FIRST STUDENTS RETURN 50 YEARS LATER
ASHEVILLE – Andrew Williams Jr., 66, recounts each day of an outdoors adventure he took 50 years ago as if still living it.
He describes scaling mountains in the winter, trekking a half-mile through thick woods for breakfast, and going on a solo expedition in the wilderness with only a candy bar and a live chicken.
At each memory he grows more animated with the laughter, awe and incredulity of his past 16-year-old self. After half a century, he said, the memories and the lessons he learned at the nonprofit North Carolina Outward Bound School have stayed ingrained in his being.
Williams was among the 1967 first class of NCOBS, headquartered at Table Rock Base Camp just outside the Linville Gorge Wilderness in Pisgah National Forest.
The world-renowned school celebrates its 50th anniversary this year with a series of events commemorating the outdoor, expeditionary learning institute that is often described by many of its 160,000 alumni as life-changing.
As an alum of the very first class, Williams uses that term often.
He was raised in the inner city of Richmond, Virginia, and had never camped or done anything “outdoors” such as hiking, rock climbing or camping. His high school offered some boys the chance to try an introductory program at a new type of school in the Western North Carolina mountains.
“It proved to be more challenging than fun, to say the least," Williams said. "It was life-changing, doing something I’d never done before."
He said he arrived at the NCOBS Table Rock Base Camp in early winter with a bunch of other teenage boys, a duffel bag filled with cotton clothes like jeans, knowing nothing about life outside of a home with hot running water and electricity. Or high-tech fabrics that dry quickly instead of the moisture-soaking, potentially deadly effects of cotton.
“We would live in tents during the weeks that followed and I would build a strong bond with the other guys, who were mostly white but some black, but race didn’t seem to matter,” Williams said. “We were just young guys out for an adventure. Little did we know that the adventures we would experience would far exceed our wildest imagination.”
The challenges of the outdoors began right away.
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