by Jon Krakauer
Just six weeks later, it did. On June 27, 1990, four days after enrolling in Challenger, a sixteen-year-old Florida girl named Kristen Chase collapsed after completing a five-mile hike in near-100-degree heat. Once again, her counselors had thought she was faking it when she’d brought her problems to their attention. The counselors carried a radio, but instead of immediately calling for medical assistance when Chase went down, they tried to carry her to camp, and while they were doing so, her heart stopped beating.
The incident occurred south of Escalante on a high mesa called Fifty Mile Bench. During a previous emergency Cartisano had relied on the services of Classic Life Flight a company that operated a fully equipped medical helicopter out of Page, Arizona. Classic could have flown to the site within twenty-five minutes, but Cartisano had been feuding with the company over an unpaid bill, so a tour helicopter from Bryce Canyon was called instead; by the time it finally arrived, two hours had passed since Chase had stopped breathing. The coroner attributed the death, like that of Michelle Sutton, to hyperthermia and dehydration—the most basic and easily prevented hazard of desert travel.
Following Kristen Chase’s death, the state of Utah charged Cartisano and his field director, Lance “Horsehair” Jaggar, with negligent homicide and nine counts of child abuse involving not only Chase, but other Challenger students as well. Jaggar, however, cut a deal with the Kane County prosecutor: he agreed to testify against Cartisano in return for having all charges against him dismissed.
The trial was held in Kanab, Utah, in September 1991. Jaggar and other Challenger employees testified under oath about beatings and other abusive treatment. “We had Cartisano on the ropes,” says Sheriff Max Jackson. After five days of testimony, however, a mistrial was called when defense attorneys pointed out that the judge had forgotten to read the charges to the jury at the commencement of the proceedings.
The case was retried eight months later in the Salt Lake City area. “The second time around,” says Jackson, “Cartisano knew what the prosecution’s game plan was, and brought in a high-dollar attorney from New York. And then in the middle of everything, the prosecuting attorney started drinking real heavy and I had to arrest him for DUI. The upshot was, Cartisano was found not guilty. He got off scot-free.”
Afterward, one of the jury members explained their verdict: “We weren’t saying Cartisano was innocent, we were saying the prosecution didn’t prove he was guilty….We all felt like the program had some real problems.”
Despite its failure to convict Cartisano, the state of Utah resolved to monitor the wilderness therapy industry much more closely. Many concerned individuals within the industry, including Doug Nelson and Larry Wells, supported the crackdown and came forward to help draft a set of strict regulations. Prominent among the reformers pushing for the tough new law were Lance Jaggar and Bill Henry, who zealously decried the abuses of their former employer, Steve Cartisano.
Jaggar and Henry had earlier announced their intention to start a wilderness therapy program of their own. They put together the paperwork, submitted it to the appropriate agencies, and in October 1990, were granted a license to operate in the state of Utah. Three months after the death of Kristen Chase, the two individuals considered by many to bear most of the responsibility for that tragedy were back in business. They called their new enterprise North Star Expeditions.
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“Of all the regions of the United States the Mormon Country is the least known outside,” observed the late Wallace Stegner.
For all the Chambers of Commerce which toot the scenic wonders of the red rock plateaus and mountain lakes, the Mormon Country remains comparatively untouched by the tourist traffic; the society which is actually more interesting than the country in which it was planted keeps to itself, aloof and as self-sufficient as Brigham could ever have hoped it to be.
If Mormon society strikes outsiders as insular and hard to fathom, it is particularly so in the small, isolated towns that rise from the wind-scoured slickrock of southern Utah. Escalante, in Garfield County, is one such community. In the county seat of Panguitch, seventy miles to the west, where Jaggar, Henry, and six North Star employees will be tried this winter for the death of Aaron Bacon, a clerk in the sheriff’s office remarks, unbidden, “They’re a different kind of people over in Escalante. You ask me, everybody who lives there is weird.”
