While no two situations are identical, I think you hit on one of the crucial factors, socially speaking, in your second paragraph.
***?Just 3 generations ago, you had 16 years going to war in WWII. Even my generation, teens were expected to graduate from high school and either get a job, go to college or join the military. My parents did not instill in me the expectation that they had to support me past high school, nor did they instill in me the expectation that it was their job to fix all of my problems. Some of them they let me figure out on my own and let me fail. We parents today are afraid to let our kids fail; sometimes failure can be a learning experience.?***
Teens are invisible in this society. They are feared. They are 'expected' to be dependent. They are no longer allowed to quit school and work, or better yet, apprentice with someone. They have far too few options. You can?t force a square peg (70-75%) into a round hole. When you do, you end up with angry, apathetic, disinterested teens, with no passion for life.
Society, and many parents, are not meeting the needs of the majority of kids.
Shipping them off to a program, holding them incommunicado, is not the solution, nor is it humane, or anywhere near a desirable option in a caring society. Nor is that ?option? exemplary of parents allowing their kids to ?fail?. Failure (natural consequence/cause&effect) is the best teacher. A program simply gets the kid out of his parents/society?s hair for a while, and subjects the kid to human consequences until they can perform to suit their captors. There are more respectful ways to meet teens needs than to warehouse them, isolated from the real world. Singling them out as the ?problem? is unfair, denying their real needs is neglectful, not advocating for more options for teens is lazy.
Give teens back some of the options we had as teens and I?d bet money we?d see far fewer ?behavioral? problems.
And to the person hawking wilderness programs?. It?s real warm and fuzzy to think that these kids are working as a group, hammering out their emotional problems in the south 40 somewhere. Here?s a bit of reality. Notice how the ?group? worked together- harassed and harangued this child right up until he died, sitting in the dessert alone. Now that?s some team work. And this program was considered one of the best. Still had a 4 star rating after this unconscionable incident occurred.
The fatal mile: The sun rose at 6:08 a.m. on July 13 and began to broil Utah. The headline on a Page 1 story in The Salt Lake Tribune promised "No Break from Heat" as weather forecasters predicted all-time highs. In North Canyon, Bear Clan breakfasted on Toasty O's cereal, slices of bread spread with peanut butter and jelly, a piece of fruit and juice.
The clan set out for what was supposed to be a 3-mile hike around 9 a.m. -- a little later than Hale had hoped in order to avoid the heat.
Ian hiked slower than usual on the strenuous route; he and another teen stopped every few minutes, moving at the rate of one city block an hour based on a reading from Hale's GPS unit.
Soon, the group spread out, with the faster hikers ahead, Ian in the middle and Hale in the rear with the slowest boy.
Ian finished his water, HIS SUPPLY ALREADY REDUCED DURING THE PREVIOUS NIGHT?S HIKE, and began to complain of thirst. Some teens shared their water, and Hale gave him half of her quart at one point. Ian drank it in a gulp.
The group crossed three ridges, one hill after another. Ian labored, at times stumbling. Two teens started urging him along.
"Come on, man, you can do it," one teen told Ian, according to a witness statement taken by the Millard County Sheriff's Office.
But as Ian crested that final hill around 11:30 a.m., after hiking 1.4 miles, all he could see before him was more of the same: up, down, up and down, an undulating landscape of sagebrush, native grasses, broken shale and scattered junipers and pinyon trees. To his right spread the Sevier Desert, empty and browned under the summer sun.
On the ridge, Ian stood still, his body already in the process of shutting down as his blood thickened in the heat and he became delirious. One teen noted Ian didn't seem to know what was going on.
"Come on, man." Ian didn't respond. "YOU CAN GO DOWN THIS HILL WILLINGLY OR WE CAN PUT YOU DOWN IT," his hiking companion said.
[NOW LET ME TELL YA, THAT IS JUST DAMNED SUPPORTIVE. NOT!]
Gause, who had reached the crest of the next hill, watched the agitated teens as they spent approximately 20 minutes trying to get Ian moving.
