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, Summit Quest Inc. Palmer knew little about the backcountry or therapy beyond what she'd gleaned from pitching Challenger courses. "But
Palmer got tired of working for Steve," says Doug Nelson, "so she hung out her shingle."
Five students were enrolled in the inaugural Summit Quest course, which cost $13,900 for 63 days.
Palmer sent the group to the arid Shivwits Plateau, near the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, supervised by two young counselors who were paid minimum wage. During the first several days, Michelle Sutton--a pretty 15-year-old who had enrolled voluntarily to regain self-esteem after an alleged 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 not go on. According to counselors' field reports gathered by state and federal investigators, the lead counselor had been ordered to ignore such talk as manipulative behavior. "You have been sloughing off," she told Sutton. "You are now being warned."
On May 9, 1990, during an ascent of 7,072-foot Mount Dellenbaugh, Sutton's speech became slurred, she cried out that she couldn't see, and then she lost consciousness and died.
Palmer insisted to officials 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.
Gayle Palmer, the founder of Summit Quest, was not charged with any crime after the death of Michelle Sutton. Although she was subsequently denied a license by the Utah Department of Human Services,
Palmer brazenly resumed operations. Last year, near Zion National Park, a scruffy, frightened, 14-year-old girl wandered into a remote archaeology camp begging for help. It turned out that she was fleeing from a course
Palmer had been running illegally out of St. George, Utah, the same town where she had based Summit Quest.
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"Remembering Michelle Sutton"
http://www.teenadvocatesusa.org/Remembe ... utton.html---------------------------
Michelle Sutton is not even listed on CAICA's progam death list.