Colfax students take on Elberton ropes course

Ben Stueckle carefully watches the ground beneath him as he makes his way up the cargo net.

Bailey Mackleit swings over a gully on the Elberton zip line.

“Fall back!”

“Now?”

“Yes. Fall back.”

“Now? No way!”

“Fall back. It’ll be okay.”

And with that, Colfax eighth grader Brooklyn Schmidt took a deep breath and plunged backward from a log suspended between two trees 20 feet in the air.

Just before hitting the ground, ropes master Keith Haley tightens his grip on Schmidt’s support rope to catch her.

“That was the scariest thing I’ve ever done,” said Schmidt. “But also the funnest.”

Dozens more Colfax eighth graders felt scared and elated as they took on the Elberton Ropes Course this week. On Monday and Tuesday the students experienced everything from climbing walls to swinging on ropes and working together to move on rope boards.

The students were taken to the ghost town’s ropes course as part of an effort to overcome fears, build confidence and learn trust, said Haley, who is one of the members of Palouse River Counseling Services to oversee the course.

That last characteristic can be tough when you’re dangling from a narrow wire thirty feet in the air.

“You can’t, like, see the wire, so it doesn’t feel like there’s anything there,” said Austin Corean. “You don’t know what’s going to happen when you fall back.”

Ben Stueckle learned all about beating fear by climbing a cargo net that is suspended between two mammoth pine trees. Nervous about heights, Stueckle climbed well up the net before returning to the ground with oatmeal knees.

“Well that’s done,” he said. “I don’t have to do that ever again.”

“Feels good that you did it, though, huh,” suggests a classmate.

“Yeah. Now that I’ve done that I can sleep easy,” Stueckle replied with a thick overtone of sarcasm.