by Jon Krakauer
“Where you guys headed?” the counselors calmly inquired of the runners. After suggesting that the kids return to the group, they added, “Of course, if you’d rather keep going in this direction, that’s cool. We’ll just tag along with you to make sure you’re safe, okay?” The boys sheepishly confessed that they were tired and hungry and wanted to return to the group.
Anasazi’s methods are rooted in the Mormon principle of “agency”—that “God will force no man to heaven.” According to this precept, righteous behavior cannot be induced through coercion. Nobody can make an unruly child straighten up and fly right; he or she must choose to do so.
“We don’t lay many rules on these kids,” explains Elizabeth Peterson, an irrepressibly upbeat twenty-year-old counselor. “They’re not strip-searched when they arrive. If they insist on smuggling in contraband, they can—but we explain that they won’t start making forward progress until they choose to turn over their drugs. The whole program is based on trust. It takes time and a lot of work to build that trust, but without it, there’s really no point in even doing any of this.”
This approach works at Anasazi because the young counselors are uncommonly sensitive, dedicated, and well trained—and because Anasazi turns away students who would not necessarily be disqualified from other programs: kids who exhibit assaultive or violent behavior, for example. If the kids here tend to be slightly more manageable than, say, the North Store clientele, plenty of them are deeply disturbed nevertheless, and their stay at Anasazi would never be confused with summer camp.
The kids are marched hard over rugged terrain. They sleep on rocky ground. When it rains, they improvise shelters from tree limbs and army ponchos or get wet. Once a week students are given a fifteen-pound food bag containing such staples as cornmeal, flour, and lentils—but no candy or junk food. The daily ration of 2,000 calories is extremely lean, and if a kid imprudently eats all her food early in the week, no more will be provided; she will have to subsist on wild plants, scorpions, or whatever else she can come up with until the next resupply. The Anasazi students with whom I spoke looked fit and healthy, but food seemed to monopolize most of their conversations and all of their fantasies.
Somehow, the Anasazi staff manages to impose discipline, to get the kids to go along with the program, without resorting to threats. Seldom do they even raise their voices. Larry Dean Olsen, who established the Anasazi Foundation in 1988, shortly after Steve Cartisano launched Challenger, explains that intimidation is antithetical to the Anasazi philosophy. “That’s Satan’s tactic,” he insists. “There’s only two ways you can help a kid: love him and love him some more. You’ve got to guide him gently and prayerfully to the right path.”
As Olsen’s choice of words suggests, theological doctrine is an integral part of the Anasazi curriculum. Students and counselors sing hymns and recite prayers from the Book of Mormon several times a day. Ezekiel Sanchez, who cofounded Anasazi with Olsen, unabashedly describes the program as “a battle for kids’ souls. The Book of Mormon makes it very clear: You’re either on the Lord’s team, or you’re on Lucifer’s team.” The religious cant inevitably raises questions about the program’s effectiveness in treating kids from outside the LDS community. But on the surface, at least, Anasazi appears to work wonders.
“For the first week, I couldn’t stand being here,” says Cheri as she warms her grimy hands by the fire. “I hated everything about Anasazi. But now I’m grateful that my parents made me come. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I’ve changed so much out here.”
“It’s true,” Angie pipes in. “You should have seen Cheri when she first arrived. She cried all the time. She was mean to everybody. Now look at her: she’s happy. The rest of us can actually stand to be around her. She’s really changed. All three of us have.”
After speaking candidly and at length with four groups of Anasazi students, out of earshot of their counselors, I am convinced that the program changed many of the kids in dramatic ways. But I am less convinced that the changes will stick.
A 1991 survey of Anasazi alumni found that 73 percent had managed to stay away from drugs and alcohol a year after completing the program. Another study reported a 78 percent success rate in averting failure in school, 60 percent success with drugs, and 62 percent success at changing “oppositionally defiant behavior.” These are respectable numbers, and anecdotal evidence offered by Anasazi is even more impressive. But as psychologists are quick to point out, the kind of self-reporting on which much of this evidence is based results in notoriously unreliable data.
