For the troubled teens with whom Rob Cooley ’65 works, the wilderness can be a place of healing...

It is a winter morning along the crest of Oregon’s Cascades. Across a trackless expanse of snow, seven teenagers and three adults slowly thread their way amid towering evergreens. An occasional pine martin or field mouse flits or skitters into view, but otherwise the land is still and frozen. There is no talking among the group. To some, it may seem as if the heavy blanket of snow is muffling the voices of the outside world.

The snowshoeing is hard work. The leader of the line, one of the adults, creates a trail by stamping down the snow, which in some places is as much as 15 feet deep. Those who follow behind must widen the trail further to make way for those at the end, who are pulling the heavy sleds that carry much of the group’s gear. With each step, a snowshoe can sink several feet in the deep snow, so everyone is forced to take long, high strides. Although the temperature is well below freezing, the hikers are sweating through the many layers of their clothing from the effort.

The challenge is inward as well. Each of the seven teens is struggling with problems that have very little to do with the pristine natural surroundings. Alcoholism, drug abuse, uncontrollable anger and depression are among the most common. The teens have been sent here by their parents to participate in a three-week trek run by Catherine Freer Wilderness Therapy Expeditions, a program founded by Rob Cooley ’65.

Cooley grew up by the McKenzie River east of Eugene, Ore. Although his family moved to northern California when he was in junior high, he always felt a deep connection to the landscape of his childhood. He graduated from Pomona with a degree in philosophy and history, and after brief stints in journalism and as a grad student in Chicago, he found himself back in his home state, spending summers guiding whitewater rafting tours and the rest of his time studying psychology.

He began to develop a theory that the wilderness offered people something more than just recreation. "I would go out and spend two or three days just camped out somewhere when I couldn’t figure something out. That was my refuge—that was the place where I felt safe," he explains.

Cooley believes that the human response to wilderness has a deeply ingrained cultural and biological basis. In his doctoral dissertation at the University of Oregon, he argued that hunting-and-gathering cultures occupy a natural human "econiche," and that a better understanding of how people relate to that niche could aid in psychotherapeutic treatment.

But in the late 1970s, he had difficulty persuading the committee reviewing his dissertation to accept this as a valid approach to psychology. "Now there are lots of books on that subject. Everybody kind of knows about it," he says ruefully. "But at the time it was cutting-edge stuff. Most of the articles I was reading were in French and German."

Despite this resistance, Cooley continued to make the wilderness an integral part of his life and work. He had co-founded a whitewater rafting company in 1972, and in 1988, he started his treatment program for troubled adolescents, naming it after a friend and fellow wilderness therapist who was killed in a mountaineering accident.
At the time there were only a handful of outdoor therapy programs for teens. "When kids were troubled, you’d put them in a psychiatric hospital. I didn’t think it was very healthy for the kids," Cooley says.

"Putting kids in a sit-down, locked-up kind of place, with no access to the outdoors, is probably the last thing you want to do if you want therapy to be helpful," he adds.
The Freer program is anything but sit-down. The participants hike up to 12 miles a day in varying off-road, off-trail terrains, carrying backpacks of up to 40 pounds. They subsist on a simple diet that includes no caffeine or extra processed sugar. The program includes several hours of therapy and education each day, and time is also set aside for the teens to write in journals on assigned topics. Every night they set up their own tents or tarps, cooking meals for themselves on fires built using flint or steel.

"They spend the first week thinking the world as they know it has come to an end. Here they don’t even have hair dryers—or showers," Cooley says.

Many of the teenagers are unwilling participants. "The first thing you do when you’ve got kids who don’t want to be there is you create a sense of safety: ‘We are going to take care of you. If you follow our directions, you’ll be OK.’ "

And most haven’t had any previous outdoor experience. Cooley says that is part of the reason why the Freer program is effective: "It takes them completely out of their comfort zone into a world that’s completely new and different to most of the kids. They struggle. They have to rearrange their perceptions of the world and be open to new ways of doing things, even just to be comfortable."

He also believes the program’s effectiveness stems from the same biological and cultural roots of human behavior he studied in grad school. In prehistoric times, he explains, groups of adolescents would be trained by adults to hunt and survive in the wild. Wilderness therapy mimics this "niche" in human behavior. The teens are challenged by the rigors of the program, but they are also taught how to manage by the group leaders. They learn that adults have valuable things to teach them, and that there are natural consequences to their actions.

Cooley emphasizes that great care is taken to ensure that the participants are "reasonably" warm, safe and well-fed. "If they choose to not set their shelter up properly, we might let them get wet one night. That’s kind of a natural consequence, but you have to keep a close eye on that," he says.

The past decade saw a number of highly publicized deaths in outdoor youth therapy programs. Cooley acknowledged that the industry has had problems, but attributed most of the tragedies to inexperienced or unfit staff members. He stressed that at Freer, "the most important thing is staff. We usually just don’t hire guides under 25 years of age. Virtually all of our staff are 25 years and older. They are people who are in touch with the paternal/maternal sides of themselves, emotionally aware and nurturing."

But even with the most nurturing of staff, the wilderness does pose risks. Earlier this year, a 16-year-old boy was killed during a Freer trek when a heavy tree branch fell on his tent while he was sleeping. Authorities determined the death was a tragic, unavoidable accident, and the boy’s parents, far from faulting the program, asked that donations in his memory be sent to Freer's foundation that funds treatment for adolescents in other programs.

There is no way of knowing whether wilderness therapy is more or less dangerous than traditional therapy, Cooley says. Freer has collected five years’ worth of risk data showing that it is safer than other outdoor programs such as Outward Bound or National Outdoor Leadership School, but there are no statistics forthcoming from traditional inpatient and residential therapy. "It’s virtually impossible to get any statewide figures on serious injuries or deaths in inpatient programs," he says.

As to which kind of therapy is more effective, Cooley says there is no question. "I have a firm conviction that [outdoor therapy] is a lot better for kids—most kids—than any kind of indoor program could possibly be."

Freer has been actively trying to collect data to prove this assertion. Its Web site says that surveys conducted one year after treatment found that about 70 percent of parents rated their children’s situation as "improved." And Freer and other outdoor therapy programs are funding a study at the University of Idaho to do formal research on "the efficacy and processes of wilderness treatment."

"One of the reasons wilderness programs work so well is the staff are living with them 24 hours a day," Cooley says. "They’re not just shift workers coming in, having maybe an hour of therapy and a little bit of random behavioral interaction as would be true in a psychiatric hospital or an indoor residential program."

Amy Steiner ’94, who worked as a wilderness therapist for Freer for several years, thinks the program is effective because it empowers the participants. "Little by little they start to learn their skills and they start to understand their surroundings and what’s expected of them and how to take care of themselves. And then they start to see they can actually do it. That gives them the momentum to be a little less defensive about what’s been going on in their lives, and take responsibility."

Both Cooley and Steiner speak of the wilderness as a spiritual, healing place. Steiner muses: "We teach the kids about their core self, who they truly are, underneath all the layers. I think that experience of them being able to touch their core self, be in concert with the universe, to feel that smallness inside something so beautiful, is something that they never forget."

—Lorraine Wang