by Jon Krakauer
Doug Nelson—a professor of outdoor education at Brigham Young University who spearheaded the aforementioned licensing reforms in the state of Utah—argues that it isn’t fair to tar the entire industry with the same brush. “All the bad press,” he points out, “is the result of a few bad programs. When it’s used right, the wilderness can be an incredibly powerful tool for helping troubled kids. We’ve found that you can do more in a month or two in the wild than you can in a year at a residential treatment center. Unfortunately, in the wrong hands, something that powerful can be very dangerous.”
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The belief that wilderness redeems the soul is as old as the Boy Scouts, as old as John Muir, as old as the Old Testament. But only in the last half-century has the concept of forging character on nature’s anvil been packaged into a booming business.
In the early days of World War II, German U-boats began sinking great numbers of Allied merchant ships, forcing thousands of crewmen into lifeboats on the stormy North Atlantic. Surprisingly, the youngest, strongest sailors were often the first to die in the open boats. Disturbed by the fact that “the younger men seemed to lack self-reliance, confidence, and a compassionate bond with their fellow crew members that was so vitally essential to meet the challenge of a crisis,” a German educator named Kurt Hahn decided to establish a school in Wales, christened Outward Bound, to rectify this deficiency.
After the war, Hahn’s school expanded, offering the same arduous outdoors curriculum as a tool for molding Britons into higher achievers in peacetime society. In 1962, Outward Bound transplanted the program to the United States, opening a branch in the mountains of western Colorado. The standard twenty-six-day course included rock-climbing, bust-ass backpacking, and a three-day wilderness “solo.”
Americans found the concept immensely appealing and signed up in swarms. Outward Bound opened additional schools from Maine to Oregon, and scores of OB imitators materialized to meet the unquenchable demand. By the 1970s, the nation was home to more than two hundred programs dedicated to self-improvement through outdoor adventure.
A disproportionate number of these OB-inspired programs originated in Provo, Utah, on the campus of Brigham Young University. The catalyst was an Idaho farm boy named Larry Dean Olsen who enrolled at BYU in the mid-1960s. Olsen was a self-taught survival buff who knew a lot about chipping arrowpoints, making snares, and living off the land. To help pay his way through college, he started teaching evening classes in the rudiments of backcountry survival to local hunters and fishermen.
In 1968, the university asked Olsen to lead an experimental “expedition,” based loosely on the OB model, for a group of students who were flunking out. The thirty-day course, held in the Utah desert, was a grueling physical trial. But most of the twenty-six kids who completed it showed a striking improvement in academic performance the following semester. It was promptly added to the standard undergraduate curriculum, proved to be hugely popular, and ultimately became a centerpiece of the university’s Department of Recreation Management and Youth Leadership.
Olsen—now in his fifties, a folksy, gregarious man with a fondness for buckskin clothing and didactic fireside yarns—went on to write a widely read book, Outdoor Survival Skills, which brought him minor celebrity. Although he was forced out of BYU in the early 1970s following allegations of mismanagement and sexual impropriety (“Larry liked the girls a little too much,” explains one of his colleagues), the success and popularity of BYU’s outdoor education curriculum continued to balloon after his departure.
BYU is closely affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; the culture that spawned Larry Olsen’s survival courses and the programs that followed was profoundly shaped by Mormon values. As a consequence, the BYU wilderness courses veered notably from the Outward Bound paradigm. The Mormon programs placed a greater emphasis on primitive skills—on living more directly off the land, on getting by without modern technology. And at their core was a spiritual component that had no equivalent in OB. The BYU courses were intended, first and foremost, to be deeply religious experiences—to promote faith in the Mormon ideal and prepare young Saints for the coming of the Last Days.
With the evangelical zeal endemic to Mormondom, graduates of the BYU courses established similar programs across the West. Most of these operated uneventfully, but there were serious setbacks that presaged what would happen to Aaron Bacon. In 1974, a twelve-year-old boy became dehydrated and died of heatstroke while enrolled in a program run by the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. The next year, a young woman died while hiking across Utah’s Burr Desert, also from dehydration, while participating in a course run by BYU. In each case, the staff was inexperienced, poorly trained, and inadequately equipped; both deaths would have been easily prevented with a few basic precautions.
