Outward Bound Canada
Written by Peder Ourom
In 1984 I was looking to start building an outdoor-focused career that involved guiding on the rivers and mountains of Canada, and my choices were limited to the Outward Bound Canada school in that was located in Keremeos BC, or the Yamnuska Mountain school with their headquarters in Seebee Alta, approximately 80 km west of Calgary.
Both options were pretty good choices. The deciding factor for me was that my partner on a Yosemite El Capitan epic in 1979 was Paul Berntsen who had been an instructor at the school in 1980 and 1981. On our seven-day ascent of the Shield wall in 1979, Paul had recounted tales of adventures that sounded pretty good to me. From Vancouver it was also a much shorter hitch hike to Osoyoos than Calgary. It was also quite possible for an instructor to ride their heavily loaded 12 speed bicycle to the school. No one owned a car, and we were young, fit, and broke.
Paul recommended me to the Outward Bound team as a good choice for an instructor because of my technical rope and climbing background. Other instructors were highly skilled in kayaking and orienteering, and I had to become proficient in these activities in a hurry.
Formed in 1969 by Art Rogers, Mike Perry, and John Hasell, the school focused on building individual outdoor wilderness survival skills. After a 5-day staff training program, I was offered a job that provided meals, a place to sleep, and a meager pay cheque of $95 for a 24-day course. The previous year it had been the same pay for a 28-day course, so we thought we had it pretty good.
The school was based 6 km west of Keremeos in BC, approximately 30 km north of the US border. The school was a row of old Quonset huts on the edge of an active farm, and the Similkameen river flowed on the edge of the property. An old bus was used to transport students to the practice climbing rock on the far side of the river, and farther away destinations such as the larger cliffs by Hedley and the trail access points to the Cathedral Park areas.
The land around the camp was dry and heat baked. Without irrigation, the beautiful fruit crops the area is famous for would not be able to grow. The one disadvantage of being located in this almost desert location is that we shared the property with many Western Rattlesnakes. They were usually calm in the mornings after it had cooled off overnight, and then became more active throughout the day when they started to move toward the creeks and rivers in a search for a midday snack.
Staff Training
On the second day of staff training, we all gathered in the main hall for a session on leadership or survival or some other boring topic, and to be honest, I can’t really remember, as what happened next was a little more exciting. I had noticed a number of blankets placed around the room and a few buckets of water, no doubt for a first aid improvised stretcher type of training that somehow involved water. As it was mid-afternoon in the summer in Keremeos and around 40 degrees Celsius in the hall, it was all I could do to stay awake and I would say the entire group of instructors were not at their best.
What happened next is seared in my memory forever.
Unknown to us, the head instructor had hired a Calgary Fire Department training expert to liven up the afternoon activities. Now this expert was not just an expert on putting out fires, he was also an expert at setting himself on fire. In a back room with the help of an assistant, he dressed himself in a Nomex fireproof suit and smeared a special paste over any possible gaps in his clothing. Now comes the moment of the afternoon when the instructors were jolted out of our head nodding sessions. The assistant then sprayed him with some toxic flammable substance and ignited it, and the human ball of fire ran into our midst.
It was complete pandemonium of course, as our minds instantly flipped from what’s for dinner to holy shit what just happened. It had all happened so fast that I had a fleeting thought that something must have occurred back in the kitchen like a propane tank exploding. The thought never even crossed my mind that someone would do this on purpose. Immediately, our flaming human ball was wrestled to the ground and the flames were smothered by the strategically placed blankets. The water buckets would have not helped in the slightest and actually made the situation worse, so it was good that they never came into play. Possibly they could have been of help if one of the blankets caught on fire. With his unique skill set he would have had a great career in Hollywood North 2 decades later.
Our now very awake group of Outward Bound instructors had saved the day by responding correctly, and had passed the test with only a couple of little burns to run under cold water and then bandage.
I doubt if anyone will ever have a staff training story better than this one, and if you attempted to repeat this today, the Workers Compensation Board would be very interested in having a conversation with you.
Kayaking
As mentioned before, I was a complete rookie orienteer and kayaker. I quickly became proficient at map and compass skills and sort of figured out how to triangulate a bearing after offsetting for this mysterious thing called inclination, and to fail in the field at this skill would probably not kill me.
On the other hand, failing at a newly learned kayaking skill probably would. Being an experienced rock climbing instructor, I could not believe the peril in which we would place 16-year old kids. There were so many hazards and ways to die and get seriously injured. Get caught in a sweeper and you could drown. Flip and get caught against a rock and you could drown. Actually, any time you flipped and attempted to not drown by performing an Eskimo roll (likely story!) you risked dislocating a shoulder. Our plastic high volume kayaks also made rolling pretty much impossible, and watching jagged rocks flash by your face was always an interesting experience! Within days, the inevitable happened to me during a training session, and I was pinned upside down against a huge boulder. It’s no wonder that I had avoided treacherous water activities in the past.
