 Photo Courtesy Of Emma Winer
Emma Winer had to carry a pack as heavy as 53 pounds during her 110-mile trek through the Big Horn Mountains last month. After 28 days of backpacking through the Wyoming wilderness, Los Altos resident Emma Winer couldn’t wait to call her parents and tell them about her adventures. But before the 15-year-old could start, her mom wanted to make sure Emma was in one piece.
“When I finally spoke to her on the phone after a month in the wilderness, my first question was, ‘Do you have all your limbs and teeth?’” Alice Lankester said. “Only when she answered, ‘Yes,’ did I want to hear about everything else.”
Despite a run-in with moose, myriad mosquito bites, too-close-for-comfort lightning strikes and the aches that come with carrying a 50-plus-pound pack, Winer emerged from the woods just fine. Sure, she was lighter and in desperate need of a shower, but the soon-to-be sophomore at Castilleja School had no other complaints.
“I loved being in the wilderness,” said Winer, who completed the 110-mile hike with seven other students of National Outdoor Leadership School and two instructors. “I miss it – I kind of want to go back.”
It seems Winer was born to backpack. She went on her first trip at age 8 – accompanied by dad Peter – but it was an excursion the summer before eighth grade that piqued Winer’s interest in outdoor adventures. By high school, she was an avid hiker and rock climber.
She spent the past two summers working with GirlVentures, a Bay Area non-profit organization that helps inner-city teen girls enjoy the outdoors. A member of the advisory board, Winer ventured in to the wilderness with the group for hiking, climbing and kayaking.
But these trips must have seemed like day hikes compared to what Winer experienced last month with National Outdoor Leadership School.
“This was the biggest trip I’ve done,” she said. “It was amazing.”
So what prompted Winer to sign up for a monthlong hike through the rugged Big Horn Mountains that included 17,800 feet of elevation gain?
“My summer wasn’t very full before, and it was better to do this than to be home watching TV,” Winer said. “I want to go into outdoor leadership in the future and thought this was a great opportunity to gain experience and make friends.”
A GirlVentures instructor recommended National Outdoor Leadership School to Winer. She also received encouragement from neighbor Eric Rosen, a Mountain View High student enrolled in an NOLS course that began the week before hers.
“Emma found out about this trip herself, and literally begged to go on it,” Lankester said. “And when Emma sets her mind to something, it’s pretty hard to fight it.”
Winer couldn’t wait to get going. Coming off a track season in which she ran the 100- and 300-meter hurdles for Castilleja, Winer said she “was in good shape for the course.” She went on a few runs to break in her new hiking boots, did some core training and “lots of reading about wilderness survival that made me a lot more prepared than most.”
Her NOLS class included four boys and four girls, ages 14 and 15. Winer and two others came from California. Her instructors – a man and a woman – “were amazing and worldly,” Winer said. “They were really good teachers – we lucked out.”
They embarked on their journey lugging 53-pound packs. The packs got a little lighter each day – until the group replenished their food supply at a designated spot each week.
“It was the heaviest at the beginning of the ration periods,” Winer said. “We all had bruises on our backs where the packs sat.”
The rations were delivered via four-wheel vehicle or horseback, depending on the terrain. The food included calzones and pancakes – Winer’s favorite options – along with pasta, hash browns and snacks like granola.
“There was no official lunch – we just snacked all day,” Winer said. “I was tired of Chex Mix by the end of (the trip).”
They cooked on small stoves or over leave-no-trace fires.
“We cooked a cake on the fire and it tasted really good,” Winer said. “Out there, all of (the food) tasted really good. Everything tastes better in the outdoors.”
There was one week that the food must have tasted particularly good. The group ran out of rations a day before reaching the next round of supplies.
“One day we were out of food, and that kind of sucked,” Winer said. “We didn’t plan it out right.”
Thanks to the limited food and long hikes each day, Winer lost 16 pounds on the trip, “but I gained it all back pretty quick,” she said.
While the hikes were hard – one day the group misread a map and trekked for nine hours on what Winer called “a death march” – they weren’t the most difficult part of her adventure.
“For me, it was being with the same people 30 days in a row,” she said. “You got to know each other well and became really good friends, but we got tired of each other at a few points on the trip.”
But nothing annoyed Winer more than a certain pesky winged insect – the mosquito.
“At one time I had 156 bites on my back,” Winer said. “I walked around in a T-shirt one day and they bit me through it. That was a big mistake on my part.”
Winer had a few other uncomfortable encounters with nature along the way. There was that week of afternoon thunderstorms that pelted the hikers with hail and created lightning strikes within a mile of their campsite.
And then there was that day they were charged by moose.
“We were setting up camp and they came out of the trees – three big moose that came toward us,” Winer said. “We had to make a lot of noise to get them to go away.”
An unscheduled meeting with moose isn’t enough to discourage Winer from giving NOLS another go. She plans to take an NOLS first-responder course next summer.
Winer’s mom will probably worry a little, but she understands her daughter’s need for nature.
“I think the outdoors is a permanent fixture in Emma’s future,” Lankester said.
Contact Pete Borello at
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