Scaling New Heights : Outward Bound Program Poses a Series of Challenges That Stretch the Mental and Physical Limits of Its Participants

Seventeen-year-old Brian Russell remembers the exact moment his life changed. It was during a three-day solo adventure that climaxed an Outward Bound expedition in the Sierra last summer.

Reliving that time, he said: “I hike to a beautiful spot with a small waterfall, a pond with fish and a little meadow up against a big cliff. I sit next to the waterfall and listen to it and think about stuff.

“I’d always try to keep busy, but there were not many things to do but think about your problems and things you want to change. . . . I did a lot of writing--letters to my parents and friends. . . . You totally re-evaluate your life. You get your priorities straight and you know what you want.”

The Brentwood School senior says the experience still colors everything from how he argues with his parents to how he approaches schoolwork.

Like Russell, an increasing number of Westside teens are discovering that an Outward Bound adventure tests their physical and mental limits. It has become a middle-class rite of passage.

Russell said he was reeling from his parents’ recent divorce when he--and they--decided he might benefit from three weeks in the wilds.

And did he? Russell laughs.

“It was a jolt from L.A. life! It gave me a good rush. It was definitely terrifying, but at the end it was fun. It is the most challenging thing I’ve ever done, although the physical part wasn’t as hard as the mental.”

Last year, 700 Southern Californians--more than half of them between 14 and 21 years old--embarked on the pricey excursions offered by Outward Bound’s Oregon-based Pacific Crest School, one of five such schools in the United States.

Besides teen-agers from affluent families, they included at-risk youths, aging businessmen and women in crisis--all trekking through the wilderness in small groups for different reasons, all becoming intimately familiar with moleskin, lightning storms, fasting and scaling sheer rock faces.

The formula that leads them to describe their experiences as both “grueling” and “life-changing” is quite simple, said Pacific Crest director Paul Dudley Hart of Portland, recently in Santa Monica to meet with the local staff at its Montana Avenue office.

“We take people away from the things that they’re accustomed to, place them in a situation that is profoundly alien to them and very challenging, and give them the means to succeed,” Hart said. “Everybody possesses an enormous amount of courage and strength, but very few of us have ever been given a tangible challenge to test that.

“In the old days, it used to happen in the fields or the frontier. It happens in war in a very negative sense. . . . We’re not getting those visceral challenges anymore.

“It’s interesting that the modern malaises are anxiety and tension,” Hart said. “The degree of anxiety or tension that somebody carries around with them is directly proportional to their knowledge of self. People who don’t know themselves very well are hugely anxious because they don’t know what they’ve got to call upon. . . . We allow people to learn what their bounds and resources are--their courage, their spirituality, their compassion and tolerance.”

Thus, while people may sign up for an outdoors adventure at sea or in the mountains, that adventure turns out to be a vehicle for a more important internal adventure, those who have participated say.

“The bottom line is old-fashioned character-building,” says David Bransky, Outward Bound regional director for Southern California. “You don’t have to be a Charles Atlas to go.”

Outward Bound got its start more than 50 years ago in Wales, when a German educator named Kurt Hahn was recruited to train young merchant seamen. The young men, though technically trained and physically fit, were dying at an alarmingly higher rate at sea than the so-called old salts, who had learned tenacity, teamwork and how to cope with adversity.

The program now has 38 schools in 26 countries, Hart said, with 300,000 alumni in the United States alone.

Hart, a stocky sailor who spent years in the Antarctic, says most people react to Outward Bound with a mixture of love and hate.

“I mean, under torrential rain on a dark night when your sleeping bag is wet, it’s hard to find joy,” he said. “But there is a sense of accomplishment that rises above that.

“There are very few people who hate every moment, and very few people who fail to hate at least one or two moments. It’s those moments that are a peak of learning. Some of the pain really does not come from the physical aspect, but from having to accept that we can’t control something.”

While the image of a frail youth clinging to a vertical rock raises questions of safety, Hart insists the danger is “actually synthetic rather than real” because of unobtrusive backup safety systems.

He said the school has had no deaths or serious injuries in the past 10 years. Initially, the instructors are in charge; by the expedition’s end, the students have mastered the requisite skills to make their own decisions.

Today, Outward Bound offers a variety of programs:

* Mountain, rafting and sea courses from eight to 42 days, for ages 14 and up, costing $1,000 to $3,000, with scholarships available.

* Police-sponsored programs for at-risk youth. The Torrance Police Department’s juvenile diversion program, for example, sends 20 youngsters each year to short courses at Joshua Tree National Monument and Red Rock Canyon as part of its counseling program.

* Model school ventures that will involve Culver City Middle School and Crossroads School this fall, as well as an intensive one-day course for pairs of private and urban school students.

Despite a host of similar wilderness companies and the effects of the recession, Outward Bound officials say there are waiting lists for most of its adventures. “This has been our best season in 10 years,” says development director Kathie Velazquez.

The nonprofit organization wastes little money on advertising. It hardly needs to, given the word-of-mouth praise from those who have “survived” a course. The Times interviewed about a dozen participants, none of them selected by Outward Bound officials; all were articulate, enthusiastic and nostalgic about the experience.

Stephen Gabor, 20, of Pacific Palisades, still talks about the rigors of his Outward Bound canoe trip six years ago in Minnesota.

“I think it is life-changing. We climbed up rocks and rappelled down and crossed snowy crevasses . . . that would freak the living day-lights out of most people. . . . We ran out of food and had to catch and cook frog legs.”

But life doesn’t require you to climb mountains, he was reminded.

“It does,” Gabor insisted, “though not literally. You keep on going with the same stamina and tenacity that got you over the mountain.” The young man said the experience helped him persist, despite two rejections, to win a spot in his school’s junior-year-abroad program. He soon heads for Paris.

Erick Bermudez, 19, said his three short Outward Bound trips through Torrance’s juvenile diversion program over the past two years have helped him improve his relationships with other people. “Now everything is happening for me,” he said, including studies at El Camino College.

And Pam Janssen, 21, of Lawndale, said it is the impossibility of rock-climbing five years ago that sticks in her mind. “I never thought I could ever do that. Looking at this wall I thought, ‘Yeah, right.’ But after going to the top, I thought, ‘Wow, you actually can do this!’ It gives you confidence not only for the trip but for when you come back.

“Homework? If I can climb that wall, I tell myself, I can do this. “

After going on a four-day course at Joshua Tree, Janssen won a scholarship to a three-week program in the Southern Sierra.

“That was . . . hell . But I got my life together, and now I’m in college.”