Welcome to College: Now Take a Hike

How’s this for a first taste of the college experience:

Darkness is closing in. Mosquitoes are swarming. And bears lurk in the woods.

A pair of teenagers manage to sling a rope over a high branch of a lodgepole pine. Others debate how to hang nylon sacks--stuffed with freeze-dried rice and beans, granola and gorp--high enough to be out of reach of the claws and jaws of a 350-pound black bear.

How high is high enough? Will a slip knot hold up? Could one of the bears snatch the prize by climbing onto a low-lying branch?

Most of these spanking-new Pomona College freshmen--who flew in two days before from Boston, New York, Lexington, Ky., and elsewhere--have never been on a backpacking trip.

None of them have ever seen the high Sierra, much less a bear in the wilds.

So as nightfall descends, they huddle in their tents and worry that the slightest rustle outside means a hulking intruder is nosing around the campsite.

This is freshman orientation, 1990s-style. And it’s not just at Pomona College.

It used to be that students starting college would be greeted on campus with a special lecture, an English composition placement test and, perhaps, an official cookout on the quad. Or, if they were lucky, they got invited to a very unofficial keg party.

But in a scene that’s becoming as commonplace on college campuses as turning leaves, thousands of new students first pile their gear into rented vans that whisk them to the wilderness for a few days of hiking, cycling, canoeing or rock climbing.

At the very least, freshmen who hit the trail before they hit the books get a chance to make some friends, pepper upperclassmen with questions and have fun before they plunge into the usual orientation, like the library tour.

But there’s something more at work here for these students who are probably making their first major break from family, friends and everything they’ve known.

Sure they’re smart and well-prepared, at least academically. Way too many honors courses and late-night cramming sessions have put them at the top of their class. But they’re teenagers too. Personalities under construction.

“The look of fear is absolutely the same on every new face,” said Daniel Robb, president of the National Orientation Directors Assn.

“You can see them thinking: ‘Am I going to fit in here? Am I going to have any friends? What am I going to do without my mother? What if I get an F on my first test?’ ”

So sending them into the wilderness carries a metaphoric message as well: Of course they will face unfamiliar, if not downright scary, territory as they begin their college adventure, but they can make it.

Comparing Notes, Waxing Philosophical

The parking lot at the Pomona campus in Claremont teems with 200 sleepy-eyed freshmen toting sleeping bags and packs. Some are heading to the Colorado River, others to Catalina.

Ten freshmen have picked a moderately strenuous hike to Cottonwood Lakes in the mountains above Lone Pine. They mill about, timidly awaiting instructions. Their stiff body language makes them easy to pick out from their three student leaders, who exude cool confidence as Pomona seniors.

Once on the road, freshman Tamara Zakim tries to break the ice by revealing a few details about herself and coaxing her new colleagues to compare notes.

How many siblings? Tamara, from Armonk, N.Y., has three older brothers, one younger. “I miss the younger one already,” she says.

Sports? Everyone has a passion. Jumal Qazi of New York City wrestled in the 119-pound weight class. Sheila Ormond of Washington, D.C., ran cross-country. Tamara, towering at 6-foot-1, was captain of her basketball team. Twenty-four points a game. “Basketball’s my life,” she says, turning her cap backward over her short-cropped hair.

Advanced Placement tests? Everyone’s got a fistful of 5s, the highest possible score, in various subjects, including calculus.

As the van grinds up the switchbacks to the trail head, the freshmen realize they have something else in common. They’ve been wrestling with Pomona’s reputation.

They picked the school because it’s ranked among the top five liberal arts colleges in the country. But none of their friends have ever heard of it.

Jumal says he feels “lucky” to have received Pomona’s acceptance letter and generous financial aid package. The 17-year-old son of a Manhattan coin laundry owner, he bemoans the fact that he only got 1490 out of 1600 on his SAT, which he calls a mediocre showing among his peers from New York’s highly selective Stuyvesant High.

