The survival school that lived up to its name…

Michael here. Come with me down memory lane as I challenged a Rocky Mountain survival school in 1966 at age 14. Located ten miles up Crystal Creek—outside Aspen. Welcome to natural selection, the teenage years. “A place where wealthy people bet with the odds that natural selection will occur and nature will take care of their demon seed.” Also: “That which doesn’t accidentally take my child’s life will only make him stronger.”

Dad said—to live, is to face the unknown…

In mid-1967 the Vietnam War was underway, and the intellectual purebred cliental would more than likely acquire college deferments to avoid the draft. Ashcrofters became the perfect solution, to rid the world of potential threats, I being one of them. I recalled, “Just the previous summer, one of the mountaineering students died while crossing a river and we would be faced with such dangers countless times. Were my parents giving me the opportunity to build my character and become a stronger person or were they giving me an easy way out?”

“My father, Leon Uris, boasted that facing death in World War 2’s Pacific Campaign, in the Marine Corps—made a man out of him. From what I understood, he spent most of his time playing cards and writing letters home, and he saw little, if any, frontline action like the adventures he wrote about in his first novel, Battle Cry. Funny thing, upon arrival at the survival school, none of the other mountaineering students knew that a student died the previous summer. Oddly enough, most of our parents were fully aware of the incident but somehow forgot to mention it to us.”

You learn instantly when your life is at risk…

During our five-week near-death camp incarceration we learned climbing techniques and how to survive in the wild with a tool called SHED, an acronym for finding Shelter, Heat, Edibles and Direction. As a final test of our abilities, we split up into several groups, each with five students and one instructor—and headed up into the high-elevation backcountry outside Aspen with fifty-pound backpacks, including climbing gear and essential survival gear.

One day we entered our own personal hell…

Day three became my turn to be group leader, and after traveling ten miles through valleys and over ridges, through meadows, rivers, forests, thick undergrowth, swamps, abandoned impassable traitorous and torturous mountainside trails—our instructor, Dave Farny, who owned the school, discovered he’d read the topographical map incorrectly and we were miles off course.

To put it mildly, we were in the wrong valley. This had become my greatest trial to date, leading our group to safety, which had been pushed to the limits of exhaustion, with cuts, bruises, torn clothes and covered in mosquito bites. The sun had already gone down over the ridge, that meant in two more hours it would be pitch dark. The shortest route would be eight miles.

The first half of the journey led us uphill, along the side of a steep ridge route. Past exhaustion and near delirium, we climbed two thousand feet in altitude—this took us an hour and a half to reach the ridge. In near darkness, we ran downhill the remaining four miles, tripping, falling, crying out for just a couple of minute’s rest—we persisted and never slowed down. Covered in sweat, we finally stumbled in the dark to our night’s destination. 

Thanks survival training, I lived to tell the tale…

But the fun didn’t stop there. This would be the night our instructor collected our backpacks from us, and all warm clothing other than pants, boots and a T-shirt. He gave us three wooden matches each, and told us to separate in the immediate area and fend for ourselves—this would be our final test of survival. If we had any good sense, we should have called it quits and surrendered.

Not us, not after enduring the most arduous experience in Ashcrofters’ history—never give in, never surrender! With that we put our SHED skills to the test. First, I burrowed a hole next to a tree to block a relentless chilled wind, and made a bed out of twigs, grass and weeds. Second came heat, of which I collected whatever dry wood and twigs I could find, then I started a small fire. I then went down to a mountain stream and tried to catch my dinner (before I became a vegetarian), but failed, and settled for a collection of roots gathered from the water’s edge. The next trick would be to survive the near freezing night—that seemed to be an eternity.

Dawn was proof of life…

When morning came, instead of a hot meal waiting for us, all we found was a note saying Dave had gone ten miles down the valley and he would wait for our arrival. At sunset, we finally walked into the town of Aspen. We survived—YEAH! The experience helped mold me into the man I am today. All testosterone aside, thank you Ashcrofters.

Read about more climbing adventures in my memoir, The Uris Trinity.

Photos: Aspen Times: David Hiser, Vietnam: Bimo Luki, Hiker: Jay Perce, Tree hillside: Eberhard Grossgasteiger, Night sky: Kyle Johnson

Find The Uris Trinity at Amazon.com
Read Michael’s blog/journal at” www.michaelcadyuris.com
Follow Michael on Facebook: fb.me/TheUrisTrinity