Classic Krakauer

by Jon Krakauer

  Conservationists are unhappy about this and other aspects of ANILCA. In a questionable interpretation of the regulations, subsistence hunters drive all-terrain vehicles through Gates with impunity. Miles of ruts made by eight-wheeled amphibious machines known as Argos now crisscross the tundra around Anaktuvuk Pass and scar several valleys across the northeast quadrant of the park.

  A controversial compromise was hammered out between the Nunamiut and the Park Service in the summer of 1994 that promises to contain the environmental damage done by ATVs. The deal rearranges park wilderness boundaries, allowing the use of ATVs in 200,000 acres of ancestral hunting grounds but prohibiting mechanized access beyond these mutually recognized areas.

  ATV tracks are nowhere in evidence on the back side of the Arrigetch massif, in any case, where Peggy, Roman, and I are camped in the rain at the foot of a mountain that looks like an Arctic version of Yosemite’s Half Dome. The terrain here, like most of the higher reaches of the Brooks Range, is much too rugged for Argos, and few hikers wander this far from the navigable rivers. The only tracks we’ve seen belong to caribou, Dall sheep, and bears.

  “For dinner tonight, how about potato flakes and macaroni?” Roman asks as raindrops drum on the tent fly. “They taste great together.”

  “That’s what you said about the tuna and spaghetti,” Peggy replies dubiously. We decide to dine on freeze-dried chili instead.

  In the morning, Peggy finds a week-old grizzly kill just beyond camp—the half-eaten carcass of a young caribou. Wondering when the bear will return to eat the rest of it, we try to take our minds off the subject of grizzlies by investigating the glassy chunks of quartz, some as large as household appliances, that lie scattered across the surrounding tundra like pieces of petrified ice.

  Striking camp and moving on, we struggle up a steep pass as the storm builds to a howling gale. Twenty years ago, my friends and I scrambled easily over this same pass on a sunbaked 80-degree afternoon. Now horizontal sleet sprays the cliffs that cap the divide, making the rock too slippery to attempt without technical climbing gear. Pulling coils of rope from our packs, we spend the next three hours negotiating a five-hundred-foot precipice, while icy water fills our boots and dribbles down upstretched arms.

  On the far side of the pass, shivering uncontrollably and soaked to the skin, we escape the wind but remain in dense fog that restricts visibility to a few dozen yards. Navigating by compass and altimeter, we pick our way through a dreamscape of lush heaths and tortured stone. Waterfalls tumble over sprawling glacier-polished slabs streaked with orange lichens. Massive boulders appear out of the mist, jutting from meadows carpeted in heather, moss, and tufted Dryas that would put the loveliest Japanese garden to shame.

  My feet hurt. My pack feels like it weighs two hundred pounds. I’m bone-tired and dripping wet, and want very badly to stop walking and crawl into my sleeping bag. In forty-eight hours, however, an airplane is scheduled to meet us at a distant lake. If we are to arrive by the appointed day, it is imperative that we keep moving. There is still one more precipitous pass to climb before we can rest.

  People who have never ventured into the back beyond might well wonder why anyone would subject himself to such suffering. As we trudge forward on exhausted legs, the answer is everywhere I direct my gaze. The Brooks Range is such a seductive place to visit, moreover, not in spite of the incumbent hardships, but precisely because of them. The fact that admission to this Eden requires a toll paid in sweat, pain, and fear makes its beauty all the more intoxicating.

  It’s after midnight when we reach the base of the next pass. The slope is steep and the footing loose, but as we push stubbornly upward, the fog lifts, unveiling a panorama of ripsaw mountains in the fading light. Scraps of cloud wrap the summits like gauze. The ghostly blue tongue of a glacier hangs from a nearby ridge. By and by we stand atop the pass, a shank of wind-scoured rock marking the Arctic Divide—the hydrographic apex of the continent. Snowmelt burbling from the cliffs at my back is bound for the Arctic Ocean; ahead, in the valley at my feet, we will camp tonight beside a creek that flows into the Pacific.

  I’ll be happy as hell to finally make camp. I look forward to a long, sybaritic soak, come tomorrow afternoon, in the hot spring that lies a half-day walk down the valley. But the thought of our impending departure already saddens me. I’m not ready for the trip to be over.

