Soaring High

“[On the trail], the day pretty much consists of waking up, hiking, getting there, setting up camp, cooking and going to sleep,” junior Daniel Soares, who recently returned from a semester at the High Mountain Institute (HMI) in Colorado, said.

On Aug. 18, 2015, Soares and his parents arrived in Leadville, Colorado, the highest city in the United States and the location of HMI.

“I was the first one there,” Soares said. “There was the Leadville 100 bike race that day, so they were going to close the pass between Leadville and Aspen. My parents were staying in Aspen, and they were driving me there, so they had to get back before they closed the pass.”

Soares arrived at HMI around 10 a.m., several hours before the arrival of the first bus.

“I was just sitting around,” Soares said. “I talked to some of the apprentices, and it was a little awkward. But one of the teachers was from Kirkwood, so we bonded over talking about St. Louis.”

The buses later arrived following a two hour trip from the airport, during which many of the students had already begun to know each other.

“Everyone was friendly, but also very shy, just because it was a completely different school and you didn’t know anyone at all,” Soares said.

The first night there was an opening campfire led by Danny O’Brien, the director of HMI, to greet the new batch of students.

“The director said, ‘Welcome to the semester, what are your goals for the semester, what are you scared about,’” Soares said. “We wrote those down on a paper and we threw it into the fire, and he said, ‘We’re gonna start a clean slate. Throw away all your preconceived notions and just have fun.’”

The founders of HMI, a husband and wife pair, were on a sailing trip around the world during Soares’s time at the school. However, Soares did get to know O’Brien well.

“He was cool. He was excited about the mission,” Soares said. “He was trying to get people to figure out their goals. He asked you about your goals all the time.”

Soares and the 47 other students lived in cabins on the HMI campus. The cabins consisted of a common room, a wood stove and beds for 10 students.

“We didn’t need to make a fire for the first half of the semester, but then, once it got cold, we needed to make fires,” Soares said. “Later in the fall semester, during the day it’s like zero degrees, so at night it’s well below.”

One night a week, an apprentice, HMI’s term for a teaching assistant who was a recent college graduate, would stay in the cabins with the students; the rest of the time, the students were in the cabins alone, furthering the sense of trust Soares felt while at HMI.

“They pretty much just had eight rules, and the rest they didn’t care about. [Some of] the rules were don’t have sex, don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t steal, don’t purposefully break stuff, don’t be out of your cabins at night,” Soares said. “Other than that they pretty much trusted us. You could sign out and just go up to the lake and go for a run, do whatever. They let us backpack by ourselves, so they trusted that we wouldn’t die.”

The students went on three two-week backpacking trips over the course of the semester, two in Colorado and the last in Utah.

Each day while hiking, the students were given a study hall to do their school work.

“[The work] is manageable,” Soares said. “For history, you usually have a long reading and some questions. For English you have to read and to prepare for a discussion, and then for ethics you also have to read and prepare for a discussion. And then you’d usually have a science lab.”

The third trip took place in the canyons of Utah, and, after hiking for several days with the teachers to allow the students to become accustomed to the environment, the students were left on their own.

“I was elected to be one of the student leaders. I picked my crew of the nine other guys that would be with me and I picked the tarp groups,” Soares said. “For the first three days, the counselors were with us … and then they’d show up in the morning, give us our meds and then we wouldn’t see them for the whole day, until the next morning . We were just hiking around by ourselves.”

While on campus, the students worked a certain number of shifts per week in the kitchen on a cook crew to make their meals. When backpacking, the students carried all of their food with them.

“We were rationed a certain amount of food, so we got like three pounds of rice, two pounds of beans, a ton of pasta, and then you can just choose what to cook that night,” Soares said. “You carry your water and then you have purification drops, so you could use the water from streams.”

Although Soares had enjoyed backpacking prior to attending HMI, the sights and locations he experienced there made the trips unique.

“On the first trip, the second or third day, we were climbing at 13,000 feet and I had never been up that high. We also left early, and I was super unhappy because I don’t like waking up early,” Soares said. “There was this big ridge, so my friend Elliot and I bolted and we went up the ridge really quickly and we got up to the top of the ridge and you could just see everything. That was just so cool. I had never seen that.”

Soares’s adventures at HMI changed his perspective on common occurrences in his daily life. The environmentally friendly practices at HMI made some faults more evident to Soares upon returning to CHS.

“I hadn’t realized how much paper we use [at CHS], and from one teacher, every single handout we get is a massive packet, and it’s stuff that we don’t need,” Soares said. “Since you don’t really have that much stuff with you while you’re there, I’ve realized that you don’t actually need everything that people want. I’ve kind of dimmed down my consumerism.”

Soares returned to Clayton on Dec. 17, but the lessons he learned during his semester at HMI will continue to have an effect on his life, choices and, perhaps, even his career.

“Before I went to HMI I was thinking I’ll become an engineer or a computer scientist or something like that, but then my advisor there said I’d be a really good outdoor educator. That kind of sounds fun. You just get to be in the outdoors all the time and teach people about the outdoors,” Soares said. “It’s kinda changed my perspective a little bit. You can do more of what you want even if it doesn’t make that much money.”