No wilderness therapy program has ever been the subject of a scientifically rigorous, long-term study. When graduates of such programs return to the same environment that created their problems in the first place, there is little assurance that the kids won’t revert to their old ways of acting out.
During a five-hour van ride with a batch of parents en route to be reunited with offspring after a sixty-three-day stint at Anasazi, I am vividly reminded that troubled kids are sometimes the product of seriously haywire families. After listening to one father—a self-important doctor from Kansas—pontificate smugly for much of that long ride, I wonder whether the child of this pathetic man would have been better served had Dad been shipped off to Anasazi instead of Junior.
And yet after I hear this father’s story, culpable though he is, a part of my heart goes out to him—as it goes out to every parent in the vehicle as they recount their own doleful, distressingly familiar tales of children lost to drugs and petty crime and nihilistic adolescent rage. What would I do, I wonder uncomfortably, if I had a fourteen-year-old daughter who lived on the street and performed fellatio on strangers in order to buy crack cocaine—a child, say, who’d already been through every kind of conventional treatment available?
I am not Mormon, and the religious indoctrination I witnessed at Anasazi disturbed me. But even if I knew that the odds of solving my kid’s problems were less than 50 percent—even if they were less than 1 percent—I have little doubt that I would attempt to scrape together the money and hie my child off to Anasazi or someplace like it as fast as humanly possible. Given the alternative, what parent wouldn’t?
Which underscores one of the biggest problems with wilderness therapy: too often parents are motivated to choose such treatment for their offspring by fear and guilt and unfiltered emotion—lousy criteria for making such a critical decision.
According to Mark Hesse, who has worked with adjudicated youths as director of the Santa Fe Mountain Center, “A bad program can do more than physically harm kids—it can do major psychological harm. Boot-camp-type programs are good at breaking kids down, but then what? When adolescents are hardened and desensitized, it’s usually for a pretty good reason. Their screwed-up behaviors often serve as a useful kind of armor. It can be disastrous to take kids out into the woods, strip down their defenses, and then throw them back into the same snake pit that created them.
“You simply can’t send a kid into the wilderness and expect miracles to happen, even in the best programs. The crux is what you do after the kid goes back home. For a wilderness experience to succeed, it has to be integrated with a comprehensive follow-up program that addresses all the kid’s needs.”
As the Anasazi van lurched down the rutted dirt road, the subject of Aaron Bacon came up. “I would never intentionally send my boy to an abusive outfit like North Star,” offered one of the fathers, “but I realize that every program has risks.”
“I guess there are some bad things that could happen out there in the desert,” a mother rationalized. “But whatever my daughter is doing, I’m sure she’s a whole lot safer at Anasazi than she would be in town, drinking and taking drugs with her friends.”
This is what Sally Bacon believed about her son, too, of course, but she now warns that matters are not so simple. “I am not an unsophisticated person,” she insists during a long conversation about the decision to send Aaron to North Star. “Bob and I were car
eful. We asked all the questions you’re supposed to ask.” She stares at her hands, and her eyes brim with tears. “Of all the treatment centers in America, why did I pick this one? How could I have been so wrong?”
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“I think about what happened to Aaron every day,” Mike Hill whispers in a voice thick with regret, more than a year after Bacon’s death. A soft-spoken, baby-faced Apache raised by adoptive parents on the San Carlos Indian Reservation in Arizona, Hill will be a crucial witness for the state of Utah in the Bacon case. The defense will attempt to discredit Hill’s testimony by attacking his character, pointing out that he has a history of drug abuse and that, as a counselor at North Star, he was investigated for having a sexual relationship with a seventeen-year-old male student. Hill says that none of these old allegations change what he saw and heard.
In September 1993, Hill was nineteen years old and “hanging out on the rez” when he and his best friend, Sonny Duncan, were offered employment at North Star. “There was no job interview or anything,” Hill recalls. “I didn’t really have any qualifications. They just hired us on the spot and drove us up to Utah. I thought it was going to be like a summer camp. I figured we would just chill out, spend a lot of time sitting around the campfire. Then we got there and learned different.” Upon their arrival in Escalante, Hill and Duncan were rushed out to the field and, without training or supervision, left in charge of five students.
