Nonprofit brings at-risk youth into the wilderness for early intervention

Seattle police are going to great efforts to reassure the public about a spate of recent fatal shootings: three in Seattle in the last 10 days. And that’s not counting others in July, including the death of Donnie Chin, a longtime community leader in Seattle’s International District.

On Tuesday, Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole held a press conference to let the public in on their police work: data analysis, inter-agency cooperation, tracking guns, monitoring gang activity.

She was adamant that most shootings can be connected to neighborhood gangs.

As part of that conversation, O’Toole said the best way to prevent gun violence is to catch kids early so they don’t end up in gangs.

“There’s no better crime prevention tool than good skills-building programs for young people,” she said.

One such program takes local kids on free, week-long backpacking trips. Big City Mountaineers, based in Colorado, took at-risk youth from the Seattle area to the Olympic Peninsula this summer.

Owen said many of the children don’t have enough food to eat or a safe home, but it’s not just that.

“They don’t have anybody they can look at and say, ‘He did this,'” he said. “He’s gonna be my role model. He succeeded and so can I.”

“I think that’s where a lot of kids end up in gangs, because they don’t see any kind of future for themselves,” Owen continued. “So at Big City Mountaineers, we try to show them, ‘Hey, we’re going to take you out of your life, we’re gonna take you into a neutral environment and we’re going to show you that you actually could take a different path.'”

Owen remembers one boy who was on that trip this summer, connected to BCM via the Boys & Girls Club of Bellevue. At first, the boy considered it all a dire situation: the hike, the gear, the physical exhaustion.

“He didn’t know how to persevere and the second night he started asking how, very specifically, he could get off the mountain,” Owen said. “How can I get a helicopter? I want to leave. How can I get out of here?”

The boy, like most of the kids who go on these trips, had never worn hiking boots, never trudged up a dirt path, never slept under the stars. Exhilarating? Not really. Owen said it’s isolating and actually quite lonely for the kids at first, having been plucked far away from anything familiar to them.

Owen said he watched the boy move from a point of desperation into grit and determination. He remembers watching him with his backpack, knowing that he was thinking he couldn’t do it.

“He got sick,” Owen explained. “He was exhausted more than he’d ever been in his life. He was uncomfortable.

“I think the moment for him wasn’t reaching the peak and seeing these incredible mountains. The moment was on peak day getting back to camp and realizing that, oh my gosh, I did it.

“This was a kid who never thought in a million years that he could have done that,” Owen continued. And to see his face it was like relief times 100. It was something I think he’s always going to take with him.”

And at the end of the trip, the boy said something to Owen.

“He said, ‘I want to do this again because I love how I feel right now,'” Owen repeated. “He said, ‘I feel powerful for the first time in my life. I feel like I could do something rather than just surviving’ – those were his exact words.”

Big City Mountaineers is hosting a panel event Wednesday night with a big time freeskier who grew up in the Seattle area, Ingrid Backstrom, along with kids who are involved in the trekking program.

It’s at The North Face story in Seattle’s University Village.