He finds comfort in wearing a black T-shirt--every day of the four-day trip--that shows he is a standout. It lists him as a semifinalist in the prestigious Westinghouse Science Competition.

After dinner, the talk around the picnic table drifts from the red-faced humiliation of being carded for NC-17 movies to the unfairness of not being able to vote before age 18. Then it turns philosophical.

A freshman poses a question: “What would you rather do? Live a completely happy and fulfilled life and die when you were 30, or live a long, uneventful life?”

Much soul-searching ensues and then consensus: Thirty is a long way off. Plenty of time to live a rich and full life.

The always-restless Jumal hams it up as the New York City boy on his first wilderness trek. He shows off his bandaged toe, the first blister of the trip. He got it from his new leather Timberland boots--during the drive in the van.

Now, he’s trying his hand at pounding in a tent stake. “You might want to use a smaller rock,” student leader Mike Miller warns. Too late. Jumal has already hammered the stake into a curlicue.

As darkness falls, Tamara grows quiet. It’s an uncharacteristic mood for this buoyant 18-year-old.

But it’s been a long couple of days. She has just left her family. Pomona is four times as big as her prep school, the all-girl Greenwich Academy. There she was known by her nickname, “T-Funk,” tall Tamara with short spiky hair who is featured in the yearbook hanging from the basketball rim.

Surveying the campsite full of new classmates, she wonders if any one will emerge as a close friend. Peeling an orange, she says, “If you pull the rind off in one piece, it means someone loves you.”

As she unrolls her sleeping bag that night, she discovers a note tucked inside. It’s her mom’s handwriting: “Sleep well, schnookie.”

Two Approaches: Heavy and Light

Retreats in the wilderness have become popular for business executives as team-building exercises. Wilderness therapy programs for troubled teens are similarly en vogue.

The freshman wilderness trek is their academic hybrid. Scores have taken root on campuses around the country, from elite private schools like Duke, Princeton and Yale to public institutions like Humboldt State and the University of North Carolina.

So many freshmen venture into the woods from New England colleges that it’s tricky to find enough campsites along portions of the Appalachian Trail this time of year.

Typically, the excursions last two to six days. The trips are optional and cost a few hundred dollars.

Why do colleges promote them?

For starters, they have become a selling point in the competition for the best students. Mailings to incoming freshmen look more like travel brochures, with hearty students wearing little more than bathing suits and smiles.

Wilderness treks also are touted as a way to reduce dropout rates. The idea is to ease a teenager into college: A happy freshman is more likely to stick with it for the next four years.

One study showed that 81% of the students who went on the University of New Hampshire’s wilderness trip were still in college 3 1/2 years later, compared with 61% of those who did not. And the trekkers got better grades.

Of course, the freshman orientation trips are guided by different philosophies.

Some colleges strive to make a major imprint on these late adolescents. Often they incorporate a “ropes course” or other challenges that require students to solve problems as a team--sometimes while dangling from ropes high off the ground.

These more intense programs also emphasize deep reflection.

UC San Diego’s wilderness orientation offers a “solo” fast. For 24 hours, a freshman remains alone in the wilderness with some water, a journal and only an inspirational quote to chew on.

“It’s a time for them to reflect and to get to know their best friend and worst enemy,” said Sasha Paris, director of the program.

Other colleges don’t take it all quite so seriously. They model their programs after Dartmouth’s, the nation’s oldest, which was founded in 1935 on the principles of “fellowship and fun.”

Dartmouth freshmen tromp around New Hampshire’s White Mountains for three days then congregate at a mountain lodge for some old-fashioned college zaniness: dancing the salty dog rag, singing school songs and eating green eggs and ham, dyed the school’s color.

Pomona falls into this camp. Its handbook for orientation leaders puts it this way: “One of the primary purposes of these trips is to have fun and have fun making new friends. We’re not here to induce spiritual catharsis. . . .”

So Pomona is perfectly happy to see freshmen emerge from the wilderness with little more than a budding friendship or the self-satisfaction that they set a goal, like climbing a mountain, and conquered it.