Escalante (pronounced “es-ka-LANT” in the local patois) has had an influx of California retirees in recent years—the population has swelled to about eight hundred—and a new motel recently went up to siphon a few dollars from tourists passing through town on the national park circuit, yet the townsfolk merely tolerate these intruders—they don’t welcome them. When Cartisano brought Challenger to Escalante in 1988, many of the locals were initially wary. But it was a good Mormon enterprise, and field director Lance Jaggar married a local girl—Barb Reynolds, from nearby Tropic. The company and its payroll provided a significant boost to the moribund local economy. Eventually the Challenger crew gained a measure of acceptance.
By the time Challenger, minus Cartisano, transmogrified into North Star (the name changed, but many of the personnel remained the same), the company had insinuated itself tightly into the civic fabric. When the state and the media started asking pointed questions about Aaron Bacon’s death, most of the town rallied to North Star’s defense. At the Circle D restaurant, a remark about Bacon prompts a curt warning from the waitress: “That’s a real touchy subject around here. He was a drug addict, his parents was drug addicts, and now that he’s dead, they want to blame somebody, so they’re trying to wreck the lives of the folks who was trying to help him.”
Aaron Bacon arrived in Escalante on March 1, 1994, in the custody of Lance and Barbara Jaggar. He was strip-searched, issued cheap boots and backpacking equipment, and then driven out into the desert to begin a ten-day acclimation process. Escalante lies 5,600 feet above sea level, and in March the weather there is harsh and wintry. As part of their treatment, students were required to keep journals, in which they were forbidden to use obscenities or “use the name of the Lord in vain.” The first backcountry entry in Bacon’s journal reads:
I’ve been shaking from the cold since I got here. My body being used to the weather in Phoenix is going into shock. I feel like I’m going to die….I am scared. I don’t know when I can talk or if I can.
Following the deaths of Michelle Sutton and Kristen Chase in 1990, the state of Utah enacted a codex of strict new regulations for the wilderness therapy industry. Under the new law, the weight of a student’s backpack was not to exceed 30 percent of body weight. Each student was to have a sleeping bag, shelter, and ground pad whenever the temperature dropped below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and a weekly change of clean clothing. Hiking was never to “exceed the physical capability of the weakest member of the group.” Students were to receive a minimum of 1,800 calories of food per day. A single violation was grounds to suspend an operator’s license.
Responsibility for enforcing the regulations, however, fell to a lone civil servant—a rotund, balding man named Ken Stettler, who was supposed to monitor more than a hundred youth treatment companies statewide. In fact, it was impossible for him to keep on top of that many programs, and North Star was among those that escaped close scrutiny. Stettler was a devout Mormon who knew Jaggar and Henry well and, as fellow Saints, trusted them implicitly—having been leading advocates of the tough new rules, he assumed they would abide by them.
(Stettler’s confidence in Jaggar and Henry would remain steadfast even after Bacon’s death. Immediately postmortem, he cleared North Star of any wrongdoing and allowed the program to keep operating—which it did for the next six months, until the Garfield County sheriff opened a criminal investigation in October 1994.)
But Jaggar and Henry made a mockery of Stettler’s trust and brazenly flouted the regulations. Thirty-three students were enrolled at the time of Bacon’s arrival, even though the school’s land-use
permit limited enrollment to twenty-six. Food was strictly rationed. Students were deprived of provisions, sleeping bags, and shelter as a matter of course.
Like Challenger, the North Star program was sixty-three days long and promised to take back misbehaving alumni at no additional charge. The counselors in the field were mostly twenty- and twenty-one-year-old high school graduates without formal training of any kind; the starting salary was $1,000 a month.
There was one credentialed therapist on the payroll—David “Doc Dave” Jensen, a clinical social worker—but Aaron saw him only once, on March 6. Following the Challenger model, therapy as it was dispensed by the North Star staff consisted almost exclusively of intimidation, deprivation, and paramilitary discipline. The program purported to build self-esteem, but only after the will of each student had been thoroughly and utterly broken.