The North Star modus operandi was made clear to Hill right away. “My third day there,” he says, “Horsehair [Lance Jaggar] came out and started yelling, shoving kids around, grabbing them in the crotch, poking them in the chest. He told one kid, ‘Know what’s gonna happen to you if you keep smoking pot? You’re going to wind up in prison where big black bubbas like to fuck little white boys like you.’
“Horsehair almost never came out into the field except to beat up kids. One student, he kept cutting up his arms to try to get out of the program, so Horsehair wrapped him in a blue tarp, kind of like a burrito, and dragged him around on the ground. It freaked me out. These same people were trying to convert me to Mormonism, preaching about righteousness, and here they were doing this kind of stuff?”
Bacon wasn’t in Hill’s group, but they crossed paths now and then, and Hill liked the skinny, smart-ass kid from Phoenix. After not seeing Bacon for a couple of weeks, Hill encountered his group at the mouth of Right Hand Canyon on March 30, and was shocked at the boy’s appearance. “He looked anorexic-like,” Hill recalls, “with bones showing everywhere.”
By this time Sonny Duncan, who was assigned to Aaron’s group, had grown concerned enough about Bacon to radio the North Star office and request that Georgette Costigan—a staffer who was certified as an emergency medical technician—come out and look at him. She talked to Aaron for a few minutes, gave him a piece of cheese, and then drove back to town without checking any of his vital signs or performing a medical examination, satisfied that he was still faking his illness, despite the fact that he then weighed approximately 108 pounds, 27 pounds less than when he was “extracted” from his Phoenix home.
On March 31, because Aaron could no longer walk more than a dozen yards without collapsing, it was somehow decided that he should be taken into Escalante and start the course over again. Sonny Duncan radioed Mike Hill, who was camped nearby with a group of advanced students, and asked him to look after Aaron until a truck arrived to transfer the malingerer to town.
It was a cold, windy morning. At 10:30 A.M., when Hill walked over to Duncan’s camp to take custody of Aaron, he found him sitting on a pit latrine. When he tried to stand, says Hill, “he started staggering like a drunk.” As he did so, Duncan taunted and mocked Aaron, and insisted to Hill that Aaron had been starving himself because he wanted to die. Hill pulled up the boy’s pants and started leading Aaron back to Hill’s camp, but Aaron couldn’t walk, so Hill instructed some of the students to carry him.
Back in Hill’s camp, the counselor had Aaron lie down under a juniper out of the wind, and took two photographs of the emaciated youth. “Since you’re trying to starve yourself,” Hill admonished Aaron, “I’m going to show these pictures to your parents so they’ll know what you’re up to.”
Aaron said he couldn’t hear Hill, and that his vision had become a white blur. “I don’t want to die, sir,” he protested, and said that he had extreme pain in his lower abdomen.
Becoming increasingly alarmed, Hill got out the first-aid kit and tried to take Aaron’s temperature—the first time anyone at North Star had thought to do so—but the thermometer was broken. Hill pulled a pouch of ocher-colored Apache “medicine” powder from a pouch in his pocket, sprinkled it around the sick youth, and told the other students to pray for Aaron.
A few minutes before two P.M., the voice of Eric Henry, one of Bill Henry’s sons, crackled over the radio. En route to the camp in a North Star truck, Henry was calling to announce that he was almost there, and that Hill should “get the faker ready” to be transported back to Escalante.
According to Dr. Todd Grey, the forensic pathologist who headed the state’s medical investigation of Bacon’s death, at that time the contents of Aaron’s stomach had probably been leaking through the perforations in his intestine for twenty-four hours or more. “He would have had low blood pressure, a fever, an elevated pulse rate, and exquisite tenderness of the abdomen,” Grey says. “It would have been obvious that he was extremely sick. Any reasonable person, regardless of whether they had had any medical training, should have realized that Aaron Bacon was in need of immediate medical attention.”
