This testimony was published by Kimberly on another Blogspot blog. All rights goes to the original author

Joy

Have you ever gone with out showering for 57 days? I don't think so. Well if you consider billy baths a shower than you are crazy! A billy bath is when you get two small containers filled with creek water and two drops of concentrated camp soap. You got to have a "billy bath" once a week. A billy bath was the equivalent of a shower at Wilderness camp.

I had to deal with this because I was sent to SUWS of the Carolinas. SUWS of the Carolinas is one of the most prestigious wilderness camps for teenagers. It is sort of like Outward Bound but much more intense, and it isn't voluntary. I was sent there for partying a little bit too much.

Throughout my time at wilderness I had many crazy experiences. A normal day consisted of getting our pants and shoes brought to you in the morning (you had to give your counselor your pants and shoes evernight to prevent people from running...which it didn't accomplish).

After you woke up you would go get the bear bags with your group. Bear bags was an area at every site that you would go to, far away from where you slept to hang your food, toothpaste, and trash at night so bears wouldn't come attack you. You would everynight thrown a rope onto a very high tree and have to tie up all the bags and hoist it up there.

So after retrieving your food we would all walk back to camp and start to take down camp. We were given about 35-40 minutes to take down our tents, pack up our packs, destory the loo, and get breakfast made. Breakfast was a cup of oatmeal with a pinch of brown sugar, a scoop of powdered milk, and raisons if you were lucky. Not a very appetizing Breakfast to say the least.

After breakfast we would start are hike. These hikes were trecherous, strenuous, and grueling. Our packs alone weighed about 50 pounds and then we had group gear which added another 20 pounds. We would hike for hours, miles at a time up steep mountains. I think the worst mountain we had to climb was called heart break. The name alone gives you a slight taste of what we endured. I also am saying mountains because we were not climbing baby hills. We weren't climbing hills at all. When we climbed heartbreak our counselor was set on our group breaking the record for climbing this mountain. Therefore instead of taking a 5 minute break every 20-30 minutes we were going for a 2 minute break every 30-35 minutes. This was heartbreak number one.

We became reliant on those 5 minute breaks to take of our 70+ lb packs and drink the some of the four full one liter water bottles that we were required to drink everyday.

SUWS was started in the early 1970's and it one of the oldeste wilderness programs still in operation. It was purchased by Aspen Education Group in 1990's. Two boys have died there so far.

Sources:

• The original Statement by Kimberly
• Datasheet of the program on Fornits wiki
• Gregory Owens Jones - 1985 (Today a child died blog - about one of the deaths)