“In those days,” explains Larry Wells, a BYU alumnus who currently directs an exemplary program called Wilderness Conquest, “the staff at these programs received almost no training in things like logistics or safety. Often there’d be only one instructor for every thirty or forty students. Nobody had radios. People didn’t carry enough canteens. Because we were doing ‘God’s work,’ there was a strong belief that God would look after everybody.”
The deaths in 1974 and 1975 served as a wake-up call. BYU hired Wells—who credits a BYU wilderness course with his own transformation from a seriously troubled youth to a responsible adult—to overhaul the program and establish adequate safety standards. But sending unruly juveniles into the wilderness is an inherently dangerous undertaking, and there continued to be accidents over the years that followed. In the mid-1980s, a thirteen-year-old boy fell from a cliff to his death while enrolled in a course run by the School of Urban and Wilderness Survival (SUWS), a commercial outfit with an otherwise spotless reputation. Another student contracted a fatal case of bubonic plague—he probably caught it from a squirrel—while attending another well-regarded commercial program, the Boulder Outdoor Survival School (BOSS). Vision Quest, a notorious wilderness program based in Tucson, Arizona, has racked up at least sixteen accidental deaths to date.
Most of the deaths cited above were noted by the news media, but no great hue and cry was raised, and wilderness treatment programs continued to proliferate through the 1980s. Like BOSS and SUWS, many of the new schools were launched by BYU alumni as privately owned, entrepreneurial ventures. By and large, however, none of the commercial programs made much money or attracted many students until a brash, charismatic young man named Steve Cartisano burst onto the scene in 1987. Applying the full brunt of his marketing genius, he quickly transformed a marginally solvent industry into a cash cow.
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Stephen Anthony Cartisano was born to a Cherokee mother and Italian-American father, from whom he inherited chiseled features and piercing eyes. His childhood in Modesto, California, he has reported, was not happy: One parent was addicted to heroin, the other beat him. Although Cartisano has been known to interpret the facts loosely, he insists that the torment he endured as a youngster gave him tremendous empathy for troubled teens, and eventually motivated him to make a career out of helping them.
Cartisano, who turned forty in August, joined the Air Force in 1974 and was made an instructor at the prestigious Fairchild Air Force Base Survival School—the school where Scott O’Grady, the F-16 pilot shot down over Bosnia last June, honed his survival skills. Eventually rising to the rank of staff sergeant, Cartisano became a parajumper with the elite 129th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Group, and in 1979 was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal for his role in a dangerous rescue in the Wasatch Range. While in the Air Force, he became close friends with a Mormon airman and was baptized into the LDS church. Soon thereafter, he moved to Utah and enrolled at Brigham Young University.
Cartisano cut a dashing figure on campus. Eager to launch a career in show business, he spent most of his time studying film and theater, and wrote a screenplay about t
he exploits of a crack Air Force pararescue squad: the hero of his script was a handsome, brooding parajumper of Mormon faith and Italian-Cherokee descent named Steve Montana. Cartisano never made it to Hollywood, nor did he earn a degree from BYU, but while he was a student, he worked briefly as an instructor in one of the school’s wilderness courses, and thereby found his calling.
After leaving academia, Cartisano took note of all the commercial wilderness programs being launched by BYU alumni and decided to start a school of his own. Toward that end he hired Doug Nelson—who had directed the BYU wilderness programs for many years and founded BOSS—as a consultant. “Steve told me he was going to charge nine thousand dollars for a two-month course,” Nelson recalls. “At the time, most commercial programs were charging something like five hundred for a thirty-day experience, and I told Steve there was no way anyone was going to pay that kind of money.”