But when Eric Henry arrived that afternoon, North Star still had no intention of taking Bacon to a doctor; the boy was slated to join another group of new students and begin the course again. Unable to make it to the truck on his own, Aaron was picked up and placed in the backseat by Henry. Then for the next twenty minutes, he and the other counselors stood outside the vehicle chatting and making fun of Bacon.
At 2:54 P.M., the counselors heard Bacon banging his head repeatedly against the truck’s rear window, so Hill went to check on him. The banging stopped. A minute later, Hill recalls, “I went to the passenger side of the truck to check again, and Aaron was just sitting there, staring off into space. His eyes were blank. I got really scared then. I checked his pulse and felt nothing.”
They pulled Aaron from the truck, and Hill began performing CPR while Henry frantically radioed for medical assistance. “Everyone was freaking out,” says Hill. “Someone kept screaming, ‘Oh, shit! Oh, shit!’” Georgette Costigan arrived with her EMT kit in about thirty minutes, followed soon thereafter by the Escalante ambulance team and the Life Flight medical helicopter from Page, Arizona, but they were too late to do any good. Aaron was already dead.
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When asked about the deaths at Challenger, North Star, and other programs, Steve Cartisano answers that because wilderness therapy saves the lives of so many children, an occasional fatality is a regrettable but justifiable cost of doing business. He calls it the “window of loss.”
“Jaggar and Henry apparently share this view,” muses Bob Bacon as dusk falls over Phoenix, “and I find that despicable. Nobody from North Star has ever indicated to Sally or me that they are sorry for what they did to Aaron. They are not contrite in the least. Even now they seem convinced that they were performing a benefit to society. Their arrogance is incredible. And I don’t think Jaggar and Henry are the only two people misguided enough to subscribe to this view.
“They call it ‘tough love,’ but I don’t see that there was any love involved. It’s all about using fear and humiliation and intimidation to break kids down. And we allowed these assholes to take our money and talk us into this ‘extraction.’ It’s going to be very hard to forgive myself for that lapse of intelligence. But outfits like North Star prey on families in crisis. They lie to you. They tell you whatever you want to hear.
“Aaron was the only k
id who died at North Star, but he wasn’t the only one who was severely abused. I feel quite certain that many of the kids who survived the program have been scarred for life, emotionally and spiritually.”
In the current political climate, many people view boot camps as a nostrum for the myriad ills afflicting the nation’s youth. Paramilitary discipline is no panacea, however. It may be an effective tool for molding obedient soldiers and cohesive fighting units, but the available evidence suggests that intimidation is not the best way to instill such qualities as compassion, sound judgment, and self-respect. Brutality tends to become imprinted on the psyches of the brutalized, who thereby learn to regard savagery as acceptable behavior, and to treat others in the same inhumane fashion. Programs like North Star, it can be argued, do considerably more harm than good—both to the kids who attend them and to society at large.
Not all wilderness therapy programs are run like boot camps, to be sure. Larry Olsen’s Anasazi Foundation, Larry Wells’s Wilderness Conquest school, and the Aspen Achievement Academy, based in Loa, Utah, should not be confused with the likes of North Star, Pathfinders, or Challenger. But this remains an industry in which regulations are lax and the profit margins are extremely tantalizing. As long as the population of messed-up adolescents and desperate well-to-do parents continues to swell, wilderness therapy is likely to attract more than its share of shady operators and sociopaths.
A few months from now, Lance Jaggar, Bill Henry, Eric Henry, Sonny Duncan, Jeff Hohenstein, Craig Fisher, Brent Brewer, and Georgette Costigan will stand trial for felony child abuse and neglect. If convicted, each could go to prison for up to five years and face a $10,000 fine. If found not guilty, they will be free to return to the field of youth treatment.
Gayle Palmer, the founder of Summit Quest, was not charged with any crime following the death of Michelle Sutton. Although she was subsequently denied a license by the Utah Department of Human Services, Palmer brazenly resumed her operations in that state. In 1994, near Zion National Park, a scruffy, frightened fourteen-year-old girl wandered into a remote archaeological camp begging for help. It turned out that she was fleeing from a course Palmer had been running illegally out of St. George, the same town in southern Utah from which she had operated Summit Quest.