  As Bob Marshall wrote six decades ago at the conclusion of an extended Brooks Range sojourn, “In a day I should be in Fairbanks…in a week in Seattle and the great, thumping, modern world. I should be living once more among the accumulated accomplishments of man. The world with its present population needs these accomplishments. It cannot live on wilderness, except incidentally and sporadically. Nevertheless, to four human beings, just back from the source streams of the Koyukuk, no comfort, no security, no invention, no brilliant thought which the modern world had to offer could provide half the elation of the days spent in the little-explored, uninhabited world of the Arctic wilderness.”

  PUBLISHED IN SMITHSONIAN, JUNE 1995

  Loving Them to Death

  The long-distance connection was good, but as Sally Bacon held the phone to her ear in her Phoenix kitchen, she couldn’t make sense of what she was hearing. Thirty days earlier, she’d sent her sixteen-year-old son, Aaron, to a Utah-based wilderness school called North Star Expeditions. And now some woman from North Star was telling her, “Aaron is down. We can’t get a pulse.”

  “What does that mean, you can’t get a pulse?” Sally inquired, uncomprehending.

  “Aaron’s been airlifted to the hospital in Page, Arizona,” replied the disembodied female voice. “Call your husband. He’s been given the hospital phone number.” Sally frantically called her spouse, Bob Bacon, at his office; sounding numb, he repeated what he knew: Aaron had apparently collapsed in the desert. It was a freak accident. There was nothing anyone could do. Their son was dead.

  On March 1, 1994, the Bacons had enrolled Aaron in a sixty-three-day North Star course conducted in the sandstone badlands of southern Utah, near the small town of Escalante. He was a funny, articulate kid who wrote prizewinning poetry and excelled academically. But early in his sophomore year at Phoenix’s Central High School, Aaron started smoking marijuana every day and ditching classes. His grades plummeted. Bob and Sally repeatedly caught him lying to them. He grew increasingly sullen, and succumbed to frequent crying jags.

  That January, Aaron—a tall, skinny youth with shoulder-length hair—had been jumped by a gang of Crips in the school parking lot. Although he vehemently denied being a gangbanger, witnesses reported that the Crips called him Rabbit, an apparent gang moniker, and acted as if they knew Aaron well. Sally, an artist and part-time real estate agent, and Bob, an eminent Phoenix architect, worried that he had been buying weed from the Crips, or maybe even selling it to them. “That really scared us,” says Sally. “Aaron seemed to be caught in a big downhill spiral.” The Bacons decided the time had come to take serious measures.

  Two years previously, the Bacons had sent Aaron’s older brother, Jarid, to Hazelden, the renowned Minnesota clinic, to be treated for drug addiction. Despite spending thirty days there—at a cost of $20,000—within two weeks of returning home, he started using again. “We didn’t think a residential facility like that was best for Aaron,” says Sally. “His problems didn’t seem as severe as Jarid’s. We wanted to try something else first.”

  From a friend of a friend, Sally had heard about a company called North Star that was reportedly quite successful at turning around troubled adolescents. North Star’s program was based on an increasingly popular regimen known as wilderness therapy: a blend of intensive counseling, “tough love,” and Spartan hikes through the desert—it sounded to Sally like a cross between the Betty Ford Center and Outward Bound. “Students at North Star Expeditions learn that Mother Nature does not make exceptions,” explained the brochure she received in the mail. “They learn responsibility, self-discipline, and motivati
on.”

  Tuition for the two-month program was $13,900, plus another $775 if the Bacons wished to have Aaron “escorted” to Escalante by North Star personnel, which the company strongly recommended. Bob’s design and consulting business, once prosperous, had lately been teetering on the brink of insolvency, and the Bacons no longer had that kind of cash at their disposal. But after talking to the owners of North Star and several parents whose kids had been helped by the program, says Sally, “we were given a lot of hope that North Star was going to build Aaron’s self-esteem. I knew it would be rigorous, but I pictured him out there with God and nature, hiking all day, discussing his issues with therapists around the campfire at night. I thought it would be perfect for him.”

