One Person’s Test of Sanity--and Survival

My legs punched postholes in the hip-deep snow. One misstep and I would tumble onto the rocks below.

I was in ecstasy. Alpenglow lit the granite flank of Big Bird Peak. Two thousand feet below were the misty beginnings of the Marble Fork of the Kaweah River.

My city-bred body was shaping up. As I stood surrounded by the granite grandeur of the Sierra, sucking pure air deep into my lungs, 30 years of life flashed before me and made sense. I was wet and cold, but for the first time, I knew I could make it.

It must have been on Day 6 of my two weeks with Pacific Crest Outward Bound School. I wasn’t keeping track. The pain in my knee kept me from thinking much. But the Outward Bound promise came through.

Outward Bound teaches rock climbing, sailing and how to camp without leaving a trace. There’s also talk in the brochures about working as a team, growing more compassionate and developing mental stamina--all strengths that could help you survive several weeks afloat at sea without food or water.

I signed up for a class called “Alpine Challenge,” hoping to learn mountaineering skills. The rest all sounded corny.

We met May 9 at Fresno Airport, hair shining clean, garments made out of high-performance synthetics still bright from the washer. There were high school and college students starting their summer with the fabled, rite-of-passage Outward Bound experience. There were weekend warriors, looking for something meatier than a 30-second bungee jump.

The Outward Bound instructors moved on legs as thick as the tree trunks on the mountains they appeared to have just emerged from. They drove us up a stomach-churning road through stands of sequoia to the Lodgepole Visitors Center in Sequoia National Park.

We split into small groups called patrols. My group had two men and three women. Leading us were our instructors, Peter and Dave.

We picked over our gear--stoves, fuel bottles, climbing ropes, a plastic sheet and a foam pad to lay between a sleeping bag and the snow. For food, we had bags of trail mix, noodles and grains, and cans of sardines. Plus rolls of brick-hard biscuits to be spread with peanut butter and cream cheese.

We squeezed what could fill a small room into our backpacks and hoisted them onto each other’s backs. One mile up the trail toward Mt. Silliman, I turned to Dave and said, “I’m not going to make it.”

He just looked at me. I realized it was too early to quit, so I pretended it was a joke and and marched on. The ligaments holding my hipbones in place felt as if they were about to rip apart.

By evening, I looked worse than Quasimodo after his public flogging. The others were groaning. We abandoned our destination for the day and set up camp. Some of us were too tired to eat.

The next three days were a blur. My right knee went out. It hurt so much I couldn’t speak. I have no pictures from those days. I planned an “I quit” speech each night before falling asleep.

But each morning, I would feel glad to still be there with this ragtag group of people.

Everyone seemed to be at a crossroads in life. Dan was about to start his first job out of college. Tina was a mathematician with a not-so-exciting job at an insurance company. Dave and Peter, serious desk-haters, were lamenting that few women were drawn to impoverished men with bad schedules. And I was about to turn 30.

We students commiserated with each other as Dave and Peter whipped us deeper into the beautiful Sierra. The pain from my knee transformed me into a blubbering child. I felt sorry for myself.

After we hit snow, my group couldn’t stand listening to me sniffle anymore and took the heaviest items from my pack and added them to their own.

I was saved by a two-day stopover below Mt. Silliman. We dropped our packs and practiced sliding down snow-covered slopes, headfirst and on our backs and stopping ourselves with an ice ax.

Another patrol crossed our path. One guy in their group quit the first day and had to be escorted out back to Lodgepole by an instructor. That could have been me.

After climbing Mt. Silliman, we struggled into our backpacks and moved on. It was a few miles into a typical 10-mile day that I rounded that corner below Big Bird Peak and decided I wouldn’t be evacuated--even if I had to crawl on all fours.

The other students were there to help me. We held out our hands to steady each other over boulders and gaps. We shared camp chores--tent pitching, screening dishwater and carrying the scum back to civilization. Joe, from Hawaii, valiantly forced down leftover food from dinners gone wrong so we wouldn’t have to carry it out.

Dave and Peter tried to teach us how to read a topographic map, but the closely set, squiggly lines were difficult to match to terrain. We wandered off course, wasting valuable daylight and energy.

Once, Dave and Peter yelled at us from an escarpment and pointed in the opposite direction. In our frustration, we yelled obscenities at them. Tensions mounted.

The Outward Bound “solo” came none too soon on Day 8. Each of us set up camp alone. We wrote in our journals and thought about life. We wrote letters to ourselves that would be mailed to us in six months. A small ration of trail mix, a few biscuits and a bit of rotten cheese was to last us two days.

It was a welcome rest. But when Peter finally came to pick me up, I had been packed for hours. The other students said they grew lonely too. The only company we had were legions of furry marmots that circled our camps and tried to steal our gear. We were glad to be back together, and the appreciation lasted the rest of the trip.

We ended the journey together, 50 miles and 12 days from where we began. We crossed a final bridge over the Kings River, fuming body odor, greasy hair falling onto sunburned, peeling faces, and stepped onto pavement. It wasn’t the first time I cried.

Now I care more about what I do than how I look. I feel strong.

I don’t know if I would crack in that lifeboat without food and water, but the lessons I learned on this trip will certainly prolong my sanity. For the first time in my life, I pushed my physical limits far beyond what my head told me was possible, and I watched victoriously as they fell away.