Through the Woods
By Sierra Crane-Murdoch. Photographs by Kitty and Craig Fritz, Twin Lens Images
Wilderness therapy students fight their demons in the Colorado Rockies.
One day in early June, shaded by a wind-rattled ponderosa, Dr. Jade Wimberley ’92 lifts the arm of a boy with nervous eyes. She wraps two canvas flaps around his bicep, squeezes a pump several times, and lets her meter hiss and deflate. “Are you afraid of the dark?” she asks quietly, “or of lightning?” No, says the boy; he likes storms. What was it, then, that made him call for the guides? He had been on his “solo,” a student’s rite of pas- sage before graduating from Open Sky Wilderness Therapy, and he had done well until left alone. Even though the guides were close, he became lonely. “At home, didn’t you spend time by yourself in your room?” Wimberley asks him. Yes, but that was different, he says. He had his phone and could text his friends. “When you first got here you’d hardly look at us,” says Wimberley. “I see a lot of life coming back.” She brushes her fingers across a flaking callus on his foot. “Your old layers are coming off. The old Jeffrey.”
The week had been difficult for Jeffrey* and the other adolescent boys in Team Avatar. Several had vomited— an unwashed hand at dinner the likely culprit—and four new students had joined the group. One of the boys, determined to leave as soon as he arrived, faked stomach pain, and a guide took him to the hospital. The doctors found nothing wrong. On the ride home, the boy said he had given up; he wouldn’t try again. “Everything we do here has therapeutic value,” the guide tells me. “Every piece of their life is carefully considered and managed.”
In a remote pine forest in southwestern Colorado, just west of the La Plata Mountains, “management” means something very different from setting curfews or locking the liquor cabinet. Students in the program operate out of a base camp, where teams live in tipis, cook their own food, collect water, and build fires. Several days a week, they venture off accompanied by guides to hike and explore the Rockies. During these expeditions, students practice meditation and meet with therapists using the natural world as a backdrop for self-reflection. There are rules: Students may speak to one another only within earshot of their guides. They must ask permission to go to the bathroom, fetch belongings from the tipi, or handle knives to cook dinner or carve spoons. For every emotion, they have a process to express it. Everything they take into the field, down to their underwear, comes from the program warehouse. If a student threatens to hurt himself or run away, a guide won’t leave his side. And any question is fair: Is he sad? Has he slept? When did he last defecate? Why did he eat one helping, not two?
The staff members at Open Sky have good reason to be careful; one death on their watch, and the program could shut down. In six years of operation, more than 500 students have attended without major incident. (The only broken bone was a mother’s; she slipped and fell on an icy rock.) But deaths at other wilderness therapy programs have dampened the industry. Most infamous was Aaron Bacon’s in 1989, when parents sent their wayward son to the Utah desert. Tough love turned to neglect, Bacon’s complaints were dismissed as lies, and he died of a leaky intestine. There have been more than a dozen deaths since, some due to pre-existing conditions, others to dehydration, physical restraint, or suicide. Parents of victims have testified before Congress, calling wilderness therapy “boot camp,” and some states have drafted laws to regulate the industry. Seven programs have closed this year.
But Open Sky is far from boot camp. The food is local and organic; the staff is experienced and well trained, treating patients who seek their help for everything from depression to substance abuse to eating disorders to ADD.
*Some names and details have been changed in order to protect the identities of students and their families.
