Challenging The Spirit Of Youth -- Ropes Obstacle Course To Help Revive Ghost Town

ELBERTON, Whitman County - This place isn't on most maps. It lost its post office, school and business district decades ago.

Even its colorful history is fading. Elberton lost its listing on the National Register of Historic Places last year.

But Whitman County is bringing new life - and some hoots and hollers - back into this Southeast Washington ghost town.

The county will soon begin operating a ropes challenge course on a wooded hillside up from the town's once thriving main street. Ropes courses are designed to instill confidence and trust in participants. Elberton's is one of about 25 in the state and the first in Whitman County.

"It is a takeoff from a military obstacle course with a different focus," said Ellen Winiarczyk, who guides youths through a Washington State University 4-H challenge course at Bonney Lake, Pierce County.

Winiarczyk and Sam Tower, who operates the Bonney Lake course, trained 15 course group leaders at the new Elberton site in June.

The largest element at the new course is a 12-by-14-foot wall. Group members must figure a way to get everyone over the top - without using the edges or any props, including ropes.

Elberton's course has 12 elements, including a catwalk 35 feet above the ground and a pamper pole. At the pamper pole, participants are secured into a harness, climb to a small platform at the top of a vertical log and jump to a trapeze swing six feet away.

The idea is to create personal goals with each element and work within a group to obtain them. Participants can decline any activity.

The course elements provide safe physical challenges but are only considered tools for the overall job of learning self-worth, confidence and trust.

"It emphasizes hands on. It emphasizes communication and it emphasizes making choices. It allows people to . . . get down to what's happening in their hearts or here in their heads for themselves," Winiarczyk said.

Whitman County Mental Health counselor Keith Haley has long considered a ropes course for this area.

"We wanted to be able to have young people interact with each other . . . and address stress-management and anger-management issues," said Haley, a child therapist who works with at-risk adolescents.

He said the course will be open to everyone and participants are strictly supervised. High-school and middle-school groups already have asked about the course, but an opening date has not been set.

The ropes course resulted from a joint effort by four county agencies and a $12,000 state and federal grant.

Elberton hasn't seen much action in the past 40 years but, at the turn of the century, its commercial district included saw and flour mills, a creamery, general stores, grain warehouses and a livery stable.

Economic and natural hardship sapped the town and the population dwindled from about 500 at its peak in the early 1900s to a couple of dozen today.

Haley said Elberton is a practical spot for the ropes course. It's about 35 minutes from Pullman and is wooded and private, he said. And the county owns about 85 acres of land there.

Past pie-in-the-sky schemes to build a golf course at Elberton or turn the deserted town into a historic park are as dusty as the streets themselves. Lack of money halted both projects.

Elberton was taken off the national historic register after county officials removed some of the town's buildings, stripping it of its original historic character, said Leonard Garfield of the state's Historic Preservations Office in Olympia.

Longtime Elberton resident Charlotte Mundell said the ropes course took her by surprise.

"They came in and just did it before we even knew what was going on," said Mundell, who lives just down from the wild woozie.

The wild woozie is part of the course and requires participants to traverse cables suspended horizontally just inches off the ground.

Mundell can hear shouting and yelling from the course but that doesn't bother her.

"It's kind of nice to have some kids back," she said.

Marcia Smith, who has lived in Elberton with her husband, Oral, for 41 years, was worried the course would attract "juvenile delinquents."

"We were a little shook up when we thought about what was going to happen," she said.