NOLS scholarship recipient Lauryn Bailey shares her experiences with NOLS in the Wind River Range.
I did not expect to be here.
Not on the side of a mountain in Wyoming, my hands raw and chalked, standing on a cliff and staring out at a view I once thought belonged only to other people. Not in a tent beside sixteen-year-olds who eventually came to carry pieces of my story with a tenderness beyond their years, their emotional intelligence outpacing anything I had at their age. And never in a million years would I expect to have someone read my stories, some of the most vulnerable.
I arrived by a chain of quiet choices: an application I almost didn't submit, essays I was half-ashamed and embarrassed to send. Words about fear and trust, about how climbing became refuge when my mind was too loud. I wrote of a body I'd learned to call strong instead of broken, and about the quiet generosity that first opened the outdoors to me. I didn't expect anyone to read those sentences and see me. Someone did.
This application had somehow landed me on the side of a mountain in the Wind River Range, taking photos on the fisheye setting of my camera with my instructor Alex during the "Crack Party " where somehow he had converted me to be obsessed with crack climbing and let me use his fancy climbing gloves that he had just bought new for himself days before the trip. The same instructor I had confessed to the day before we backpacked out about my fears of making friends and relationships with the people in the orientation room, who I would spend a month with in the backcountry, because they all looked 16 years old. I was 21. Little did I know that the "fourth instructor " was actually a student. He was actually a thirty-eight-year-old pastor on sabbatical who became one of the loudest voices in our late-night talks about relationships, breakups, and the messy hilarity of growing up. He told us once that he broke up with a girl on Christmas when he was our age, and I swear you could have heard his laughter about it echoing into the next valley. I sometimes wonder if other NOLS courses miles away caught the sound of him retelling that story.
In a world where I hadn't submitted the Elevate scholarship, I would have jumped straight into the next logical move in my life: graduate from college and start as a research assistant studying cancer. I had never given myself a break; I was always pressing forward in my studies, hard on myself, never taking my foot off the gas. Yet somehow, I had been offered an opportunity to pause. Offered a break that went against everything I had known, and everything I thought I deserved. It was illogical to break away from that path, no matter how much I secretly yearned to do so. It went against my very nature, which I had been conditioned to believe throughout my life: why do something if it doesn't advance your academics? Why pursue something if it doesn't make you more financially stable? The course gave me a pause I never would have taken for myself. The scholarship forced me into stillness, a rhythm of no rhythms. Never sleeping in the same place, never filling my water bottle in the same place, never bored. It was not rest in the conventional sense, but a break from everything else.
There are images burned into my mind from those weeks. One evening, wildfire smoke settled into the valley like a heavy blanket. The sky glowed orange while lightning split the horizon, and rain began to fall in fine droplets over a field blanketed with flowers that I can only describe as nature's sprinkles.
It was 7 pm, and about six of us were either reading, writing, or getting ready for bed. The rest of our group had already retired to the tents. One started running towards his camera. I could sense that there was something spectacular on the horizon just based on his cadence. Quickly, the six of us gathered on one rock to watch as the rainy, fiery orange sky now held the most intensely colored rainbow across the entire valley. Each of us squeezed ourselves onto that rock together, mourning how the others in our group had missed what I so desperately never wanted to leave my sight. I was quietened by the sight and suddenly attuned to how even the birds and marmots seemed to quiet and marvel at this sight.
To my right, I could see the outline of the mountain where I would climb my first multipitch.
The multipitch where I didn't care about the rock being rough against my raw knuckles. I remember looking down at the rack of black diamond cams, their colors catching the sun as it followed us up the mountain that morning, so shiny and impossibly small I couldn't have imagined trusting my whole body to them when first packing them in my 90-liter pack two weeks earlier. On that climb, I cried privately and quietly on the final pitch. Not from fear, but from disbelief that I was there at all. Climbing out here, multipitching, on these big mountains that had always belonged to climbers stronger, braver, steadier than I believed myself to be. Yet there I was, belaying my instructor, Christina, up the multipitch, filling my harness with cams and climbing equipment, moving upward..
To my left that same evening were our four tents, crooked against the meadow.
