Ten Strangers, Swedish Fish, and Bear Bags lost in the Wilderness

Posted 05:13 PM, August 25, 2006, by tenforde

Stanford has a unique orientation program to acquaint our class of 86 medical school students. Our program is called SWEAT, and it's the most unique ice-breaker that I have ever experienced.

On August 23rd, we assembled at the Dean's Courtyard of the medical school to meet our first-year classmates. As an optional exercise, SWEAT (Stanford Wilderness Experience Active orientation Trips) is one week before we begin classes and consists of three days of backpacking and wilderness exploration in the Sierra Nevada. Our class had the highest turnout for SWEAT in the event's history, with nearly 90% of our class attending. We ranked our hiking experience levels and were randomly placed into groups that were balanced to have people of all abilities equally represented. Two medical school students led each group. Our leaders were Tyler Hillman and Greg Allen, both in their third year of SWEAT. Our group had been assigned the name sloths, a species most closely related to the anteater and aardvark that is also known for excessive sleepiness. In contrast, every other group had much more common names, including monkeys and tigers. However, our group proved to be extraordinary. Here's our story from day one of our journey together.

After waking up at 5 am and departing Stanford at 6 am, we traveled nearly 4 hours to the trailhead of Silver Valley Campground, and backpacked three hours to Rock Lake. After reaching our campsite, we were humored to find that our dinner was composed of 'burritos', consisting of beans, cheese, and tortillas. However, someone forgot to bring the cheese, and we also learned that our pot for cooking had a hole in the side. Our talented collection of incoming med students discussed solutions to fix our main cooking pot for the three-day journey. Solutions included cooking baked-beans in the pot to create a tight 'bean layer', using sap from nearby trees, using tortillas, or using a pot top. I brought Swedish Fish for the trip, a red gummy candy. After a short silence, Ariel suggested we use the Swedish fish to plug the hole. Surprisingly, the pot held water and my candy helped salvage our cooking plans!

Later that evening, we went to hang our bear bag. For those unfamiliar with this term, a bear bag is created by throwing a carabineer (a metal clip) over a branch of a tree attached to a rope. The branch is used to hang a bag with all the food and any other items with a fragrance. The other requirements are that the bag must hang 11 feet from the ground and must be away from the trunk of the tree to prevent bears from climbing (brown bears are apparently notorious for their climbing skills). Unfortunately the people responsible for initially setting up the bear bag only had moonlight and flashlights to lead our group to the site, and we soon found our group lost. Tyler, Greg, Luis, David, Jason, and I went to help hang the bags while Ariel, Wendy, Philippa, and Lisa waited at our campsite. However, not only could we not find the bear bag, but we also could not locate our campsite to backtrack. We yelled out to the ladies, but got no response (apparently they thought the noises were 'non-human' and did not respond to our calls of help). So we walked, lost in the wilderness for an hour, looking for a rope hanging from a tree with a 'unique bark pattern' and no clue as to our initial campsite. However, we finally crossed a path we recognized, found the missing carabineer, hung the bear bag, and got back to the campsite by 1:00 am. We did have a fun time wandering together and a good laugh about our 'non-human' voices being unrecognizable.

The Sloths (from left): Tyler, me, Philippa, Jason, Wendy, Lisa, Luiz, David, and Greg