If Elisa's letters home are to be believed, the group's overall dynamic was less than ideal. Weeks in dusty tents and around campfires with nine unwashed strangers either leads to group coherence—a sense of shared mission, a brotherhood, a sisterhood—or group dysfunction and the breaking apart into cliques. Elisa's patrol, it seems, quietly broke apart. The boys had too much "attitude" and seemed to share a contempt for the girls, according to Elisa in her letters home (Stan from Colorado "used to be nice"; John from Wisconsin had "his mood swings"). Elisa at the same time failed to bond with the other girls. "The girls hike really slow," she wrote. Tina from California is described as "soo mean and aggravating." As for Karen, she "always complains." "I complain also," Elisa wrote on the 11th day of the trip, "but try to stop."

By the 11th day, the kids had reason to complain. There was a heat wave across the Southwest, and in southern Utah the temperatures rose in tandem with the patrol's descent from the juniper forests into the canyons. In the fluted narrows and under the high rims of West Coyote Gulch, 17 miles (27 kilometers) south of Moab, the group settled in for the long loneliness of the solo. Elisa, per the Outward Bound tradition, was allowed only minimal food, water, a pen, a journal, a sleeping bag, and a sleeping pad—alone for two nights with her thoughts, the cliffs, the heat, the darkness. "She said that at night, solo was really hard," wrote Neilson. Of the many letters Elisa penned in this solitude, there was one that she was instructed to write to herself and not read until six months had passed—this was also tradition. The note was dated July 11, and, given that it was the last thing Elisa Santry ever wrote, her family would not share it.

On the morning of July 16, four days after her solo, Elisa didn't eat much—just some nuts and crackers, according to Outward Bound. It was probably the heat. That day was to be one of the patrol's most demanding and rewarding, a seven-mile traverse of Lockhart Canyon to rafts waiting at the Colorado River; the culmination of eight hard days in the aridness of the Canyonlands basin.

The hike down Lockhart would be completed as a group, but without instructors present, with only their maps, compasses, and wits. The route was a simple one, an old jeep road that followed the drainage of the canyon to the sun-smashed cottonwoods and stands of tamarisk along the river. Neilson, as lead instructor, would walk on ahead, while the second instructor, a woman who Outward Bound will only identify as Alex, would act as "sweeper," trailing the group far behind to ensure that there would be no stragglers. Neilson and Alex issued the standard protocol: The patrol was to stay together at all times. The kids were provided ample food and water. Neilson and Alex were also not the only adults in the area. Tina, who Elisa had found so intolerably "mean," had sprained her ankle on a rappel and had to be trucked out. To help with the evacuation, the organization's top man in Utah, Mike DeHoff, director of the Southwest Region Program, had piloted down the Colorado River by boat and was hiking up Lockhart Canyon.