Outdoor Institute Throws City Slickers into the Woods : A Walk on the Wild Side
When his parents signed up for the Wilderness Institute’s “Family Ropes Course Adventure,” Greg Glassman never expected to find himself balancing on a tree limb 25 feet off the ground, with an instructor urging him to leap into the great void. At the moment of truth, Greg reacted predictably for an 8-year-old kid from the wilds of Agoura Hills. He panicked.
“I’m not jumping,” he said.
Greg was supposed to launch himself toward a trapeze suspended at his elevation about 12 feet away. “That’s going to be impossible,” he moaned. “I’m going to get killed.”
But the instructor knew otherwise. At Calamigos Ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains this Sunday morning, Randy Childs, a bearded mountain man, had put Greg, his family and 18 other people through a series of confidence-building exercises for just this situation. In the past three hours, Greg had learned to trust in the others. The leap of faith was the ultimate test.
“If I did it, anybody can,” yelled Erin Tuller, an 18-year-old woman from Huntington Beach who just moments earlier had made the jump and lived to tell the tale.
Greg was poised nervously on the limb. “You’ll be fine,” Childs said in a soothing, reassuring voice. “Don’t worry. Remember the things we’ve learned. Trust me.”
Childs, of course, knew that nothing was going to happen to the youngster. Greg’s harness was connected by a rope to a cable above his head. Greg had been told about the safety system before he had climbed a rope ladder and walked across a 100-foot rope bridge to a huge live oak.
“If you fall,” Childs had instructed the group, “you’ll just hang there like a spider.”
Childs’ encouragement and the potential embarrassment of wimping out in front of witnesses finally got Greg to jump. Grabbing the trapeze would have taken an extreme athletic effort. Greg didn’t come close, but plunged like a potato sack until his safety rope stopped his fall. Childs gently lowered him the rest of the way.
“That took a lot of guts,” Childs told him. “You did good.”
And doing good in the outdoors is what the Wilderness Institute is all about. Staffed by the kind of people who can identify every plant in the forest by its Latin name, the institute provides what it describes as “outdoor adventures for personal growth” while helping to preserve the natural resources of Southern California.
“We try to make better campers,” said Bradley Childs, executive director, “by creating an awareness of the environment. We teach people to think globally and act locally in caring about the Earth.”
Brad Childs, 34, is seven years younger than his brother, Randy. He opened the nonprofit Wilderness Institute in 1984 after leaving the National Park Service when Proposition 13 eliminated the recreation program that he was teaching.
In five years, the institute has provided free programs to a few thousand disabled people and inner-city youths; another 10,000 people have hiked, backpacked, camped, skied, rappelled, cycled and taken classes, paying anywhere from $14 for a fossil hunt to $65 for a wilderness first-aid course. Last year, about 7,000 youngsters took part in an outdoor education program for schools and camps.
Brad Childs says the institute offers a diversity and quantity of outdoor activities that can’t be matched by any other organization in Los Angeles, including the Sierra Club. Operating out of a second-story office in a small building on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills, it mails to 50,000 subscribers copies of a semiannual, 26-page catalogue that lists everything from “Storytelling Under the Stars” to “Spring Butterfly Discovery” and “Indians’ Skills.”
With an outdoor nature center and trading post opening in May on an acre of leased land in Agoura Hills, the institute’s six full-time and 30 part-time staffers are kept busy. “A few of us work seven days a week,” Brad said, “but it’s a labor of love.”
Not surprisingly, the Childs brothers grew up in rural Michigan, raised by a father who was a Boy Scout leader. “I was destined to be an outdoorsman,” said Brad, a rugged-looking man with a dark beard whose master’s thesis at Cal State Northridge was on “The Effects of the Outdoor Challenge on Underprivileged Youth.”
He specializes in rock climbing and interpretive hikes.
Former Park Ranger
Randy, head of program operations at the institute, became a Michigan state park ranger after high school. An expert on just about everything connected with the outdoors--”I never stop learning”--he teaches such esoteric skills as making beef jerky and setting a snare.
Other staffers include a native Chumash Indian who teaches basketry, an entomologist, a paleontologist and several naturalists.
Randy teaches the ropes courses, which are connected to the risk-management program that the institute provides for organizations such as the Internal Revenue Service and General Telephone.
The corporate program is on a larger scale than the four-hour ropes course that Greg and his family took, but the basic structure is the same.
Each of the five families who participated in the course paid $50. Some of the techniques were right out of the ‘60s--standing in a circle, squeezing the hand of the person on the right when the person on the left squeezes yours. Other exercises were designed to instill teamwork and trust. In one, Randy and his assistant, Tina Johann, had the participants fall backward off a table into a cradle of arms--the trick was to believe that the others would be there for you.
“These kinds of things let you get to know more about each family member,” said Greg’s father, Andy, there with his wife, Marilyn, and daughter, Jacey, 11. “As a parent, you get a lot of joy in sharing new experiences with your kids and watching them grow.”
Greg, of course, did a little growing when he survived the jump from the tree. He only had one complaint. “I lost my stomach,” he said. “I lost my stomach.”