Fortunately for me there were expert paddlers like Jim Orava in our group. He managed to cross the river to the side I was on, then work the side eddies on the Class 3 Similkameen River we were paddling on. Jim then pulled me off the rock out into the main current, judging the ebb and flow of the river perfectly. Jim was so skilled he paddled UP the river to rescue me.
A Course Outline
The almost month-long course was structured to take participants with no outdoor skills and turn them into both individual and group survival experts. This did not always go exactly to plan; however, the instructors did a great job of moving their groups in this shared direction. My instructor partner was John Buffrey, who in later years became a film industry avalanche and mountain risk expert.
After meeting a group on the second day, you would usually go out for a day trip hike with a couple of emergency packs of first aid supplies, water, food, and sleeping bag. You had not actually been truthful when you called it a day trip, as your intentions were to take the group on their first overnight bivouac without them knowing the plan. Late in the afternoon you would casually mention that actually we were not returning to the comfort of the camp and would be spending the night huddled together watching the stars and starting the process of bonding as a group. Usually someone in your group had never even taken a pee in the “wilderness” let alone built a shelter or taken turns trying to stay awake on a night watch. This was in preparation for a solo night that would be scheduled later in the course.
The following days were spent learning and practicing climbing, kayaking, and orienteering skills. This was the time that you could evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the members of your group and come up with a plan to help anyone that had a phobia about a certain activity. I do not know how I had not developed a fear of kayaking after my near drowning experience in staff training, but I should have.
Twenty kilometres west of the Outward Bound school close to Hedley sits a pretty decent steep granite cliff about 300 feet high. The rock is not as good as Squamish (actually very few places are), however it was what we had, so it got a lot of use by Outward Bounders. The rock is coarse grained and had some continuous crack systems that allowed us to take students up their first and perhaps only multi- pitch climb. We climbed carefully of course, in order to make sure that the cracks had no resident buzz worms inside.
The rock climbing world at the time had moved on from old school Goldline ropes and improvised webbing harnesses, to modern Kernmantle ropes that had a core and a sheath, and Whillan’s harnesses (first developed for expedition climbing). However, at Outward Bound this modern equipment that was much more comfortable and reassuring had not yet been brought into the program.
Rapelling with Goldline rope, Outward Bound, 1984. Photo by Peder Ourom
The Outward Bound program directors liked every activity to include a touch of suffering.
The Goldline ropes were nasty hard (you could hardly tie a knot), and for the instructors leading the climb, falling was not really an option as they were also super difficult to belay with. Climbing the cliff was not the problem, the real challenge was getting back down to the ground by rappelling. The problem with the old school twisted construction ropes was that when you hung from one, it had a tendency to start to untwist. It was a pretty creepy way for a beginner climber to descend a cliff, and unfortunately for some students it put an abrupt end to any thoughts about becoming a rock climber.
Midway through the course it was time for participants to spend a solo night out in the wilderness. Megan Routley was in charge of a group of girls, and I was tasked with monitoring my energetic collection of boys. We placed them along a small river in individual bivouac spots, hoping that by this point of the course we had passed along enough survival skills that no one would actually get hurt or die. This was the plan at least.
Megan and I were located for the night at an abandoned log cabin close to both the road and our campers. Late in the night we had a surprise visit from a panicked local wrangler whose horses had panicked after a rattler encounter and had then fled into the valley where our groups were camped. At this point I now “inherited” responsibility for both of our groups, while Megan (who was, and still is, a horse whisperer), spent the entire night lassoing and corralling and enticing with apples (actually I have no idea what was involved) the escaped horses, saving our students from being trampled by them. In today’s world this would be unacceptable. A male instructor left in charge of 8 girls while the other instructor abandons her group to assist a desperate wrangler? It all came down to trust, Megan trusting me with her girls, while I trusted her to actually return by the morning without being kicked by a horse.
The Expedition
Creating a rope litter, Outward Bound, 1984. Photo by Peder Ourom
The following days were spent building both skills and endurance for the participants. Every morning before breakfast we went for a cross-country snake avoiding run, starting at 2 km and building up to 6 km by the mid-course. The fitness building was important because soon the group would be undertaking a one-week backpacking expedition that would be the apex of their Outward Bound summer adventure. Lots of oatmeal bars were baked for provisions, and they were often the only food remaining toward the end of an expedition.
