathered our gear. He was a white-haired bear of a man, who’d climbed the Grand Teton as a teen, wearing his cowboy boots, fought his way across Italy in WWII with the famed Tenth Mountain Division, and once climbed K2 without bottled oxygen. I remember him gruffly commanding me to return a pair of wool pants I had chosen and to take a longer pair. I had reason to regret that advice later, as the longer ones sagged to the ground, where I constantly stepped on them with my boots; they were tattered to ribbons by the time my course was finished.
Before we knew it, we and our bulging backpacks were on a flatbed truck heading to Sinks Canyon, where our trip would begin. We would follow the Middle Fork of the Popo Agie (Puh-POE-zhe) River, up into the high backcountry of the Wind River Mountains. Our backpacks were monstrous, loaded down with gear and enough food for the first ten days of our journey. My pack weighed 80 pounds, I weighed 105. By the end of the trip, I’d weigh 95 (but of course, my pack would be lighter too).
Again, no fancy freeze-dried food here. We carried sticks of butter, sacks of oatmeal, blocks of cheese, and bags of flour which we would use to make pancakes as well as yeasted bread. We had fishing poles and tackle to hopefully help us supplement our food. We carried no water filters in those long-ago days; we just drank right from the streams and lakes. This would not be possible today, because backpackers (and beavers) have since spread the painful gut parasite disease giardia into the wilderness.
I doubt it was NOLS students who spread the giardia, though. We had environmental ethics and Leave No Trace drummed into us from the first day. Don’t pee near water, bury your poop in a hole far from water and burn the toilet paper, etc., etc.
We carried no fancy tents, either. We slept out in the open air, on Ensolite pads under rain flies (just nylon tarps). Fortunately, the mountains were too cold for mosquitoes, at least in mid-June. In fact, it had been a very snowy winter, and the snow pack in the mountains was very heavy; that ended up impeding our leaders’ plans and stymied several of our attempts to get to the highest parts of the range.
That first day, we were instructed on the protocol for hiking. Our coed course, of thirty-six 13-15-year olds, of all body shapes and fitness levels, was broken up into three patrols, of 12 campers each, by age.
I was in the middle group, my buddy Mark was in the oldest. The patrols traveled separately and rarely encountered each other, so I spent the next five weeks with 11 kids (and two late-teen leaders) I’d not met before. Our adventure was underway!
Thanks for reading! I’ll be back soon with the next installment…
If you know Ann Arbor, the train station we departed from (and returned to) is now the iconic Gandy Dancer restaurant.
The dorm where we worked was East Quad, home of the hippie school-within-a-school, the Residential College. There was lots to see for a wide-eyed teen. I particularly remember seeing a naked (male) student streaking the halls on Halloween.
We got life experience and had lots of fun at work, for example hurling plates like frisbees as deep into the assembly-line-like dish machine as we could and making a snowman out of uneaten mashed potatoes we had scraped off the students’ plates. Students worked alongside us for spending money. One of them, a recent transfer from the Catholic women’s Mercy College, said the nuns had taught her that VD was caused by “bad apples and cracked crockery”.