Her mother objected, worrying for a city girl's safety in a desert 2,000 miles (3,219 kilometers) away. In a family of three boys, Elisa, who had blond hair and was born with a lazy left eye, was the only daughter and the youngest child. "My miracle baby," Elisa Woods said. "I spent ten weeks in the hospital with that baby. She wasn't supposed to make it." Elisa's oldest brother, Michael Woods, 32, was thrilled for his sister, whom he had taken hiking in the green hills outside Boston. Michael reassured his mother that Elisa would be in good hands. "My excitement for Elisa," he said, "was that she was going to have a truly wild experience in the American West."

They began the course in the La Sal Mountains east of Moab, nine teenagers and two instructors, dropped off by van at 8,000 feet (2,438 meters) in the aspen forests. Here there were black bears, rumors of cougars, and the sign of elk in the pine beds. A pounding rain and bleak thunderheads barred their way to the region's tallest peaks, so the group was forced to settle for a 11,600-footer (3,536-meter) they called "Mount Tapatío" (after a hot sauce they'd come to love). According to a letter that instructor Rob Neilson, 26, later wrote to her family, Elisa was intrigued by the tools of survival. She learned how to route-find, use a compass, read a topo, march by starlight—to lead and trust to be led. She liked knots: the trucker's hitch and clove hitch for lashing her tarp as shelter in lieu of a tent, the figure-eight follow-through and water knot for tying into a top rope. She learned how to jury-rig a harness out of webbing, how to attack a rock face, and how to belay. But as the students experienced true wilderness for the first time, the instructors also taught them to be wary of it. This was key to the lesson, according to Outward Bound: to watch out for the health of the group, to recognize the signs of hypothermia and dehydration and heat sickness.

The rigors of the expedition naturally wore on Elisa and her companions, enough that one of the girls quit on day four due to a stomach ailment. By day nine, one of the boys was forced to withdraw because of a nagging ankle injury. Another girl, a 17-year-old Californian named Karen, consistently lagged behind. For this, she was shunned by the four remaining boys with whom Elisa, on the other hand, had no trouble keeping pace. Karen was "not quite as intellectually and emotionally mature as the other students," Neilson wrote. Elisa remarked in her own letters that Karen had trouble tying shoelaces and sometimes sucked her thumb. Elisa took Karen under her wing "when no one else was willing to help," Neilson's letter said. "Elisa was always trying to coach [Karen] to do well, to be timely, and to work well with the group." She took weight from Karen's pack, helped her fold tarps, clean pots, tie knots. Perhaps she recognized in Karen something of her own experience, sensitized as she was to the condition of the outcast: As a child, Elisa was laughed at for her wandering eye and later underwent surgery to correct the condition.