This book describes a wilderness therapy program for troubled youth. Teenagers struggling with drugs, abusive or neglectful families, depression, suicidal thoughts, or their own impulses to lie or steal spend months in the Utah desert learning to survive in the wilderness, cooperate in group activities and problem solving, communicate with other group members and counselors, and understand themselves and their lives. An award-winning nature writer underwent staff training and became an observer-participant engaged with two groups of teens. He chronicles the sometimes very different experiences of a group of boys and a group of girls as they negotiate the various phases of the program from intake to "graduation" and reunion with their families. Along the way, he discusses the power of wilderness to spark self-realization and enforce responsible behaviors, historical efforts to use nature as part of therapy, family dynamics, rituals and rites of passage, and the difficulties in returning to mundane everyday life after experiencing the extraordinary. (SV)