Who are these two rough lookers you ask? This is my sister, Marion and I on our last day of BYU Survival in August 1973. As rough as we looked, we might have smelled worse. There aren't too many conveniences on the desert in southern Utah and we had been walking around there for about a month. I came across the picture while I've been going through some drawers, trying to organize a little better. It's the only one I've found from the whole survival experience and I'm glad I did because I'll bet all of Marion's pictures were ruined when they lost their house in the Teton Dam flood. It was all Marion's big idea to go on Survival. She was always looking for adventure and I think she always wanted to prove to herself that she could do hard things. Slug that I am, when I heard you could earn 5 credits in a month with no written tests, I climbed aboard. What I didn't know was that there are other kinds of tests that can be more intimidating than written ones.We spent the time hiking along the Green River. We went down Robber's Roost Canyon, spent time in the Boulder Mountains and Capitol Reef Monument. Some of it was really beautiful. Some was ugly alkaline desert. Sometimes I was too tired to care. It wasn't your typical camping trip with tin foil dinners and s'mores. They gave us food packs which consisted of flour, salt, oatmeal, brown sugar, raisins, beef bouillon. One week we got cheese, which as I recall quickly turned to a greasy orange lump in the heat. It tasted good though. The week we were in the Boulder Mountains, we were supposed to live off the land. I never did acquire a taste for wild onion stew or green pine nuts. Along with a few elderberries and currants, that was about all we found. We carried everything on our backs and didn't bother with tents or sleeping bags or other such frivolities. We used wool army blankets at night and our pack was our pillow.
It was a hard month, one that I wouldn't want to go through again. But at least I learned that if I had to go through it again, I could make it. Of course that was 35 years ago. The old bones aren't what they used to be. Maybe I couldn't make it, but I'd give it a try. Thanks, Marion.
