OUTWARD BOUND

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WILDERNESS SKILLS SCHOOLS, PART II:

It's first week of June, and a chartered bus carrying 40 Outward Bound students is rolling down a highway paralleling the Blue River in central Colorado. At this time of year the Blue is flowing thick and muddy with snowmelt from the Gore and Ten Mile mountains. Towering above the valley floor are the sublime snow-covered summits that make up the two ranges. These mountains are rugged, some of the steepest in the state, but from a distance they appear to be no more than big rolling hills.

Eighty anxious eyes peer through the tinted bus windows as the students try to imagine what their Colorado Outward Bound School (COBS) experience will entail. The bus continues on its journey from Denver, where the students boarded three hours earlier, heading deeper into a majestic and remote country.

Waiting at a campground on the Blue River are nine COBS instructors, of which I am one. We laugh and joke around, trying to sustain a light and carefree atmosphere. Yet this is the first and most difficult day of a 23-day mountaineering course, and the moment the bus arrives we go to work.

"Here it comes!" someone shouts.

"Here we go!" announces Paul, the course director. Paul is responsible for eight instructors and the 40 students bearing down on us now.

When the bus pulls into the campground and has rolled to a stop, Paul darts through its doors before the students have a chance to disembark from their last link to the civilized world for the next 23 days. He greets them and gives a brief overview of the course, telling them everything they'll need to know to make it through the first hour of their Outward Bound experience: Change into shorts and running shoes, toss your luggage onto the waiting pickup truck, and leave all tobacco, booze and drugs behind.

Forty students file off the bus behind Paul. Some look excited, some tired, others bewildered.

"OK, we're gonna start things off with a little run up this road here," Paul an nounces as he points up a steep dirt road that wind its way into a forest of spruce and aspen. A few mumbles are heard among the students: "What is this guy, nuts?" "What have I gotten myself into?" After leading the students through a few warm-up stretches, one of the instructors leads off up the hill. Behind him the 40 students, most of whom aren't acclimated to the 8,000-foot elevation, shuffle off in a pack that strings out into a long line of runners, walkers and wheezers after only a few hundred feet.

This kickoff run of a mile or so is an Outward Bound tradition. In addition to being the first activity of the course, it sets the pace for the three strenuous weeks to come and gives the students a basis against which to gauge their physical improvement. Twenty-three days from now, the course will conclude with a second run, the "Outward Bound Marathon," which is 10 miles long. During that final run, most of the students think about how they felt on this little jog and can see the improvement that three weeks of rigorous living have made in them.

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