"Come on, man, who dogs it on the downhill?" one frustrated teen asked Ian.
Ian just stood there, dazed and sweating "like a pig."
The teen grabbed him and began pulling him along. Ian finally responded.
"Oh, I can do it," he said.
When Ian didn't move, the boys THREATENED TO DRAG HIM TO THE NEXT CAMP.
[MAY BE THEY WERE DESPERATE TO GET THERE BECAUSE THEY WERE ALL OUT OF WATER DUE TO POOR PLANNING??? GOTTA LOVE THAT TEAM WORK.]
"No, I can do it," Ian said. And then he sat down. The two teens pulled off Ian's 29-pound backpack, and Ian lay against it.
One teen backtracked to Hale, who was about 20 yards away. She called out to him: "Ian, get your pack on and let's go."
When Hale reached Ian, he stood briefly and then sank back down to his pack.
"So do you need a break? Are you tired? What's the problem?" Hale asked Ian. He crossed his arms and stared at her. Hale tried to cajole Ian into moving for about 20 minutes. According to one teen's taped statement, Hale nudged Ian with her foot, shook him and slapped his face to try to rouse him from his stupor. Finally, she pulled out her radio and called Mark Wardle, who was in Delta.
"I can't convince Ian that he needs to continue hiking," she told Wardle. "What should I do?"
Wardle told her to check Ian's consciousness by doing a "hand drop test" -- holding his arm above his face and letting it go to see how he reacted. It flushes out fakers, Hale would say later, because a conscious person will protect the face.
Ian's arm slipped to his side.
"I need to know if there's something wrong," Hale said to Ian. "Respond to me, tell me your name."
"Ian," he said.
Hale called Wardle again. "He seems to be conscious," she reported. "I can't get him to hike. What should I do?"
Wardle, who already had begun driving toward Marjum Pass, told Hale to pour water over Ian and move him into the shade.
Hale beckoned to Gause to come assist her. Ian now lay on the ground, motionless, his eyes open and occasionally making contact although his breathing was "strange," a mixture of a moan and a cry.
The counselors sat Ian up and tried to get him to drink water. It merely dribbled down his face. They poured warm water from their bottles over his head, chest and back.
The noon sun had burned down on the dying teen for more than an hour when Gause grabbed Ian's torso and Hale held his feet and "pulled" him 10 feet to a patch of shade under a pinyon tree.
Still convinced Ian was faking illness, the two counselors split up -- Hale running ahead to check on the rest of the clan and Gause moving 30 to 50 feet away so he could observe Ian from behind another tree.
Gause noticed Ian's moans stopped minutes after Hale left -- proof, he figured, that Ian was acting. Gause waited about 10 minutes and then crept closer to Ian.
As Hale made her way back to the tree, Wardle called for an update.
"How is Ian doing?" Hale yelled over to Gause, who, figuring his cover was blown, hurried to the tree.
Ian had stopped breathing and lacked a pulse.
SITTING ALONE UNDER THE PINYON, IAN AUGUST HAD DIED.
As Gause began CPR, Hale called Wardle for help. The 9-1-1 call came into the Millard County Sheriff's Office at 1:30 p.m.; it would take two hours for the ambulance crew to reach Ian and in a series of errors, an AirMed helicopter dispatched from Salt Lake City, would never arrive after receiving incorrect GPS coordinates and running low on fuel.
The truth is, medical experts later concluded, it didn't matter. Only an immediate ice bath might have saved Ian.
****
You can read the rest of the horrid details here:
http://fornits.com/wwf/viewtopic.php?to ... t=30#55721Don?t come back with this being an isolated incident. There are 52 other stories where that one came from- and some at the more ?reputable? programs advertised at ST and elsewhere. Are you in denial, or attempting to deceive the uneducated public?
Thank god for Fornits. It's one of the few places that consumers will get anywhere near the truth. And yep, they might have to wade through some unpleasant emotional expressions. I'd say their kid was worth that.
All the other programs mentioned have been discussed here. Search WWF. HLA even has its own forum.
