Orientation Day: Lander, Wyoming, elevation 5,357 feet
The Timbuk2 team arrived in Lander the night before we were to head out onto the trail. Clad in clean jeans, dark T-shirts, and nametags, they were dining on a greasy takeout dinner in Styrofoam containers. Laughing and joking, with just a thin undercurrent of tension beneath the surface, they seemed less like a group of co-workers than a group of friends, getting together to do something a little crazy.
They assembled on burgundy easy chairs and couches in the high-ceilinged reading room library at the Noble Hotel, where we'd stay that night. Missy White, our team's leader, sat at the front of the room, near a blank flip chart, and started the introductions. She's been with NOLS since 1987, has a master's degree in organizational psychology, and runs her own consulting firm. Kat Smithhammer, with NOLS since 1996, was our other instructor.
Missy explained that she and Kat had extensive training in first aid, and that they would be carrying a satellite phone programmed with a number to a line monitored 24-7. If something were to go seriously awry, there were options--you could walk out, a horse would be sent in to pack you out, or a helicopter would come to the rescue. The Timbuk2 crew listened intently but didn't seem particularly fazed by the physical challenges ahead. After all, this was an athletic bunch, including a couple of surfers, a triathlete, a rock climber, and a former Eagle Scout with extensive backcountry experience. More potentially treacherous, it seemed likely, would be the interpersonal terrain they'd encounter.
Back in San Francisco, for example, Perry and his director of operations, Nancy Spector, work closely together--but tend to approach problems in very different ways. As a result, they get on each other's nerves. "I need to find a way to get more functional with my boss," Nancy had told me. But at the same time, she worried that the stress of being in the wild would cause a major blowup. "This trip has the potential to break wide open all the little fissures in the team." There were similar tensions between Andy Howe, the company's director of sales, and Patti Roll, the director of e-commerce and marketing. The two had been close friends before they started working together, but recently their friendship and their working relationship had become strained. The youngest member of the team was Chris Hansel, 31, manager of retail and international sales; he had been with Timbuk2 for only a couple of months. Finally, Tony Meneghetti, the CFO, had been on the job just six weeks. He saw the NOLS course as an analogy for what the team would face in the months ahead at the office. "At some point, one of us is going to be faced with something beyond our limits, just as we will in the business," he said. "One of us is going to have to say, 'I can't do this alone, I need the help and support of the team."
"What did you all think when Perry said, let's do this?" Missy asked the group.
"I thought, it's never going to happen," said Patti. "And then, two weeks ago, I thought, this just cannot happen. The entire executive staff gone for a week? At a time of deadlines? And then it was, wow, we're really going to do this. And by last Friday, I was in a borderline temper tantrum over it: I don't want to go!"
Nancy listened intently. She had her own concerns. After all, this group had never even had dinner together. Wasn't this a case of too much too soon? "At first, my gut was saying, this is going to be fantastic, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," she told the group. "But then I said to myself, if I don't have a great experience, it's going to be a fork in the road with this group and this job. If I can't have fun with these people doing this, I'll have to rethink what I'm doing at the company."
Perry didn't say anything, but he said later that his mind was racing. Up until this point, he'd been thinking of this almost as a kind of theoretical exercise, a way of testing out his ideas on collaboration and team building. It seemed obvious once Nancy said it, but he hadn't seriously considered the consequences if the trip, for which he'd spent $22,000, went badly. And who knew? It might. The executive team that he'd just finished carefully constructing could fall apart. "If two people quit as a result of this trip," he thought, looking around the room, "I'm screwed."
But it was too late for regrets. Missy and Kat discussed the plan for the next day. The first hike would be an easy one, just a mile and a half, to see how everyone was feeling in their boots and with their packs. Then we'd really get going and eventually cover a loop of about 30 miles before being picked up again seven days later. "Look," Missy said, before she sent us off for the night, "I don't know what's going to happen out there. This is like how life is at the office. You can know the terrain, the category of things that could happen--it could rain, we could see a bear, and there are a few grizzlies out there. But we don't really know exactly what's going to happen. The only question will be, how do we respond to it?"
Day One: Setting out from NOLS headquarters
The first hike, which began in midafternoon, actually turned out to be as easy as advertised. We entered the Winds at an area called the Sinks, at about 7,300 feet, and followed the Middle Fork Trail for about a mile and a half, through a postcardlike setting of pine trees, frothy mountain streams, yellow wildflowers, and bleached white boulders, until we reached a place called the Granite Buttress, an expanse of rock, interspersed with grass, looking out onto a tree-lined ridge. We ate dinner and learned how to set up our tents. Kat and Missy demonstrated the fine art of digging a latrine in the woods and then we went to sleep as the sun was going down.
