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Paul Petzoldt
Requiem for a leader
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by Jeff Merron
Paul Petzoldt died a few months ago at the age of 91. You’ve probably never heard of him, but chances are that you or someone you know has been influenced by the man’s teachings.
As the founder of the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) and a former chief instructor for Outward Bound, he was a pioneer in low-impact camping techniques. Furthermore, he was a great teacher of all things wilderness related – including rock climbing and mountaineering – and perhaps most important of all, leadership.
Petzoldt was a great athlete who once climbed to 26,000 feet on K-2 in Pakistan, setting what was then, in 1938, an altitude record for an American. But his legacy will live on in those he taught, and their students.
When he founded NOLS in 1965, he said its mission was "to train leaders capable of conducting all-round wilderness programs in a safe and rewarding environment."
In an April 1997 profile in Outside magazine, he said, "In school, all they teach is memorization, regurgitation, memorization, regurgitation. We try to teach kids decision-making. They learn to act based on reality – real people, real outdoors, real weather. They're making decisions and seeing if they work, not just learning things for ‘Jeopardy’."
Outward Bound and NOLS had their organizational roots in the British Merchant Marine, which experienced great losses during the early days of World War II when its boats regularly were sunk by German U-boats.
Surprisingly, younger sailors who managed to reach lifeboats had a much higher death rate than older, and presumably less fit, sailors in the same circumstances. Kurt Hahn, Outward Bound’s founder, hypothesized that the older men were better able to draw on their inner resources – that they had lived through more tough times than the younger men – when having to hang on for survival during the rough period before rescue.
Hahn developed an "experiential education" program to teach survival skills and self-confidence to the young sailors. The program worked, survival rates increased, and Outward Bound became part of civilian life around the world in the decades following the war.
In 1994, I had the privilege of taking part in Outward Bound’s Instructor Development Program in North Carolina. My group of 12 spent much of the month-long program in the rugged wilderness of the western North Carolina mountains. Mid-summer in North Carolina’s woods is not fun – it’s hot, and there’s a lot of underbrush, and though few mountains reach over 6,000 feet, it’s tough and steep all over the place. Flat ground is in short supply.
It was a month of frustration and achievement. A typical day would begin with our group being given the collective, and deceptively complex, task of moving from one point to another. We would have to cover ten or fifteen miles with a compass, a map, and, if we were fortunate, an occasional trail. We were not fortunate too often, and spent much of our time having little idea of exactly where we were in the thick woods.
We paid for our poor skills by sometimes hiking way past dark, and way past exhaustion, to find our prescribed camping spot. Sometimes we didn’t make it – one night we slept under a Blue Ridge Parkway bridge, another night in a thick patch of poison ivy.
Each day I was tired, always physically, mentally, and emotionally spent, but still I had to carry on as a member of the group. I was obligated to cook and clean, to help navigate, to help set up camp, and to carry my 45-pound pack, which seemed to get heavier every day.
Rock climbing is a big part of North Carolina Outward Bound, so sometimes mid-hike we would stop and try to conquer a cliffside. I am a dismal rock climber, and I spent a lot of time swinging helplessly from the end of a rope, banging against the sides of enormous boulders. Once I scraped and crawled to the top of a short peak that everyone else in the group had reached easily, and I burst into tears at the sheer effort of it.
Even backpacking, during that month, was tough. While bushwacking on the East Coast’s rocky slopes, I fell on my butt dozens of times each day.
I complained as much as anyone else, and perhaps more, but was always brought up short when one of the other group members, Karen, talked about her time in NOLS.
She talked about "soloing," the NOLS and Outward Bound practice of sending group members out into the wilderness on their own toward the end of their program, relying often on little more than their wits. She talked about spending days on a glacier with just a few other people, uncertain of which direction would bring them home.
And when we ran low on toilet paper, she spoke of the NOLS butt-wiping method, which involved using a stick, an anecdote that encouraged preservation more than she knew. Most of all, what Karen impressed upon me was how easy we had it in this Outward Bound program, because we weren’t required to solo, and we had our tarps for shelter and our grocery drop-offs every week or so.
While Karen, and many others in my group, helped keep my spirits up, I probably hadn’t arrived at camp with the proper mental preparation. I had prepared for Outward Bound’s broadening "Four Pillars" educational philosophy: that in an Outward Bound course, I would learn, and depend on, craftsmanship, physical fitness, self-reliance, and compassion. If I had read "The NOLS Leadership Education Handbook," I would have been better prepared for the unusual: it explains how a common trait of "survivors" is "tolerance for adversity and uncertainty."
Outward Bound took me out of my "comfort zone," into areas where I was quite uncertain, and where survival seemed all there was to achieve. That I simply made it through the program itself is one of the things I am most proud of having accomplished. I was physically fit enough, but I became easily dispirited humping a heavy pack in pitch blackness toward a campsite that we might or might not reach that evening. I got physically stronger throughout the program, and became a bit more confident, and a little less eager to "get there" (wherever "there" was).
Despite all of that, I never felt like I had developed any leadership skills. But I was wrong. Somewhere along the way, I learned how to lead by demonstrating, then letting your charges do things on their own. By the following year, I was ready to take high school kids on a five-week journey through the Yukon and Alaska. That was cushier than Outward Bound, as we drove from point to point in a van and pitched our tents at public camping grounds.
Still, when I bade my new young friends goodbye at the Anchorage airport, I had a feeling of achievement. I thought that, through a lot of difficult times, through many outdoor adventures, through a great deal of uncertainty, most of "my" kids ended the trip better people than when they had started.
I was able to teach them some of what I had learned in Outward Bound – that they could survive and achieve much more than they thought possible. Far from their native, urban (mostly New York) environments, they were able to prosper.
Petzoldt’s teachings filtered down and across, touching hundreds of thousands of people all over the world, not least my students and me. I had, as a friend put it, been able to reimagine the relationship between the physical and the mental, a relationship that all athletes talk about but that goes too deep for any but the most eloquent to express in words.
So instead, we demonstrate it, through athletic competition, or through the personal challenges of "non-competitive" sports like backpacking and rock climbing. It’s kinetic – expression through motion – and it’s why the fan in the stands can never understand the game the way the men and women on the playing fields do.
It’s also a yearning for something more elemental, a desire for strangeness that has been almost entirely filtered out of modern life. The twin of courage is uncertainty, that same uncertainty that NOLS and Outward Bound both cultivate.
"That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us," wrote Rainer Maria Rilke. "To have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter."
Petzoldt demonstrated this courage over and over and over again, as we all must. He was a climbing prodigy – he scaled the 13,766-foot Grand Teton in Wyoming when he was 16 – but long after his peak athletic years, he taught and climbed and led and guided and rescued those stranded in extreme conditions. He was always an athlete – he climbed the Grand Teton every New Year’s Eve until late in his life and even more important, he was out there, teaching what he knew.
"Now I see the secret of making the best persons," Walt Whitman wrote. "It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth."
Amen. Paul Petzoldt sleeps with the earth now, and we carry on.
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