Cartisano was undeterred. He christened his school the Challenger Foundation, advertised a course to be held in a remote corner of the Hawaiian Islands, and had little trouble finding parents willing to enroll their misbehaving offspring at nine bills a head. In January 1988, encouraged by this success, he moved Challenger to Utah and began running courses out of Escalante. He raised tuition to $12,500 and then $15,900, but the high cost did nothing to slow Challenger’s exploding enrollment. By the end of the year, Cartisano had fifty employees on the payroll and had taken in more than $3 million in revenue.
Like Outward Bound, most Mormon-run wilderness schools were strongly influenced by the burgeoning human potential movement. The Mormon programs subjected their students to intense physical challenges, but the kids were generally treated with care and sensitivity, and a lot of attention was paid to their “feelings.” Cartisano, coming from a gung-ho military background, disdained this softhearted, touchy-feely approach. Instead, he modeled his program on Vision Quest—a hard-as-nails school that had been inspired by the movie Billy Jack—and ran Challenger with the in-your-face discipline of a boot camp.
“There was nothing complicated about the Challenger philosophy,” Cartisano explains. “It was all about setting limits and sticking to them. Most of the kids we got were defiant, rebellious, and out of control. Every other type of treatment had failed for them. Many had been sent to us by the courts. We showed these kids that their actions had immediate consequences. The excuses they’d been using at home didn’t cut it with Mother Nature. We taught them to be responsible, we took the hard edge off of them. And the results we got were phenomenal.”
A videotape of a 1989 Challenger course shows a vanload of new students, looking shocked and confused, arriving at a remote desert location in the middle of the night to begin a sixty-three-day, five-hundred-mile forced march through the wilderness. A hulking bull of a man, wearing a bone necklace and an olive-drab biker-style bandanna, starts pounding on the van’s windows and screaming at the kids to assemble around a bonfire. “Move it! Move it!” he bellows. “Get over to that fire NOW!…My name is Horsehair. For the next sixty-three days, you’ll be under my care….Do you understand!”
“Yes, sir!” the kids answer in unison.
“I can’t hear you!”
“Yes, SIR!”
“I have a phrase that I use,” Horsehair explains impassively to the camera. “I’m gonna love you till it hurts—you.”
Horsehair—Cartisano’s field director and chief lieutenant—was an Air Force vet with nine years’ experience in military law enforcement. His legal name was Lance Paul Jaggar. He and another devout Mormon, Bill Henry—an Idaho acquaintance of Larry Olsen’s who’d been active with the Explorer Scouts—supervised the day-to-day operations out of Escalante, allowing Cartisano to concentrate on sales and promotion from his Provo-area home—a lavish residence that had previously been owned by golfer Billy Casper.
A brilliant promoter, affable and articulate, Cartisano persuaded his “good friend” Oliver North to put in an appearance in Escalante at the height of his Iran-Contra notoriety, and alerted The Salt Lake City Tribune to the visit. “It was just a couple of buddies getting together and me showing him my program,” Cartisano demurred in print. “He might have wanted to get some ideas for his own dealings with troubled youth.”
Cartisano hired a publicist who booked him on Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo—“all the big talk shows,” he boasts. “They loved me. For about a year, I was the darling of the media. I’d go on TV with kids who’d been through the program, these beautiful fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls who’d talk about how they’d been out on the street stealing and doing drugs and turning tricks until Challenger changed their ways.” It was an extremely effective pitch. Cartisano sealed the deal by guaranteeing that any Challenger alumnus who reverted to a life of delinquency could, for no additional charge, come back and repeat the course until he or she was straightened out.
“The television appearances were a marketing gold mine,” says an ex-associate of Cartisano’s. “Those talk shows are watched by precisely the audience Steve wanted to target. The phones were ringing off the hook. Parents begged him to take their kids. An incredible amount of money started rolling in. Unfortunately, Steve wasn’t used to having money and didn’t know how to handle it.”
When Cartisano would go on the road to recruit customers, says the ex-associate, “sometimes he’d spend two thousand dollars a week to rent a Lamborghini. He’d run up thousand-dollar-a-night hotel bills. He’d drop ten or twenty thousand bucks in a weekend wining and dining celebrities.” Despite all the money coming in, Challenger began having trouble paying its bills. Checks bounced. Creditors started complaining. The Internal Revenue Service inquired about $196,000 in unpaid corporate taxes.