All Signs of Pretense Vanish

Sweaty, tired and dusty, the Pomona backpackers finally reach Cottonwood Lakes and instantly flop down on the velvety meadow.

Jumal and Tamara sprawl on their packs and take a nap.

The three-hour hike was tougher than expected, mostly because of the energy-sapping altitude of 11,000 feet.

Call it bonding or just giddy exhaustion, but all pretense has vanished. Over a dinner of tortillas, cheese and reconstituted refried beans, the conversation drifts to, well, passing gas.

“I’ve never had gas,” declares freshman Brent Murakami. “I think it’s a myth. I also can’t imagine girls farting. It ruins the whole attraction thing.”

Bathroom humor rules the day among these young scholars.

After all, the freshmen have just been taught the skills of low-impact camping: how to bury their waste, pack out used toilet paper in zip-lock bags and spray--not spit--their mouthful of toothpaste over a wide area to dissipate any environmental impact.

As twilight fades, all 13 students squeeze into a four-person tent, driven inside by the cold and the aggressive mosquitoes. They play a word game into the night: Come up with as many names as possible of animals that begin with the letter “V.”

Tamara informs the group that she needs to shine a flashlight in the face of whoever is talking, so she can read that person’s lips. She has no hearing in one ear and only 20% in the other. Her new classmates don’t miss a beat. Their flashlights join with hers to spotlight the speaker.

In the morning, half the group decides to hang around camp. One freshman is hamstrung with altitude sickness. Another is tired, cold, lonely. “I miss my friends and family and I miss my teddy bear Dumpling and my stuffed Piggie, and I miss having a phone,” she writes in her notebook.

The others head off to climb New Army Pass, elevation 12,400.

On the trail, Jumal grows contemplative. “Getting into college is like climbing a mountain,” he says. “Then you get there, and there’s another mountain to climb. I guess life is like a series of mountains.”

As the terrain gets steeper, Katy Beckham gets nervous. She has been scared of heights since she fell off the uneven bars at high school and broke her arm.

She gamely trudges on, her boots crunching on the decomposing granite. The final switchback is blocked by a cornice of wind-scoured snow. The only way up is to scale the last 15 feet of rock, hand over hand, like a spider.

Katy reaches the top and can’t resist making a “Titanic” shout. “I’m king of the world!”

A New Reality Is Born on the Trail

Again dusk is falling and the students round up the food, trash and every other sweet-smelling item that might attract a hungry bear.

“Come on, give up your Chap Stick,” says student leader Mike. “Bears go crazy over one tube.”

Mike swears that it was a bear, not the wind, that violently shook his tent the night before. Others awakened in the dark from bear nightmares and snuggled deeper into their bags, too frightened to venture outside.

But the morning’s sunshine reveals no trace of bear. No paw prints. No evidence that one tried to shimmy up the tree and make a meal of the remaining provisions.

And so the camping trip imparts a lesson: Despite all the talk of bears, the students’ worst fears didn’t materialize. And so maybe their worries about flunking out or not making friends are overblown too.

Wilderness adventures often get a big buildup. Freshmen aren’t supposed to just make acquaintances, they’re supposed to bond with classmates.

Yet perhaps not every experience is profound.

For Tamara and Sheila the trip was about discovering they had some little things in common.

Picking through the gorp, they learned that they both like only green M&Ms.; Forget the other colors. Why even make them?

Down the trail they go, with newly acquired blisters and mosquito bites. The packs are much lighter and it’s all downhill.

Suddenly life on the trail doesn’t seem so hard, nor does the life that awaits them on campus. A new reality is born on the trail.

Sure, the dormitory doesn’t feel like home, nor does the cafeteria food taste like Mom’s.

But a dorm room no longer seems so small after three nights in a tent laid out like sardines in a can. “My bed seems all the much softer,” Jumal says.

As for the cafeteria food, well, after four days of trail mix and reconstituted beans, he says, “it’s much better now.”