Editor's Note: Yesterday (June 25, 2008), nine kids and two guides reported missing on an Outward Bound trip in the California backcountry made their way back to civilization unharmed. Here, we've republished a special report from our May 2007 issue that examines the recent history of Outward Bound.

The temperature had hit 104 degrees F, yet the students continued down Lockhart Canyon to the Colorado River, where boats waited to take them into the cool of the water. To Elisa Santry, who had rarely been west of Boston and never known wilderness, Lockhart Canyon must have seemed a strange place.

The walls were mudstone, formed in the Triassic period, the soft kind of rock that erodes into drips, blobs, grotesqueries: Here were ogling beasts the color of red wine or old blood, and troglodytic dwarves, and men with no necks, necks with no heads. The heat was nauseating, disorienting. It sucked at the resolve of 16-year-old Elisa, who was fair-skinned and thin-armed. The pack she wore, at 40-some pounds (18-some kilograms), was nearly half her body weight, but according to her letters, she was proud of carrying it. By dusk that day, July 16, 2006, Elisa was supposed to have completed the 16th day of a 22-day trek across the wilds of southern Utah as a student with Outward Bound, the premier wilderness school for young Americans. She was proud of that too.