“When we finally got to Deer Creek, we had to stop for water. As soon as I bent down, my legs cramped and I couldn’t move and I fell into the stream. Water was running into my nose. I couldn’t breath and I couldn’t get up. I never felt such pain. I was crippled up like a pretzel. Val lifted me out of the stream.

“He set me on the bank and tried to talk with me. I told him to go on without me, but he wouldn’t leave me. I was concerned about the girl and getting the vehicle because we didn’t know how she was at that point.

Larry Olsen, left, and Zeke (Good Buffalo Eagle) Sanchez have been trail partners since the early days of BYU’s “480” program (photos by Linda Jamison).

“At that time I was kind of ornery,” Zeke confided. “I’m not so ornery now. Anyway, I tried to get up and walk around a little and found that I could drag my feet some. So I decided that I would drag myself but when he saw how painful it was for me he put his arm around me and practically carried me all the way to Boulder. That was a long way.

“When we finally got to the vehicle, he had to lift me into it because my legs wouldn’t move. He drove all the way back. The sun hadn’t come up yet and I had him drop me off about a quarter of a mile back because I was embarrassed, you know, big macho Zeke. Like I said, I was ornery then. I didn’t want anyone to know I had been hurt. So pretty soon here comes Larry and he pampered me a little and they took care of me.

“Well, we found that Beth was alright, and she hiked all the rest of the way to the sand dunes, then on to Lake Powell and across the lake. I hiked with her and the rest of the group as they finished the trip. She is happily married today and has several children, in fact she became an instructor and married one of the instructors who worked with her.”

But that wasn’t the whole story. Larry, relates what happened before Zeke arrived that night.

“We started out at Capital Reef National Monument and hiked down the Water Pocket Fold. The first night a snow storm blew in. We were headed for a cave and everyone had hiked until they were exhausted. Beth had been in the lead group and had moved back and forth to the slower ones, helping some of the others that were dragging behind. By the time we got within a couple of miles of the cave everyone was really straggling.

“She forged ahead with some of the other instructors and her group started a fire and she began making ash cakes (wheat and water cakes that are cooked in the ashes). She worked all night patting out ash cakes to feed to the stragglers as they came into camp. So she was very exhausted the next day.

“Then we hiked all the next day to get down to the Burr Trail road and it was a very difficult trip. She had been up all night serving and helping others, then hiked all day. That night when she collapsed, she was making ash cakes for other people again. And when she collapsed, she almost fell into the fire.

“That was the only time in the twenty-five years we have been running trips that we felt we were in danger of losing someone, but she was brought back to health as a result of the blessing she was given. As a matter of fact, she still tells the story quite often. She is quite a woman.”

In the early days of the BYU Youth Leadership 480 Program, the average distance covered was 300 miles in 26 days. “But there were a lot of activities along the way,” said Larry. “On the very first trips, I think what we didn’t know was to our advantage.

“We just went out and lived with the students and loved them, and taught them. Then later, when it became popular, other groups took a look at what we were doing and said, ‘oh yes, this looks like a good thing and we’re going to make it work better.’ So they brought in therapists and various different perspectives like the psychological “T grouping” and “circles” and that kind of thing and made it seem like that was necessary for success.”

For a few years Larry also experimented with those kinds of programs, but found them to be ineffective. “We’ve come full circle and now we’re back to the way it was when we first started out,” he explains. “We just go out there and love the kids. The more you love them, the faster they come around. We live with them, experience everything with them. A student is never asked to do anything an instructor isn’t already doing.”

“And we don’t have separate instructor camps like other programs do, where the students and instructors camp separately and they have extra food and party all night,” Zeke contends. “We don’t do that. This is important because we have to build relationships of trust.”

Obviously this formula works. The following comments from students that completed Larry and Zeke’s program testify to their growth as a result of this approach:

“Perhaps the most important element in my rebirth is that which Larry Olsen defines as ‘relationship of important to essential.’ In the wilderness it was obviously more essential to have water than anything else . . . ”

“One of the greatest things I’ve learned is that there is no simple way out of anything. Simple, primitive man had a very complex life in my estimation. He had to acquire the training and skills of a dozen tradesmen of our day. And he was beset with as many problems as we have today.”

“About midway through the course I came to the realization that I was not going to be taught by the common method of teaching, nor was I going to learn the things I came out expecting to learn. For example, the day when we found Tim. The wind was quite strong and I was quite tired-a combination that brought out a continual flow of foul language to relieve the tension from a situation over which I had no control. When I finally finished cooking, in spite of the wind, Larry called everyone over and told us a story of how the wind recorded everything that everyone said. A thousand hours of lecture couldn’t have done a better job than that one story. I felt very small and ashamed of my immaturity, but at the same time I was very glad that it had taken place because I realized that what I had done wasn’t really necessary, and it was only my own immaturity that made me do it.”

In today’s uncertain world, the wisdom these two men have garnered and continue to pass along to those they teach is invaluable. But Larry sums it up best with his own philosophy.

“I have lived life at its most basic level from a cave-dweller existence to the wandering life of a stone-age hunter without any shelter at all. I have lived in shacks, cabins, middle-class cracker boxes, and in mansions. I have experienced almost every level of material existence so that I might learn the qualities necessary for survival. It has been my business to teach those qualities to others and so I had to know.

“Perhaps the most significant observations of all my experience has been that no matter what a man (or woman) possesses materially, his survival depends solely on the quality of his personal life-nothing else. I call this the Philosophy of a Caveman.”

Richard Jamison

Living with Nature

Shelter and Insulation

Two-hundred-fifty centuries ago man learned the most basic concepts of shelter-building by trial and error. The knowledge was passed down from generation to generation, from continent to continent, or learned independently by different people all over the world . . and still retained thousands of years later by late-bloomers on the North American Continent.