Myself, another instructor, and eight boys started the expedition from the Monument 86 Fire Lookout trail in Manning Park, and the plan was for us to slowly work our way over to Cathedral Valley south of our camp. We would be crossing over the US border into the Pasayten wilderness a couple of times on the trip, and this was considered quite acceptable by all. No one carried identification except for the instructors who had the important medical forms for each student. We constantly had our students remove their boots and socks in order be on top of any hot spots or blisters that were starting to develop. This was a crucial chore as an infected blister in the backcountry could quickly turn into a crisis.
It was also crucially important that we stick to our trail plan as the previous summer an Outward Bound participant with a pre-existing heart condition had died of heat stroke. All the instructors became experts on evaluating the condition of their students, and implementing emergency evacuation and cooling procedures, the probable reason for the pre-placed blankets and water buckets in staff training. For some of the smaller and lighter group members, the first few days were brutally hard. It was not easy to ask a 100lb person to carry a 50lb pack cross country, and they could barely stagger upright when resting at the side of the trail.
Over the first few days the packs progressively got a little lighter, and the legs became stronger. Eventually we approached Cathedral Peak from the American side, the high point of our trip. The one technical section of the mountain is up toward the top, and we had to belay the students and some of their equipment up to the excellent bivouac sites on the top of the peak. Late in the night we were startled awake by a terrible screaming sound from one of the students, and immediately had a rather unique and rather personal crisis on our hands. One of our students got up during the night to take a pee, and although the peeing part went just fine the next part did not. Half asleep he then zipped up his pants with an aggressive tug and the screaming immediately commenced.
The student had somehow got the tip of his “delicate appendage” caught in his zipper after taking a pee, and was now in extreme agony. We had definitely not reviewed this in our staff training sessions. Using headlamps we assessed the situation and prepared for emergency surgery. I had a multi-tool Swiss Army knife with a plier attachment that was put to good use, and we managed to wrestle the rather sensitive tissue from the jaws of the zipper.
The skills required for the “operation” were first aid and engineering. I got to know that penis quite well over the next few days. It had bled quite a lot, and I was very worried that it would become infected. It would be days before we could get the student to a doctor. The tincture we used as a disinfectant was not exactly painless, and it had to cleaned twice a day. Dressings also had a tendency to slip off the end despite our best efforts.
At dawn we descended from the peak and carried on with our adventure although one of the lads walked with a rather unique gait for the next few days.
Toward the end of the expedition, we had dropped down onto the American side of the Pasayten wilderness, as storms the previous winter had covered the trails on the Canadian side with downed trees making progress painfully slow.
After crossing the unmarked border, we would be able to travel at a higher speed and keep to our crucial travel and camping plan. They actually had trail crews that cleared up the windfall in the spring, and occasionally we would run into a friendly Ranger who carried a 10lb radio sporting a 3’ antennae. Often on horseback, they also carried a rifle to protect both the horse and the rider from cougars (the real kind), and bears.
Two days out from our pick-up location at the top of the Cathedral Lake trail system, we reluctantly left the maintained trails and headed back up toward Canada. By mid afternoon we turned up a side drainage that brought us up to a pass leading to our arranged pick-up location the next day. It had been beaten into instructors again and again in both staff training and expedition preparations that we MUST stick to the travel plan, and to this point in the expedition we had. With no communication devices of any kind the travel plan was not to be changed under any circumstances.
We ended up having to make an exception to this rule.
While moving up toward our “escape” pass we noticed some clouds or perhaps smoke off in distance in the general direction of where we were headed. The Cathedrals and Pasayten areas often had fires in the summer, so it was not an unexpected turn of events.
A few hours later we had an even bigger crisis on our hands than the “trapped” appendage. Just above the meadow where we were scheduled to camp for the night, the forest had exploded into a monster wall of fire caused by lightning strikes the previous day. We would not be making our bus pick-up, eating a real meal, or sleeping in an actual bed the next night. After a huge day of hiking, we now reversed back down the trail that we had come up, adding a couple more hours of hiking to the day. We ended up moving away from the fire until we could not move any farther. Completely exhausted, we set up camp well south of the border and the exhausted group collapsed for the night.
The developing fire had not gone unnoticed back at the Outward Bound headquarters in Keremeos. The distant fire plume could be seen up at the head of the Cathedral Lakes trail, and BC Fire Services had asked if there were any groups up in the area. Examining our expedition plan it was determined that indeed Outward Bound had a group that was scheduled to be camping at the fire location on the previous night.
After the heat stroke fatality the previous summer, Outward Bound was now facing an even larger crisis. Eight students and two instructors missing and possibly fried to a crisp in the wilderness of BC was not what their parents wanted or expected when they mailed off the release form. If the students ended up as crispy critters, it would be the end of Outward Bound Canada.
The search began with calls to the American rangers to travel in the direction of the fire and for the aerial crews tasked with fighting it to keep their eyes peeled for any camps or hikers or anything that could lead the search to a definitive last known point. By now the fire had become a monster and the plume of smoke was clearly visible from Keremeos. Everyone had been evacuated from the area including campers, hikers, climbers, wranglers with their horses, and all the staff and visitors at the ritzy Cathedral Park resort.