  Still, the Bacons had concerns, which they expressed during a long meeting at a Phoenix hotel with Lance and Barbara Jaggar, two of North Star’s owners. “I was worried because Aaron was very, very thin,” says Sally, “but Barbara assured me, ‘Oh, we would never let any of our students lose weight.’”

  Bob warned the Jaggars that Aaron didn’t respond favorably to intimidation. “Don’t worry,” insisted Lance, a 280-pound former military policeman with an imposing mien and a neck like a fire hydrant. “I have a special gift for working with kids. They really open up to me.” Convinced, Sally and Bob took out a second mortgage to pay for the course, and, without telling Aaron, signed him up.

  At six A.M. on March 1, Aaron awoke to the sound of the family’s three shar-peis growling outside his bedroom door. A moment later, his father walked in with Lance Jaggar and Jaggar’s brother-in-law, Don Burkhart. Taking Aaron’s arm in his meaty grip, Jaggar announced, “You’re coming with me. If I detect any resistance, I’ll assume you are trying to get away and I’ll take the appropriate action. Do I make myself clear?”

  As Aaron was led out of the house barefoot, Sally attempted to hug her terrified son, but Jaggar wouldn’t release the boy’s arms. Wanting to appear resolute, trying not to cry, she took his face in her hands and declared, “I love you. I don’t want you to be afraid. This is what’s best.” Then Jaggar hustled the boy outside, drove to the local airport, and flew Aaron to Escalante in a single-engine Cessna.

  Over the next month, Sally called North Star several times a week to see how Aaron was progressing. The news was not encouraging. Her son, said North Star spokeswoman Daryl Bartholomew, was “belligerent and a whiner. All the other kids resented him.” And the reports only became more negative as time went on. During a long phone conversation on March 30, Bartholomew informed Mrs. Bacon that Aaron’s attitude was in fact so bad that it looked like he was going to have to repeat the program.

  Jarid took Sally out to lunch that afternoon, during which he admonished her for sending Aaron to North Star. “You overreacted,” Sally was scolded by her oldest son. “Aaron’s problems aren’t that serious. He doesn’t belong at a place like that.”

  Twenty-four hours later, Aaron was dead. According to the autopsy, the cause of death was acute peritonitis resulting from a perforated ulcer. The contents of Aaron’s gastrointestinal tract had leaked through two holes in his small intestine, spreading toxins and a massive infection throughout his abdominal cavity.

  North Star explained that the ailment had surfaced without warning, so suddenly that heroic efforts by their staff in the field, a team of EMTs, and an emergency medical helicopter could do nothing to save Aaron’s life. Preliminary reports from the Garfield County sheriff seemed to confirm North Star’s contention that the tragedy was unavoidable, a freak accident.

  Bob and Sally were shattered by the news. The last time they had seen or spoken with Aaron was the morning Jaggar had taken him forcibly from their home, frightened and bewildered. They had never had an opportunity to explain to their son why they were sending him to North Star. “After Aaron died,” Sally says, “all I wanted was to get his body back. I wanted to hold him and say good-bye. I wanted a chance to apologize.”

  When the body arrived at a Phoenix mortuary three days later, however, guilt gave way to anger. “As soon as I saw Aaron’s face,” Sally insists, “I knew something wasn’t right.” Pulling the sheet from the body, she was confronted with a visibly battered, extremely emaciated corpse. She started screaming hysterically and had to cover her eyes.

  “His legs were like toothpicks,” Sally reports, breaking into sobs. “His hip bones stuck way out, his ribs—he looked like a concentration-camp victim. There were bruises from the tip of his toes to the top of his head, open sores up and down the inside of his thighs. The only way we were even able to recognize him was a childhood scar above his right eye. The mortician told us he’d never seen a body in such bad shape.”

  “Right then it became obvious to us that Aaron’s death was not an accident,” says Bob Bacon. “We knew that something horrible had been done to him.”

  * * *

  —

  At the bottom of a ravine slicing into the parched uplands of central Arizona, an alligator lizard scurries up a boulder in the withering sun. A big, gawky sixteen-year-old—his cherubic face smudged with soot and bracketed by blond Botticelli curls—spies the reptile and plucks it from the rock with a lightning-quick lunge. “This is the tenth lizard I’ve caught,” Craig announces proudly, clutching the quarry in his pudgy fingers. Then he slices off its head, pops it into his mouth, and gulps it down.

