Around 6 p.m., as the other students in her group made their way under the fading sun, instructors noticed that Elisa had disappeared. A search ensued, and for five hours the five remaining students and several instructors combed the canyon, donning headlamps after darkness fell. Finally, around 11 p.m., the instructors found Elisa facedown not far off the trail, her pack still shouldered. She was a half mile (one kilometer) from the river.

Elisa was the first Outward Bound student to die in almost a decade and the 24th fatality in the nonprofit's 46-year history in the U.S. (most of those deaths occurred prior to 1980). The organization's response was a near-total silence about the specifics of the case, but a small group of insiders broke form and spoke out, warning that Outward Bound's safety standards had fallen disturbingly low. When I contacted Elisa's mother, Elisa Woods, a few days after her daughter was found, she was outraged. "They told me my daughter was going to be well supervised . . . and she obviously wasn't," she said. "They killed my baby." The organization allowed no such notion: The wilderness killed Elisa Santry, spokespeople for the group told me, and, as a senior instructor in Moab put it, that is sometimes to be expected—a hard-line ethic perhaps, but one that Outward Bound says will not change as a result of Elisa's death.

Named after the nautical term for a boat leaving its pier, Outward Bound was the brainchild of a progressive German educator named Kurt Hahn, who wanted to raise survival rates among sailors at sea during World War II. His hope was to toughen young men's resolve through teamwork and compassion and a sense of shared mission. When Outward Bound came to the U.S., in 1961, its curriculum was adjusted to meet the American landscape head on: Every student in Elisa's nine-person "patrol," for example, would summit a high peak, rappel a cliff, climb a rock face, live for weeks in the wilderness, and, as the climax of their experience, sojourn alone for two days in the rite of passage known as the "solo."

The success of Outward Bound in the U.S. spawned scores of imitators (I attended an Outward Bound type program when I was 14), and it remains the ur-wilderness school, with more than 680,000 participants to date. Elisa, a gifted student from the Southie neighborhood in Boston, had won a scholarship from Summer Search, a national nonprofit, to attend one of Outward Bound's most popular programs, combining mountaineering, canyoneering, and rafting. Elisa was to hike and raft some 180 miles (290 kilometers) over three weeks, through alpine tundra and hardwood forests into the red-rock canyons and the rivers beyond.