Five days after arriving in Escalante, Bacon learned that one of his counselors had worked for Challenger. He noted in his journal that he’d once seen a television show about Challenger, and had heard that one of their students had died of a drug overdose. He didn’t know that drugs played no part in the death of Kristen Chase, or that the tragedy had happened on the mesa that dominated the nearby skyline. Nor was he aware that Lance Jaggar, the man who now controlled his fate, had been charged with negligent homicide in the case.
Bacon was driven into town on March 7, where his shoulder-length hair was cut off and he was given a medical exam by a physician’s assistant making a weekly visit from Panguitch (there is no doctor in Escalante, or even a resident PA). Bacon’s weight at that time was 131 pounds. Blood and urine were taken to test for drugs. When the results came back, they indicated he had been using nothing but marijuana.
A day later, in a letter to his parents, Aaron wrote:
I’m trying to work this program as well as I can, but their philosophy about everything seems so different from anything that I’ve been taught. I can’t believe you want me believing this stuff….I’ve been told that “all therapists, counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists are quacks.” I’ve been lectured on the stupidity of believing in them. Last night around the fire my staff was talking about how useless AA, NA, CA, Alanon, and Alateen are….I miss you mom, and you dad….As I’m writing this and thinking about you all at home I can’t help but cry.
On March 11, the acclimation period ended, and Aaron’s group of six students and two counselors headed into a labyrinth of spectacular sandstone defiles to commence a three-week backcountry trek. For the first two days, the students were deprived of food to “cleanse the toxins from their bodies.” Aaron immediately suspected that he was physically incapable of performing much of what would be asked of him over the weeks to come. The weakest member of the party, he despaired of slowing everyone down and incurring the group’s wrath. “I am scared of this program a lot right now,” he recorded in his journal. “I’ve been sick all day with a horrible stomach ache.”
Aaron got bad blisters on his feet, fell repeatedly, and had great difficulty picking himself off the ground wearing a forty-five-pound pack. Deep in an eerie, crepuscular defile called Little Death Hollow, he slipped and bashed his chin on the slickrock, inflicting a gruesome wound. “The staff don’t seem to care one bit,” he notes in his journal. “They were just mad because I broke a gallon [jug of water]. We get absolutely zero positive reinforcement….If we do the smallest thing wrong we get reamed.”
On March 15, he became too tired to carry his backpack, so he abandoned it. Because his pack held all his rations, he was forced to go without food until he retrieved the pack on the return trip two days later.
On March 18, while traversing the Gulch, a tributary canyon of the Escalante, the group had to wade through an icy, neck-deep pool that soaked all of Aaron’s food and clothing. That night, shivering by the fire, Aaron wrote, “I’m so scared of everything: staff, slickrock, nights, the cold, my pack….I’m getting blood everywhere, my nose has been bleeding for the past couple of days and even that scares me. I never got nose bleeds at home.”
A day later, a counselor named Brent Brewer called Aaron aside and admonished him to work harder. Other counselors and students taunted him mercilessly for slowing down the group, and asked if he was homosexual. “Everyone seems like they are mad at me or don’t like me for some reason,” Aaron wrote, “and I think I’m pretty nice to them all.”
On May 20, Brewer took Aaron’s sleeping bag away as punishment for his bad attitude and replaced it with a thin blanket, despite the fact that nighttime temperatures dipped well below freezing. A day later Aaron wrote that he hadn’t eaten in more than a day:
I feel like I am losing control of my body. I’ve peed my pants every night for the past three nights and today when we started our little hike I took a dump in my pants, I didn’t even feel it coming, it just happened….All the other students started to laugh….I’ve been telling [the staff] that I’m sick for a while and they say I’m faking it. When they talk to my parents they probably say that I’m a liar and I’m faking everything.
It is unclear when Aaron developed the ulcer that ultimately killed him, but the stresses of the course had by now severely exacerbated the ailment, and he was exhibiting clear symptoms of physical distress. Yet nobody took his suffering seriously. The next evening he wrote:
The cold and the wind is making me freeze up….All I can think about is cold and pain. Craig [Fisher, a counselor] is back and he’s so dagger mad like I’ve never seen him….I miss my family so much. My hands, my lips and face are dead.
