The Mountain Man Babysitter

I was a field guide in the teen wilderness therapy industry.

By Matt Stone

I Learned to Dig Holes, Not Make Fire

There I was. Freezing. Detoxing from heroin and waiting on the man that may or may not bring my car back. I loaned my dealer my car in exchange for a few stamps. This was my life now. But it wasn’t always.

I had been a gifted kid. I won the spelling bee every year I entered. I was a troubled teenager, but I turned it around and joined the army. To everyone’s surprise, I excelled.

I joined the army to be a cook. I ended up running my way into being an airborne ranger. Basic, AIT, airborne school, Ranger indoctrination, Small Unit Ranger Tactics (SURT), and Ranger school. I completed all of it. Then a deployment to Afghanistan.

My army career came crashing down when a drug test came back positive.

Hydromorphone. Strong shit. Shit I was not prescribed.

I got them from a buddy after we had a drug test. Then we had a second, surprise drug test. The consequences took a while to catch up.

Shortly after the drug test, I was deployed to Afghanistan. The results took around three months to come back to bite me in the ass.

I was kicked out of the army in short order.

After being brought back from Afghanistan, I sat in purgatory for a couple months before I was kicked out — two months before my contract was to end. General under honorable conditions. General. I joined as a cook, and became an army ranger at their request, but that was only “general” service in their eyes.

I left the army angry but didn’t allow it to consume me.

Treatment Work and the Illusion of Stability

I drove to Wilmington, North Carolina to visit my father and figure out my next move. After being sober for a few months, I ended up getting a job there at a drug abuse facility, the Wilmington Treatment Center. This center had a Tricare contract, which meant active duty soldiers and veterans of the armed forces would be patients.

This was where I learned true compassion.

I learned that addiction did not discriminate. And I learned that the Army was not doing nearly enough to take care of its strongest warriors. Delta force guys, marines, judges, lawyers, doctors, CPAs, even other substance abuse counselors, addiction can get its grip on them all.

For a few years, I held it together. I showed up. I helped people detox. I listened to stories that sounded uncomfortably familiar. I told myself I was doing something good, that proximity to recovery meant I was safe.

I discovered new drugs, and new methods for doing them. I was quietly taking note of what I could get and where. And I didn’t even realize it.

Keep showing up, and I’d be fine. That’s what I kept telling myself.

I wasn’t.

I relapsed on heroin.

There’s no poetic way to say that. No lesson neatly embedded in the moment. It happened the way relapses often do, quietly, privately, after long stretches of “doing fine.” The work didn’t save me. Structure didn’t save me. Willpower didn’t save me.

What finally did wasn’t something I expected.

Learning the Thing I’d Never Been Taught

As my heroin addiction progressed, I was spending $2,000 a week on heroin after only one month. I had nowhere near enough money to maintain a habit like that. I knew the end had come. I finally gave in and decided to try treatment one more time.

I willingly went to a wilderness therapy program called Four Circles.

I went into the Army with no wilderness skills.

That sounds strange to people who imagine soldiers as survivalists — men who can disappear into the woods, live off the land, start fires with nothing. That wasn’t my experience. We didn’t learn how to make fires because fires give away your position. Light, smoke, heat, those get you killed. Fire was something to avoid, not master.

We weren’t trained to deal with wildlife. You either shoot it or you run. Otherwise, figure it out.

What we learned instead was how to dig foxholes, how to stay awake when your body was shutting down, how to suffer quietly. We learned how to carry weight, how to follow orders, how to set claymores, how to move without being seen.

We learned how to set up patrol bases in near silence and prepare raids and assaults on various positions and locations. We learned how to endure. Survival, in that context, wasn’t about living well. It was about not dying.

There was no romance in it. There was discipline, repetition, and exhaustion. The woods were not a place of refuge. They were something to be controlled, crossed, or endured.

When I got out, I didn’t come home with some deep connection to nature. I came home with a nervous system that didn’t know how to turn off. Nature had always been a second thought.

I was an adult, not a teenager. That mattered. I wasn’t being sent there by parents or courts. I went because I had run out of places to hide. I ran out of options.

This time, the woods weren’t about concealment or endurance. They were about exposure. There were fires — real ones. Fires you had to learn to make carefully, deliberately, with intention. You didn’t rush. You didn’t dominate the environment. You worked with it.

Wood, cord, and a small handsaw were all we needed to make a bow drill to create a coal that we could blow into a fire. I learned about old mans beard, moss, and certain types of tree bark that you can use for tinder to help start fires.

We learned to hang all our food in the trees at night to avoid bears stealing our food. Or coming into our tents uninvited.

The army did teach us to clean and sterilize our water, so I knew the dangers of drinking untreated creek water after seeing enough guys get giardia.

For the first time in my life, I learned how to be outside without being at war with my surroundings, or myself.

Wilderness therapy isn’t magic. It doesn’t fix you. But it does something subtle and profound: it slows you down until your internal state catches up with your body. It strips away distractions and forces you to sit with discomfort instead of outrunning it.

The consequences of our actions are inescapable.

If we didn’t make a fire, we didn’t have hot food.