The head Outward Bound instructor at the time was Mike Boissoneault. It was his responsibility to find us, or at least find what was left of us. Examining our route carefully, Mike picked out the most likely route we would have taken to escape the peril. Brutally early the next morning he was dropped off at the head of the nearest valley that provided access to the American side of the border, although there was a slight problem. Alone with no radio contact possible, Mike would need to circumnavigate the fire and then search for evidence of our missing group by linking a series of trail systems and travelling over passes while avoiding injury, bears, and rattlesnakes. Everyone was depending on him and it would be the ultimate test of all his years of mountain skills. Mike ran 30km to start his search and arrived by dawn at the campsite we had used the night before running into the wall of fire. He was an endurance ultra-marathoner and had found the ultimate use for his skill set.
The squished mossy spots that we had slept on provided evidence that we had indeed been at the pre-planned campsite (OB was a leave no trace organization and meant it, so there would have been no litter or toilet paper whatsoever). He now had a last known point.
His search now aimed him directly at the location that he figured we would head to and it was not long before he found our fatigued group. We were amazed that he had followed our track and found us.
The only problem that he had was that no one else knew what he had found. After discussing our revised travel plans, the only option left was for him to get in contact by reversing his cross-country journey back toward Keremeos. He did manage to find a more direct route back north out a different drainage and finally managed to deliver the good news. He would end up running over 60km before his day was finished.
On the schedule for last two days of the course was the planned unaccompanied journey that the group would undertake. It would have usually been the highlight of the 24-day course, but for this group it was a little anti-climactic.
They were now a strong team and looked out for each other just like Outward Bound had been created for. They smacked sticks and threw rocks at rattlesnakes as they ran down the scree field descent into Osoyoos, and it wasn’t even a problem, as they were now rugged and hardened mountain men. It had been quite the adventure for them, and they were proud of it.
Leaping over rattlesnakes, escaping towering infernos, and managing the ultimate wardrobe malfunction had not been included as activities in the Outward Bound brochure that their parents had brought home a few months previously, but that was fine as their adventures had been even more exciting than the promised climbing and kayaking.
On the bus trip back to Keremeos they belted out a Creedence Clearwater Revival song as loud as they could sing. The song was Bad Moon Rising.
Bad Moon Rising
I see the bad moon a-rising
I see trouble on the way
I see earthquakes and lightning
I see bad times today
Don't go around tonight
Well, it's bound to take your life
There's a bad moon on the rise
I hear hurricanes a-blowing
I know the end is coming soon
I fear rivers overflowing
I hear the voice of rage and ruin
Don't go around tonight
Well, it's bound to take your life
There's a bad moon on the rise
All right
Hope you got your things together
Hope you are quite prepared to die
Looks like we're in for nasty weather
One eye is taken for an eye
Well, don't go around tonight
Well, it's bound to take your life
There's a bad moon on the rise
Don't come around tonight
Well, it's bound to take your life
There's a bad moon on the rise
We have now come to the end of my tale about a group of kids that wanted to do something different on their summer holiday, and they sure achieved their goal.
For the instructors it was the start of a lifetime of adventures in the mountains and wilderness, and the friendships that began that summer 40 years ago remain to this day.
What happened to the leaders?
Jim Orava who rescued me from the river became a stunt climber and kayaker, and is a master of body movement in the aerial world. He is also one of the best paragliders in Canada.
Megan Routley ski patrolled with me at Whistler Mountain for a number of years, before leading groups on backcountry skiing trips, and running a dog sled company in Banff, Alberta. Eventually she returned to perhaps the only activity that she loved more, horse wrangling!
John Buffery also joined us at Whistler Mountain, when we were hired to invent an evacuation system for the newly installed Peak chairlift. In later years we also were involved in some crazy-ass Hollywood mountain adventures.
We almost drowned John one day filming an dangerous stunt sequence for an extremely stupid movie named Extreme Ops, but I will save that tale for another day.
Mike Boissonneault, who came to our rescue when we were chased away by the monster fire, ended up building a career as the Head Avalanche Technician on the Stewart Cassiar Highway, and started many avalanches with artillery shells fired from the road, and dynamite charges dropped from helicopters. By the end of his career, he was one of the most qualified avalanche technicians in Canada.
Dave Stark was also a fellow instructor at Outward Bound, and ended up becoming one of the most qualified outdoor education instructors in the country. He ended up changing the lives of thousands of young kids that needed a new path to travel.
We were a young and enthusiastic group of instructors, and wanted nothing more than an interesting life in the mountains. Outward Bound was the start of our adventure journey that has lasted a lifetime.