The story of Orion's origins. As told by one of its founders:

Allow me to begin at the beginning.

At a time when Orion was not even a gleam in anyone’s eye. A time when I had no idea I would spend the majority of my life in ‘The Great North Woods’, as my high school sweetheart’s stodgy father liked to call it, or ‘The Great NorthWet’, as one of our veteran guides who grew up in Washington likes to call it. A time when Outdoor Recreation meant pop-up trailers, and campground was spelled with a capital ‘K’. as in Kampgrounds of America (KOA), as far as my car-camping family was concerned.

It was the early ‘70’s. I was in love with iconoclasm, progressive country and environmentalism. I was out-of-step with everyone I knew in north Texas. I was reminded the other day by a former classmate that I would reuse my paper lunch sack until it was as limp as toilet tissue. During my teens, I had begun questioning the twin Texas sacred cows of competition and football.

The Vietnam War was winding down. Watergate was heating up. And disco, thanks to the BeeGees and John Travolta, was catching on.

I did not have a single clue where I would go to college or what I would study when I got there. I wasn’t even certain college appealed to me. Even though I was a member of the National Honor Society and a successful public school student, I sensed an ‘emptiness’ to my education. ‘Garbage in, garbage out’ was a popular expression of the time.

For some unknown reason, since I harbored a thinly veiled phobia of mathematics, I applied and was accepted to the University of Santa Clara’s engineering program. In fact, I was offered an academic scholarship to study environmental engineering. I wanted to work on the reclamation of strip mined lands. I distinctly remember the program stretching through five years with practically every single class predetermined --- all the electives were clustered toward the fifth and final year.

Despite my antipathy toward math and science, I felt I needed the scholarship in order to attend a college, so I awaited my enrollment like a prisoner on Death Row. I have no idea what I was thinking. I was passionate about the nascent environmental movement, but I had my doubts that an engineering degree would set me on the path appropriate for me.

Out of the blue, my father, a Presbyterian minister with a nationwide audience through his weekly column in the Presbytery’s national magazine, came to me with an alternative proposal. Perhaps he had noticed my lack of excitement. Perhaps he saw something in me that I hadn’t plumbed. Perhaps he played a hunch. Maybe he hoped to live through me vicariously.

In any case, he told me about a small liberal arts college in northern Arizona called Prescott College. A reader of his from Arkansas had mailed a letter and a National Geographic article featuring Prescott and its unusual curriculum, educational style and freshman orientation. This reader told my dad that she thought his youngest son, whom she had read so much about in his weekly essays, might enjoy this unorthodox education.

When my father suggested I consider Prescott College, and that he would foot the bill, at least for the first year, I felt I had received a reprieve. If nothing else, I could postpone deciding my future for another couple of years while I explored alternatives at Prescott. Those of you who know me well, know I am far from an excitable boy. So it won’t surprise you that my father was more excited about Prescott than I was, and what excited him the most was the orientation program for all freshmen and transfer students.

Prescott’s wilderness orientation program, following a week’s worth of matriculation, was a thirty-day sojourn somewhere in the wilds of Southwest. The incoming students were divided into several groups of ten and then trucked to Baja to sea-kayak, the Manti La Sals to trudge about in the snow, the Grand Canyon to hike or to the Green River in Utah to raft. Each group was joined by several other students with outdoor recreation experience and one faculty member.

As it turns out, and quite by accident, I was shipped off to Moab, Utah, for my very first experience whitewater rafting.

I was eighteen years old. I had never camped without running water. I had certainly never camped without a physical structure over my head. I had never been on a river with whitewater and, the concept of controlling a boat in cataracts (for we were rafting down the Green River to and through the Colorado River’s Cataract Canyon), was incomprehensible, as well as frightening, to me.

I don’t remember ever having reservations about my decision to eschew my "free ride" from Santa Clara. But I do remember being infinitely relieved I wasn’t in a lecture hall with a couple of hundred other students listening to a professor drone on about trigonometry equations and the significance of slide rules.

And, after spending 30 days rafting through the Utah backcountry, I discovered my passion for environmental issues coincided with my passion for wilderness and community building. Thirty six years later, I am still amazed how close I came to being somewhere else.