If we didn’t hang our food in trees, bears would take our food source. And they did, several times. One even took a whole pot of spaghetti one night. We had no choice. He ate well that night.

If we didn’t treat water, and we got sick, we had nobody to blame but ourselves.

That program changed my life. Not because it was perfect, but because it taught me something I had never learned in the army or in treatment work: how to exist without constantly bracing for threat.

How to just be.

From Guide to Patient

After finishing Four Circles, I stayed in the Asheville area. I got clean and sober and moved into a sober living house. A life began to unfold before me.

I got a job unloading trucks at Lowe’s for a few months. I would just throw on my headphones and lift things for a few hours without anyone bothering me. It was actually one of the most peaceful jobs I have ever had.

After a few months, I applied and became a staff member at a youth wilderness therapy program — Trails Carolina.

The interview process consisted of a three-day outdoor training in the wilderness where we went over wilderness skills, and they evaluated our temperament for the job.

What I didn’t understand at the time, was how high the stakes were.

Once we got out into the wilderness, the lead field guide was the legal guardian of these kids.

And when I say kids, I mean as young as 11 years old.

I did not expect kids so young to be in a wilderness therapy camp. I didn’t believe they were even developed enough for a program like this to benefit them. And some were very clearly suffering from mental health issues that the wilderness just would not fix.

That was the first moment I began to doubt whether children should be placed in these programs at all.

My background had them immediately place me with the oldest boys’ group on what was called the “Expo” shift.

Kids at Trails were on a month-long rotation. They spent two weeks on the main campgrounds, sleeping in bunks, going to a cafeteria, and learning in classrooms.

For the next two weeks, they spent the entire two-week period in the wilderness.

This was where I came in.

I would lead the boys on hikes to certain campsites. We would practice wilderness skills, and they had workbooks that they were given by their therapists to work on during free time. A therapist only came out to the woods once a week.

Before meals, we would all do check-ins around the fire. I also oversaw the holding and dispensing of medications. Mind you — I was about 6 months clean at this point and not licensed to dispense or carry meds at all. Yet, there I was, giving out controlled medications to teenagers in the middle of the Nantahala forest.

Eventually, I became the lead guide for the oldest boys’ group, Bravo group, during their two-week wilderness expedition phase. I had only been a wilderness field guide for a few months at this point.

These were teenagers — angry, smart, manipulative, terrified. They tested limits constantly. They tried to run. They tried to fight. They tried to prove they didn’t need help. And we did all of it in the middle of the Nantahala national forest, miles from the nearest paved road.

I understood them. I was them. But I had never been snatched out of my bed by armed men and taken to a camp in the middle of the night.

This was when I first learned about this practice, as a staff member at one of the facilities that engaged in it.

The kids told me, one by one, how they had been awoken in the middle of the night by large, armed men that appeared to be off-duty police officers. These men then told them they were coming with them. Some fought, some went willingly, all cried and felt betrayed by their families.

I had been tricked into going to a 6-month program when I was 14 years old. While it hurt and I felt betrayed when my parents walked into the therapist’s office with my bags, I wasn’t kidnapped in the middle of the night and taken there. I didn’t experience that level of betrayal.

Many of these kids were also from affluent families. Some famous. Some powerful. And many had never heard the word “No.”

The work was hard, but it felt right. Not because it was easy, but because it was honest. You couldn’t bluff your way through a wilderness expedition. Kids saw through you immediately. Authority came from consistency, not force.

What I did not realize immediately, was that I was the legal guardian of these kids when we were out in the forest, and that meant I had to always be on top of things. And I feel like I was.

I only had one kid try to run away, but I ran behind him and asked him to please not make me tackle him. He listened. And then he walked back to camp with me crying on my shoulder.

One kid thought he was a tough guy and tried to fight me. I instructed the rest of the staff to stand back, because the holds they teach do not work on full grown high school football players. They barely worked on 12-year-olds.

I wrestled with him after dodging a punch and took him down using jiujitsu. I was able to get him into a rear naked choke position without sinking in the choke, simply controlling his body without hurting him. After not being able to move for a couple minutes, he gave up. We both stood up, neither of us hurt, except for his ego perhaps.

I wasn’t proud of my ability to fight. I was proud of my ability to fight without hurting the other person.

Many of the skills I was teaching these kids were skills I had only recently learned at Four Circles. Making fire with various methods, hanging your food in a tree at night so bears don’t get it, purifying water and making sure it is safe to drink, and keeping your gear dry so as to not get hypothermia.

I had a whole group let their sleeping bags get wet on one trip, and then it snowed. We learned some hard lessons that day about drying out sleeping bags under a smoked-out tent. And I learned to pack better in April.

I refused to work with the younger groups. Primarily, because I didn’t think they had any business being there. I felt I had nothing to offer them.

On one expedition, I had one kid out of ten get an ingrown toenail. As a result, head camp told me we could not hike. We had to stay put at the same camp site — for 8 days.

They expected me to keep these 16–17-year-old boys in the same spot in the woods for 8 days without us all losing our minds. So, I made a decision. I decided to teach them jiujitsu.