  Craig is enrolled in a nine-week treatment program for troubled adolescents run by the Anasazi Foundation, a nonprofit corporation based in Mesa, Arizona. He is presently camped beside a rock-choked creek with three other wayward teens and their three college-age counselors. Some forty other Anasazi students and their keepers are sprinkled among the adjacent canyons.

  As Craig stokes the fire, Danny, fifteen, and Stuart, fourteen, hunker in the sand nearby, frowning in silence as they scribble in the journals they keep as part of their unorthodox treatment. Suddenly the quiet is broken by the deafening whump-whump-whump of a helicopter, which spirals down from the simmering sky to alight behind a nearby ridge. A terse radio conversation reveals that a student from another group, in the throes of methamphetamine withdrawal, is being evacuated to a distant hospital. As it turns out, the boy’s condition isn’t serious—he apparently faked a seizure to get out of the program—but in the wake of the “North Star incident” (as the counselors distastefully refer to it), the people who call the shots at Anasazi aren’t taking any chances.

  Sometime next winter, Lance Jaggar and seven other North Star employees, charged with felony child abuse and neglect in Aaron Bacon’s death, will stand trial in Panguitch, Utah. Though Bacon wasn’t the first teenager to die during wilderness therapy—nationwide, more than a dozen other deaths have occurred since such programs came into being in the seventies—the horror of his last days, detailed in a personal journal, has stirred up a hurricane of media attention. It has also generated unprecedented concern about the multimillion-dollar wilderness therapy industry.

  The population of dysfunctional families and out-of-control adolescents is huge and growing. The demand for youth treatment far exceeds the capacity of available facilities. “There are a lot of desperate parents out there,” muses Lewis Glenn, who oversees safety at Outward Bound USA, which has adapted a relatively small number of its courses for troubled adolescents and rejects the tough-love approach. “And many of them are looking for a quick fix: ‘Here’s my money; take my messed-up kid for a month and make him better.’”

  Regardless of how the Bacon trial turns out, its long-term significance will rest on the crucial questions it has raised about wilderness therapy. Does it really work? How often? And at what risk? Who sees to it that the camps offer bona fide therapy and not just clumsy behavior modification?

  As yet, none of these questions has been adequately answered. Nationwide, more than 120 companies are in the business of wilderness therapy, and a small but significant number of them—perhaps two dozen—employ harsh methods. By definition, treatment conducted miles from any road is
n’t easy to monitor. If the Bacon case is any indication, a flurry of vaunted regulations enacted five years ago by the state of Utah (in reaction to two other fatalities in Utah-based programs) accomplished little beyond giving the public a false sense of security.

  Opinions about how society should respond range widely. In Panguitch—where North Star’s attorneys will argue that Bacon was a faker whose genuine problems were ignored because he cried wolf too often—parents of other students in Bacon’s group will maintain that North Star saved their kids from such evils as drug abuse, prostitution, and satanism, and should be allowed to resume business.

  Others see the tragedy as a clear sign that tighter controls are warranted. “North Star’s troubles have tainted the whole industry,” laments Archie Buie, the founder of an organization called the National Association of Therapeutic Wilderness Camps. Comprising some thirty wilderness schools, the NATWC was formed in the wake of the Bacon fatality to establish accreditation standards and weed out dangerous operations.

  Cathy Sutton, whose daughter Michelle died in 1990 at an inept wilderness school called Summit Quest, applauds the NATWC’s intentions but remains skeptical that the industry can be policed from within. “There is too much money to be made by duping parents, abusing children, and risking lives,” she declares bitterly. “There needs to be more government oversight.” Sutton is using the $345,000 settlement she received from Summit Quest’s insurer to establish a watchdog group of her own, the Michelle Sutton Foundation for Camp Safety.

  Arguing that North Star is by no means the only program flirting with disaster, Sutton is particularly concerned about a New Mexico–based wilderness therapy camp called Pathfinders, run by a former Vietnam fighter-jet pilot named Michael Parr. Despite documented charges of abuse and an ongoing state investigation into its practices, Pathfinders continues to operate with impunity, at full capacity.