October 2018

It’s a luminous autumn day and Kyle Drake climbs a slope of Dial Mountain in the Dix Mountain Wilderness Area, threading through crimson-leafed witch hobble, navigating tangles of bronze ferns, fallen trees and tumbled rock. He wears a pair of blue gym shorts, a trim black beard and ball cap, and carries a backpack the size of a college-dorm refrigerator.

Every so often he pauses, shifting his shoulder straps and looking over the slope with a shepherd’s eye. “OK, gather ’round!” he calls to his hiking group. “Let’s have some water and look at the map and compass.” Kyle is 34, a veteran instructor with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), headquartered in Lander, Wyoming, where he lives.

Four men and women scramble wearily toward him through dense brush, looking grateful for a break. “There’s no trail,” says Jess Stapleton, sounding a little baffled at finding herself in a place where there’s literally no trace of civilization, not even a footpath. “We’re walking this ridgeline, pushing trees out of the way.”

She’s 25, athletic, a fairly experienced hiker and camper from Knoxville, Tennessee. But this is different, bigger and wilder. She and her fellow NOLS students are on a nine-day trip into some of the rawest terrain in the eastern U.S., their only comforts the ones they carry on their backs. “You get pushed to the point of almost losing it,” says LeAnn Turner, from Berkeley, California. She’s 31, grew up in the suburbs and never had any interest in the outdoors until a few years ago.

“You’re standing in the midst of dense woods, looking in every direction, not knowing which way you should go or where the ground will fall out from under you,” she says.

While resting, the group takes in a quick lesson on backcountry navigation, with Kyle explaining the difference between true north (that’s the pole) and magnetic north (located near Ellesmere Island, in northern Canada). He holds out the map and points through the canopy of glittering maple and birch at a distant spur of Bear Den Mountain, showing how to take an accurate bearing.

“I was surprised by the Adirondacks, how steep it is out here,” he admits, drawing his finger over the map’s dense contour lines. “It looks like this last little bit could be a little bit heinous.”

His students groan as they start upward again, but there’s a method at work here. Kyle’s job is to make sure these travelers—many of them brand-new to the outdoors—make the journey safely. But it’s also his mission to let them do most of the navigation and hard work themselves, while helping them stay mindful of what they’re doing, taking in the rare experience of moving through deep wilderness.

“It can be mentally exhausting,” he says. “But there’s value in the experience of things that are hard and emotionally taxing.”

His students have come to the Adirondacks from all over the country, bending the curve of busy modern lives and spending thousands of dollars to find exactly this kind of experience. This is important: They haven’t signed up for a comfy camping trip or a quick, glampy sort of holiday. NOLS promises real wildness, deep remoteness and solitude. When they talk about their reasons for being here, it sounds more like a kind of pilgrimage, a yearning they’re still trying to understand.