Aaron’s journal ends with that entry, on March 21, but his travails continued. Too exhausted to keep up with his group, he abandoned his pack a second time as the students commenced the grueling climb up Right Hand and Carcass Canyons to the summit of the Kaiparowits Plateau. As a consequence, he went without food, blanket, or sleeping bag from March 22 to March 25 on the 7,000-foot mesa top, where nightly temperatures dropped below 22 degrees Fahrenheit.
On the twenty-fifth, Lance Jaggar and Bill Henry drove up from Escalante and met Aaron’s group on the Kaiparowits. They gave him a blanket to replace his absent sleeping bag, but took his cup away because “he wasn’t keeping it clean.” Jaggar also lectured him about malingering, and reiterated to the counselors that Aaron was “a whiner and a faker” and should be treated accordingly.
Bacon had been unable to control his bladder and bowels for many days. After urinating all over himself during the night of March 28, he was forced to hike without pants. The group descended from the high country and retrieved Aaron’s pack, but Aaron was too weak to carry it. “The counselor got mad,” recalls John Kulluk, one of the students, “and the rest of us had to carry it for him. Then, about a mile from camp, Aaron fell and couldn’t get up so we had to carry him, too. While we were carrying him he puked all over Travis [another student] and talked about seeing purple stars, and a purple sky, like he was delirious.”
Kulluk insists that when he first met Bacon “he looked normal,” but by March 29 he resembled “a Jewish person in a concentration camp.” That night Aaron complained once more of being seriously ill, says Kulluk, “but the staff just kind of blew him off and called him a faker. They yelled, ‘Get off your lazy butt and go collect wood.’ The next morning Craig [Fisher] got really mad, grabbed Aaron by the shirt, and pulled him to the latrine.”
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Three hundred miles south of where Aaron Bacon died, in a rock-strewn Arizona canyon, a teenage girl with unshaved legs, badly chipped nail polish, and a very dirty face kneels in the sand with a crude bow drill she’s assembled from two sticks and a piece of twine. Concentrating fiercely, working the bow back and forth, back and forth, she twirls the spindle faster and faster against a block of cottonwood. Tendrils of smoke appear, and a moment later a tiny coal ignites, which she places in a pile of bark and coaxes into a blazing fire. “Nice fire, Angie!” proclaims Cheri, a similarly bedraggled waif who is kneading cornmeal and water into a w
retched little pancake. “Too bad we don’t have something better to cook on it than this crap.”
Cheri, Angie, and another teen named Annie are seven weeks into a nine-week wilderness course run by the Anasazi Foundation. Like most of the kids who wind up in such programs, they were sent here for the typical adolescent transgressions: drinking, drugs, being sexually precocious, failing in school, shoplifting. “To get me here, my parents kidnapped me,” Cheri, a petite sixteen-year-old from Boston, complains indignantly. “It was sick.”
Having learned much about wilderness therapy in the abstract, I am sharing a camp with these young women and their three college-age counselors to understand how theory is put into practice here at Anasazi, which has a reputation for being one of the safest and most successful programs in the nation.
On the face of it there seems to be little difference between Anasazi and North Star. Both programs banish troubled teens to the wilderness with minimal equipment and meager rations in the hope of changing unhealthy, antisocial behaviors that more traditional forms of therapy have been powerless to alter. The kids learn how to sew clothing from animal skins, eat grubs and rattlesnakes, endure every sort of hardship the desert can dish out. But aside from these superficial similarities, Anasazi and North Star have little in common.
The night before, two boys from a nearby Anasazi group stuffed their sleeping bags full of clothes as a ruse, then stole away under the cover of darkness. Counselors discovered the escape half an hour later, picked up the kids’ trail, and caught up to them shortly after dawn. At North Star, the strategy for dealing with such fugitives was to punish the little brats so severely that they’d think twice about trying it again. At Anasazi they took another approach.