At the same time, charges started to fly that Challenger staff, including Cartisano and two of his brothers, physically abused their students. According to Max Jackson, the former sheriff of Kane County (Challenger ran its courses in Kane and adjacent Garfield County), “we pulled one kid from the program who was so bruised and scarred he looked like he’d been at Auschwitz. When another kid tried to run away, Cartisano got in a helicopter, found him, flew him up to the top of a mesa, and slugged him in the gut a couple of times.”
Although Cartisano was married and had four children, Jackson alleges that “at one point he struck up a romance with the mother of one of his students. He talked her into giving him her Visa gold card with no credit limit. He ran up sixty-five thousand dollars in charges before she realized she’d been had. And at the same time Steve was sleeping with her and taking her money, he was also carrying on a sexual relationship with the woman’s thirteen-year-old daughter.
“Steve is real smooth, real slick,” Jackson reflects. “He likes to hear himself talk. But I’ll tell you what: I went to the FBI academy a couple years back, and in one of my classes we studied the typology of sociopaths. Out of a list of twenty characteristics, Steve was a perfect match with about nineteen of ’em.” By early 1990, Cartisano was embroiled in a number of lawsuits filed by creditors and disgruntled clients, and the state of Utah was investigating him on several fronts.
Cartisano dismisses his problems with the law as a personal vendetta—Sheriff Jackson and the state, he insists, were “out to get me. The charges were all based on allegations of messed-up kids who were pathological liars and master manipulators who would do anything to get out of the program. They knew that the fastest way to do that was to accuse the staff of abusing them.” Defiant and unbowed, in 1989 Cartisano proclaimed, “There’s no way on this earth I’ll ever allow any petty bureaucrat to take over this program and turn it from a survival camp into a summer camp. They’re going to find out they’re messing with the wrong guy.”
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As Cartisano’s financial and legal difficulties mounted, the Challenger admissions director—a woman named Gayle Palmer—quit to start her own wilderness therapy company, which she christened Summit Quest. Palmer had virtually no backcountry experience, and
in fact knew little about either wilderness or therapy beyond what she’d gleaned from pitching Challenger courses to prospective clients. “But Palmer got tired of working for Steve,” says Doug Nelson, “and decided she could run a program at least as well as he could, so she left Challenger, hung out her shingle, and went into business.”
Five students were enrolled in the inaugural Summit Quest course, which cost $13,900 and was scheduled to last the canonical sixty-three days. Palmer sent the group to the arid Shivwits Plateau, near the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, under the supervision of two young counselors working for minimum wage. During the first several days, Michelle Sutton—a pretty, not particularly troubled fifteen-year-old who had enrolled voluntarily to regain self-esteem lost during a recent date rape—complained repeatedly of exhaustion, sunburn, and nausea. As the group hiked through the desert, she vomited up most of the water she tried to drink, and pleaded that she could go no farther. The lead counselor—who had been instructed to ignore such protestations as manipulative behavior—told Sutton, “You have been sloughing off. You are now being warned.”
On May 9, 1990, Sutton continued to complain of exhaustion and dizziness, and collapsed repeatedly during an ascent of 7,072-foot Mount Dellenbaugh. She begged for water, having consumed all of hers, but liquids were rationed and the other students were forbidden to share. Michelle’s speech became slurred, she cried out that she couldn’t see, and then she lost consciousness and died. Because the counselors didn’t have a functioning radio, they weren’t able to summon help until the following day.
Gayle Palmer insisted that Sutton had succumbed to a drug overdose, but the coroner found no drugs in her system and determined the cause of death to be dehydration. Cartisano was quick to lash out at Palmer in the media, accusing her of running a criminally incompetent program that besmirched the good reputation of the entire industry. “At Challenger,” he gloated, “a tragedy like the one that killed Michelle Sutton could never happen.”