St. Mark's Pecos Trip Once Cooked in Cafeteria Vegetable Cans

I have spent more time on the REI website preparing for one night in a state park than the Pecos boys spent packing for ten days. I own a titanium spork. I have read reviews of the spork.

They looked a lot more scruffy out there than the boys do now, Northcut said, and allowed that the current version was not bad by any means, just different.

The current version, as the school described it in 2014, goes like this. A twelve-hour bus ride to base camp in New Mexico. Groups set off on different routes through the Pecos Wilderness, some climbing Truchas Peak, at 13,102 feet the highest mountain in the state, others seeing Nambe Lake. Every boy does a 24-hour solo, which many remember as the highlight, and which is, the school notes, for most of them the only time they will be completely alone with no technology or contact with other people. The leaders are upperclassmen, alumni, faculty and outdoorsmen, all called Sherpas.

Twenty-four hours alone with no technology. I have not had twenty-four minutes. The youngest finds me in the bathroom.

One 2014 Sherpa, a senior heading out on his fourth Pecos, was looking forward to going back to the campsite where he had done his own freshman solo. After his first trip, he and his father, also an alumnus, had compared notes and discovered they'd been to some of the same places.

This is the danger of a family tradition with geography. You come home from the mountains with a story, and your father has the same story, from 1977, with worse equipment.

By 2016, when 91 boys came home in the dark before sunrise after eight days out, the trip was in its forty-fifth year. Its co-director said he measured its success by how many of them had already asked to come back as Sherpas.

As for the cans: they had been to the cafeteria first. They had held vegetables. They had been on a lunch line. Then a boy with a coat hanger sent them up a mountain. No piece of equipment I own has ever been promoted that far.