Bound and Magged

It was the first week of June, but the weather on top of Oregon's Mount Hood—more than 11,000 feet high, volcanic, and glaciated—tends to hold any seasonal expectations in contempt. A fresh mountaineering crew had come along expecting a moderately challenging peak ascent—a nice summer hike, really. But then, from the base, they could already see the storm. It was no flurry. They had come to climb, though, so climb they did. By late afternoon, before the team had neared the summit, winds were roaring at speeds up to 50 miles per hour, and five inches of snow were falling every hour. In such conditions, the only thing to do is pitch a tent while trying to not get blown off the mountain and then wait it out. The crew had ice picks to keep them earth-bound, but under the roar of the storm, the tents would have to be pitched virtually without verbal communication.

It was an unusual demand for this crew, which largely consisted of media executives—among them ESPN Outdoors general manager Michael Rooney, Golf Digest ad director Chris McLoughlin, Us Weekly ad director Penry Price, and Mike Riley of Quebecor World printers. If submitting to a volcano seems like a strange way for a bunch of publishers to spend their summer vacations, that's because this trip was not simply for pleasure. These execs were participating in an intensive session of outdoor education run by Outward Bound USA. Over the years, Outward Bound has hosted scores of publishers, editors, and other magazine sorts on these kinds of thrilling expeditions—and, whatever skills they might need to surmount the challenges, you can be sure they didn't learn them in j-school.

Outward Bound began in 1941, when founder Kurt Hahn implemented his idea that youths, when "impelled" into a contained and controlled confrontation with the forces of nature, stood to gain the maturity, self-confidence, and leadership skills demanded in military service and greater adulthood. In the decades following World War II, the Outward Bound name and philosophy grew into a network of popular and well-respected outdoor-education programs. But it's more than just adventure trips; today, Outward Bound encompasses a wide range of organizations engaged in education, training, and social work throughout 27 countries. There's an educational curriculum, for example, that exists entirely within a classroom setting. There are more than $1.2 million of scholarships to inner-city students each year. Altogether, Outward Bound says, it reaches 35,000 students and 4,000 teachers and administrators each year.

All that good work needs to be funded, and a significant chunk of the organization's revenue is generated by a tweaked version of the youth wilderness expeditions that refashions the program for office workers. The result is a highly popular—and lucrative—corporate-training regimen. And bringing media executives along on such a trip is a key part of the public-relations effort for those programs.

The first media trips, more than 20 years ago, were initiated by John Mack Carter—the Hearst exec who at various points edited Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal, and McCall's—and by Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel co-founder Don Welsh. These expeditions remain one of Outward Bound's few invitational events. Media mavens from all reaches of the industry meet and network while hiking through jungles and paddling down rivers in all reaches of the globe. In turn, the Outward Bound organization is given a friendly reception in its guests' advertising offices and often receives pro-bono or discounted ad placements in an impressive number of magazines. The sleek ads make a happy fit with publications as diverse as National Geographic and Maxim. Last year, a two-page spread appeared in ESPN The Magazine.

"It's very unique," says Penry Price, the Us Weekly ad director, describing the efforts of Outward Bound to engage the media. Price knew about Outward Bound from the positive role it once played in his younger brother's life—"an important experience that gave him some grounding in life, and set him on the path toward building a career," Price says—and he'll soon take over the unofficial role of industry host for these expeditions. "It reaches out directly to the publishers, who get involved in the community and then spread the word about Outward Bound," says Price. "That's taking it to a higher level in terms of the commitment on the part of the publishers."

The yearly expedition has become a familiar tradition. "Every year we invite a lot of people, and only a few end up coming," says current host Mike Perlis, managing partner at Softbank Capital Partners and formerly CEO of Ziff Davis Publishing. "But everyone is at least exposed to the invitations, and by now hundreds of people have been on our trips. It's created a fraternity of people who have experienced this kind of trial. When these folks run into each other at events, they naturally gravitate to each other." Outward Bound marketing manager Margaret Miller was the only woman on this year's trip, but she is quick to note that women are invited each year and that the gender imbalance is not always so great as one might expect. Past crew members have included Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller, National Geographic magazine president John Griffin, author and editor Christopher Buckley, and Worth Media founder Randy Jones.

Dick Stolley, the Time Inc. legend who bought Abraham Zapruder's film for Life and later helped found People, was a regular on early Outward Bound media expeditions, among them three rafting trips and a horse-trailing trip, on which team members lived on their saddles. Stolley says that the friendships forged on them, "with editors and publishers from every magazine imaginable," lasted for many years.

"The most dramatic trip was a climb up Scotland's Ben Nevis, the highest peak in the British Isles," he recalls. "On the first morning, we had gotten up to foul weather, rain, cold as hell in June." The group had yet to begin its ascent in earnest when one of its members—an Outward Bound exec—collapsed of a heart attack. "We sent up smoke signals," Stolley says, "but the weather was too bad to land an RAF helicopter in there to get him. We had to pick him up and carry him out. Pretty goddamn dramatic." Such an occurrence is rare in Outward Bound's history—extreme trips are managed with extreme care—but, to some degree, the presence of these risks is an integral part of the experience. "A slightly dangerous element is essential to provide what Kurt Hahn calls 'searching occasions'; that is, circumstances to the challenge of which young people will respond with the best that is in them," wrote Royal Navy Commander Russell Lavers in a 1952 essay on the Outward Bound philosophy. "Without [the danger element] the experience would lose its value."

If a chance of danger is what makes the experience valuable, then that June day on Mount Hood was incredibly worthwhile. Perlis has ventured to the Himalayas and up Kilimanjaro with these trips, among other feats that would make an Outside writer blush. Yet he says the night on Mount Hood was one of his most challenging. "The bad weather really became a blessing," he says. "I think the hike to the top would have been mechanical, rewarding but non-distinguished. With the conditions what they were, all the guys felt like they were really pushed to their limits." Instead of merely hiking, the crew spent a small, intense portion of their time digging out a piece of the mountain, and the rest of the night lying almost perfectly still.

"Fifteen hours in a tent is a long time, especially for these busy publishing types," Perlis says. "It was very Zen." But that's sort of the point. All these excursions—whether on water or on mountain—demand cooperation, integrity, insight, and endurance of participants, be they inner-city teenagers, prep-school kids, or Michael's-lunching executives. Pressure is nothing new to top-level editors and publishers, but these situations present a new kind of challenge: all egos must be firmly checked. On Mount Hood, as in any extreme situation, success depends upon each member fulfilling his or her basic tasks in perfect harmony. So even these type-A guys learned something new: sitting still.

Greg Bloom is an editorial intern at mediabistro.com.