I setup a small ring with logs, and with help from the boys we made a square little ring space to train. I began teaching them a few basic moves in jiujitsu, and I allowed them to wrestle and practice with each other with very strict guidelines.

They had to stay on their knees. There was no striking. And when someone said done, it was done immediately.

What followed was the most pure and heartwarming experience I had at Trails.

Every single kid participated. Every single kid paid attention. And even the shyest kid got in there and turned out to be badass. Nobody was hurt, everyone was smiling, and everyone left with a bit more self-confidence.

Being stuck at a site for 8 days was awful, but that experience made it worth it.

However, management didn’t see it the same way. I got in trouble for allowing the students to touch each other, regardless of what for. They gave me a write-up and said they wanted to try me in some other groups moving forward.

At that point, the program tried to move me to a girls’ group. I knew immediately it wasn’t right — for them or for me. The dynamics were different. The risk profile was different. I raised concerns. They weren’t taken seriously.

I spent one week with the girls’ group in the woods with two other female staff members.

My gut said no.

Then a girl walked up and brushed down my arm.

I quit.

That decision cost me financially. It cost me professionally. But it felt non-negotiable.

I would not be in the woods with a bunch of teenage girls.

When a Child Died

I left Trails and got back in school in Asheville. I earned my bachelor’s degree in political science from UNC Asheville. I was then accepted into a master’s program at American University, for international relations, and primarily remote from Asheville.

I left Trails just before Covid, and I knew Covid made staffing much more difficult.

Staffing was already difficult. I had a difficult time at that job and my past experiences made me about as prepared as you can be. I didn’t know what the situation was like at Trails Carolina at this point.

I was running an axe throwing bar in Asheville while earning my master’s degree when I heard the news.

A 12-year-old died at Trails Carolina. He had been sealed in a bivy sack and he suffocated. The state finally shut it down. And this was the second death at Trails Carolina.

In 2014, a kid tried to run away, and he climbed a tree to try and get a better view. He fell and landed in the creek with a broken hip. He died of hypothermia. This event was what inspired the plethora of safety standards that were present when I worked at Trails.

Sealing a child in sack was never part of any of the training at all. The closest to that which was standard at the time, was a new kid sleeping outside the first night would have a tarp rolled over them so staff could hear if they tried to get up during the night.

The tarp was not tied or sealed in any fashion. It was called a burrito because the ends on both sides were open. Locking a child in a bivy sack was so far from the standards that I can’t even imagine how it could have happened. The tarp gave them more warmth if anything, and it was only for the first night to ensure they wouldn’t try to run during the night.

I had a great experience with my group when I was there, despite the horrific circumstances that resulted in many of them ending up there. But it wasn’t much easier for the staff.

On one shift, I had only one other staff member due to the small group we had. We spent two weeks together, just him and I with the group. I thought we had a great time.

He killed himself as soon as we got off shift.

I took that hard. It is difficult to spend two full weeks with a person only for them to commit suicide after we get off shift. These are the pressures some of the staff were under, and this was pre-Covid.

When that tragedy with the child in the bivy sack happened, I didn’t work there. I didn’t know the child. But I knew the world. I knew the pressures — staffing shortages, cost-cutting, regulatory gray zones, the constant tension between care and control.

Wilderness therapy can save lives. It can also fail catastrophically if it is rushed, understaffed, poorly supervised, or treated like a business first and a clinical environment second.

A child died. There’s no abstraction that makes that easier to sit with.

That death wasn’t caused by the woods. It was caused by systems — by decisions, by oversight failures, by the slow erosion of caution in an industry built on vulnerability. It was caused by the fucking staff.

What I Know Now

The Army taught me how to survive without fire.
Addiction taught me how fragile survival really is.
Wilderness therapy taught me how survival and care are not the same thing.

And working inside these systems taught me this: good intentions are not enough. Structure matters. Training matters. Boundaries matter. Saying “this isn’t right” matters, even when it costs you.

I learned how to dig holes before I learned how to make fire.
I learned how to endure before I learned how to heal.
And I learned, too late for some, that systems designed to help can still do harm if they move too fast, cut corners, or ignore uncomfortable warnings.

That’s not an argument against wilderness therapy.
It’s an argument for taking it seriously.

These adults are functioning as legal guardians in extreme outdoor conditions while being paid minimum wage. You cannot expect the best level of care while literally telling someone you would pay them less if you could.

I had experience with authority, deprivation, and responsibility in life-or-death situations for keeping people safe long before I ever wore a radio in the woods of the Nantahala. Even so, the work pushed me to the edge of my competence. If it strained someone with my background and my military training, then this is not a role that should ever be filled casually.

Because when you’re dealing with human beings, especially children, there is no room for improvisation disguised as care.

And there is no room for children in wilderness therapy programs in the first place.

And the cost of getting it wrong is irreversible.

As a rule of thumb, if any part of your plan to save your child involves armed men taking them in the middle of the night, stop. Start over. Do not do that.

This essay reflects my experience working inside a wilderness therapy program and the conclusions I drew from that experience.