Sometimes they swallowed people whole by 6 pm, and other times they convulsed with laughter until the early morning. A few nights, we abandoned them entirely, sleeping out beneath the Milky Way. There were nights where everyone fell asleep under the stars, only to wake up with someone's feet in their face and noses red from the cold. I lay awake sometimes, straddling two worlds: the child who first rappelled at summer camp and the adult now entrusted with filing taxes and paying rent. And then there were the nights. The ones that stretched into early morning, all of us unwilling to release the day. Our instructor, Diego, came over not once, not twice, but three times to poke his head under the tarp, telling us to keep it down. Although he smiled at the noise of our joy, I could see the sleep he so desperately needed seeping through his smile. This is my formal apology for our ill attempt to whisper each time he trekked over in the middle of the night, to only rile back up within a minute of his departure.
Here was one day when our instructors convinced us to all hike up to an alpine lake (I am still convinced it was an attempt to have us bathe due to our intense smell that they could no longer stand). After reaching the lake, hail, rain, and wind were the only things to greet us before we made our escape back to basecamp. After hiking and, unfortunately, still as smelly if not smellier than that morning, a snowcap was a sight for sore eyes. A snowball fight was the only logical answer, pelting each other with snow during the middle of July while still wearing the same clothes we hadn't washed in weeks. The absurdity of it only made it better.
There were nights when I would be planning the breakfast I was going to create the next morning, just so giddy to wake up and see what I could do with plastic bags of flour and powdered eggs, which somehow became a quiche that I still think about to this day. Somehow, in my kitchen at home, which has more than I could ever desire, I will never create something as glorious as that quiche. The brownies I make with a whisk at home in a temperature-controlled oven will never compare to the brownies we made after hiking a mile up a mountain during sunset with a plastic bag that we hoped was brownie mix and was so chewy it pulled my crown out of my teeth (100% worth it). And to this day, my mouth still waters at the thought of the spice cake we mixed together with a stick and somehow made butter cream with hot chocolate powder, butter, and water. Don't even get me started on the apple pie.
Towards the end of the trip, I was constantly reminded of our first class. The focus was on learning how to use the restroom properly in the backcountry. Bear with me here. It was our first day, and I had barely learned more than four names. Yet, we all stood around in a circle, watching our instructor, Alex, dig a hole and then flip through an iteration of different natural toilet papers he might use. To our surprise, and with the most serious face that we 100% believed him and that this was no laughing matter, Alex held a small pinecone up to us as an example. We were laughing, yet immensely horrified that the next few weeks would be spent in scenarios such as this with strangers that we had met the day before. His illusion of seriousness cracked each time we caught him smiling at our jokes throughout the trip. There was no question by the end that he found each of us hilarious and would miss us. He even resorted to tying our shoe laces to the school bus chairs while we each fell asleep and stealing our cameras on the bus ride back, eagerly awaiting for us to wake up and watch us try to leave the bus. No one knows how, but in each of our graduation packets back in Lander, there was a small pinecone for us to take home.
These memories are inseparable from the vulnerability that brought me there. For years, I lived convinced I could rely only on myself. But you cannot climb a multipitch without surrendering to your belayer, to something bigger than yourself, surrendering to the unpredictability of the wind rivers. You cannot backpack without accepting support. You cannot share tents, food, or silence-turned-laughter without letting people in. That illusion of independence cracked quickly in the backcountry, and I am grateful it did.
When I left Wyoming, I was the smelliest and happiest I had ever been. More importantly, I left with a renewed sense of responsibility. If generosity and trust brought me here, it was not something to keep only for myself. My goals in wilderness medicine, climbing, and community work are shaped by this truth: access should not be a privilege. Just as the outdoors gave me refuge, I want others to find the same refuge, joy, and strength.
NOLS gave me technical skills, yes. It gave me the confidence to tie into a rope on a wall I once thought was out of reach. More than that, it reminded me that being seen, supported, and trusted can change so much. There is an intimacy in braiding my instructor's hair, the quiet sharing of crack gloves, and the exhausted celebration of working one route together all day until I finally sent it. From the Wind River Range, I carry this: the intimacy of celebration is something I will never forget, and something I hope to forever nurture.
To my instructors and classmates: I hope there is always a perfect pinecone for you wherever you go.
⎯Lauryn Bailey
Learn more about NOLS and the Black Diamond Elevate Scholarship below.
