Mountain Running Camp Is Celebration Of True Grit

FRENCHGLEN, Ore. - With all of southeastern Oregon spread out below them, their lungs stinging and heaving from the lack of oxygen at 9,670 feet, Amy Hill and her tent-mates knew they had made it.

Hill, a sprinter at North Eugene High School, and a pair of soccer-playing classmates had just finished the Steens Mountain Summit Assault, a 1 3/4-mile race starting at 9,500 feet and ending here, at the windy and dusty pinnacle high above the desert floor.

When they arrived a week earlier, Hill and her friends thought they were out of their element at a high-altitude camp for distance runners. But at the Steens Mountain Running Camp, a celebration of true grit for 20 years, no one is in his or her element, and that's the way it's supposed to be.

"Last session we had one of them get off and ask where she could plug in her hair dryer," camp director Harland Yriarte said, a grin creeping across his stubbled face. "We get that, or something like it, every time."

Campers sleep in battered Army tents and eat outdoors. There are no electrical outlets. No floodlights. No indoor toilets. No showers.

"When they get up here, they don't want to get dirty," Yriarte said. "Then they realize it's inevitable and they start to wear it like a badge."

The camp sits at about 7,500 feet in the sage-covered, public-private checkerboard of the Steens Mountain Wilderness. It's off a jeep road near Fish Lake, a dusty 15 miles from Frenchglen, which is just a collection of roadside buildings about 60 miles south of Burns.

"Steens" as the camp is called for short, molds character more than it makes runners. It does so for more than 150 high schoolers from Oregon and around the nation every late July and early August, along with a handful of coaches, post-collegians and other adult athletes looking for extreme, almost mythic, challenges.

The camp has been an inspiration to hundreds of runners. Marathon Kristy Johnston is a Steens alum. So are former Oregon runners including Mike Blackmore and Rick Mestler. Longtime Oregon track coaches John Gillespie and Tom Heinonen swear by Steens.

First-timers like Hill and her tent-mates, Ruth Williams and Amy Dale, arrive not knowing exactly what to expect. But they've heard the rumors: altitude runs at midnight, a 30-mile hike on the second day.

The last one is true.

From dawn until sunset, the campers, coaches and counselors trek through one of the many gorges in the area, this year it was the Big Indian. Not everyone makes it the whole way, including seven miles from the edge of the canyon back to camp. But everyone, no matter how tired, has to climb out of the gorge. They call this the "Big Day."

"It makes you nervous to find out what's actually going to happen," said Williams, a North Eugene sophomore, "After I did the Big Day, I just felt like I could do anything. I thought, wow, how could I have been able to do that?"

Why would Yriarte, a man with nine children of his own and years of coaching experience behind him, want to take a bunch of teens on week-long camping trips in Oregon outback? Why would the teens leave their TVs and headphones for a week of dirty fingernails and sore feet?

"A lot of good distance runners are from well-off families," Yriarte said. "They've had every convenience. When it gets tough, they don't get feisty, they give in," Porsche bodies with VW ignitions, as Yriarte says.

Yriarte, whose grandfather was an immigrant Basque shepherd, was born and grew up near the Double-O ranch not far from camp. He knows what it takes to live and train in this country.

"I knew what this mountain did for me," he said. "If you share the same dirt, the same bugs, the same sweat, the same adversity, then you have something in common," he said. "Everyone becomes a team up here."

The Steens challenges are more mental than physical.

"People are chameleons," Yriarte said. "They get in an environment and they adapt to survive. It molds who they are."

The campers take turns pumping outhouses and pulling kitchen patrol. They keep their tents clean. Yriarte issue strict orders at the start of camp: Carry all waste water to a straining pit. Don't use soap near the creek. Pick up trash and leave no trace on hikes or runs. Scrub dishes spotless.

Yriarte reminds them of these rules on Wednesday, the easy day after the Big Day.

The campers sleep until 8 a.m., two hours later than usual. At 8:30 a.m., 107 kids are stretching and scratching mussed heads in the corral. There's a small sign that Steens is working: When the group assembled in the corral on Monday, nobody wanted to sit on the ground; they stepped wide circles around the dried horse patties scattered about. Now the tired campers sit everywhere.

When they aren't on the Big Day or on one of the other marquee events, the campers run on the steep roads in the area or attend informational motivational lectures at the campfire.

The inspirational stories stick in the mind. Speaking at an after-dinner campfire, LCC track coach Brad Joens tells about a paraplegic who climbed El Capitan at Yosemite, using only his arms; a Marine drill sergeant who ran 24 hours straight to elude capture behind enemy lines in Vietnam and who now runs 13 miles to his base every morning and 13 miles home, in Texas.

The stories work. It's impossible to be bothered by a blister after hearing those tales.

Robyn Sutherland, a standout in the 800 meters at Sheldon High School and heading for the University of Oregon, is a motivational story herself. Steens gave her a jump start before her senior high school season, after she missed her junior year with a ruptured appendix and ensuing peritonitis that nearly killed her.

"I really needed the camp to mentally refocus and not feel sorry for myself," she said, "to make myself mentally tough again."

Yriarte fills the off hours with other projects aimed at bonding the campers and having fun.

On Wednesday, tent-mates sweep and straighten up for the honor of being the tidiest group.

Friday, each tent works up a fireside skit to zing counselors, coaches and themselves with send-ups of Steens life. On that final night, the campers receive their T-shirts and dog tags that prove they not only attended, but endured, the Steens.

"It makes it like a family," Sutherland said. "When you see someone running at a cross-country meet with a Steens shirt, you know what they've been through. You have to earn that shirt."