A windswept desert thick with spring: the flash of primrose and treeless hills shining in the sun. And in the distance, all but lost in great sweeps of rock and sky, a group of teenagers fresh out of suburban America, struggling desperately to build new lives. Lives beyond booze and crack and crystal meth, beyond sadness, beyond a fear that has brought many to the brink of self destruction.

There are times, admit many mental health professionals, when our efforts to help America's troubled teens seem painfully inadequate. The success rate treating teenage drug addiction, for example, remains under 25 percent. Suicide among teen boys has quadrupled since 1960. Incidents of depression and various behavioral problems have risen dramatically over the past decade. Not knowing what else to do, we medicate. Last year alone, nearly 14 million anti-depressant prescriptions were written for 12- to 17-year-olds, only 20 percent of which have ever been tested on kids. As Dr. Donald Cohen, director of the Yale University Child Study Center reports, "Too many people are responding to real trouble with a quick fix. As a nation we should be reserving medication only for those situations when it's proven to be an effective approach and where we can't approach it in other ways."

Shouting at the Sky is about another way. This is the story of three months spent in one of the country's most successful wilderness therapy programs for at-risk teens; I later followed a dozen of these kids for a year, tracking how the experience played out in their lives. Most of these teens, by the way, were veterans of countless other treatment options: counseling, psychiatric and drug rehab facilities,"tough love" programs, suicide wards, etc. Yet for many, it was these eight weeks in the wilderness that allowed them to finally get on track, to begin acting in their own behalf. "The wilderness ruined my high," said one 16-year-old girl from Sacramento. "Out there I came to know who I am, what I need. Two months after I got back I tried drugs again, but it wasn't the same. It was like suddenly I knew too much."

While many of us have come to think of outdoor programs for at-risk youth in terms of military-style boot camps, true wilderness therapy -- the kind now showing such impressive results -- is nothing of the sort. Here counseling, as well as regular, compassionate mentoring, are delivered against the daily challenges of living simply in nature. On one hand, the environment is free enough of distractions for a teen to build a strong relationship with the emerging young man or woman inside. At the same time, the outdoors provides a constant stream of challenges that can prompt feelings of frustration, fear and powerlessness. It's in the learning to face such moments -- developing new coping skills for dealing with the daily bumps -- that kids ultimately find the sense of power and control they hunger for.

The middle of Utah's Red Desert, 2, maybe 3 in the morning. Light from a full moon is spilling all over the place -- down the shoulders of Caineville Reef, across the long, flat sweeps of sage and rabbitbrush and greasewood, through a thin braid of dry, nameless washes, onto the faces of seven teenage girls scattered across the ground at the edge of a box canyon, hoping for sleep. Lisa and Jenna are having weird dreams again, twitching and mumbling, setting off on what seem to be conversations, passing off a slur of words and grunts, even instructions: "Not that way," Jenna is saying. "Go left. It's over there." I'm trying to remember it all, give the words back to them in the morning in the off chance they might hold some kind of meaning. A few feet away, Nancy is poking Tricia in the ribs, trying to get her to stop snoring. And beyond that, under the only tree within a half-mile, is the new girl, Brenda, the one who just went on suicide watch. Such a strange routine for her now: the drawstring taken from the hood of her sleeping bag, the laces pulled from her boots -- just in case. A blue tarp spread tight across her bag with two staff lying on top of the outside edges, one on either side of her, the better to feel every move she makes.

If this was your first week in the field, you'd probably be thinking it'd been one hell of a day. Carla had her first try at leading the group on a night hike, laying open a personality that looked something like a cross between Joan Crawford and an aerobics instructor. No one took it well. And then that thing with Brenda. Around midnight she decides to sit in the middle of the road, refuses to walk any more, starts cursing, spitting on us. Says what would really make her happy is if all of us would burn in hell. Before it's over she manages to raise everyone's hackles, even stalwart Jenna and the normally tranquil Nancy, sending them over to staff with teeth and fists clenched, asking if they could "hit her just once. C'mon, just once!" Not surprisingly, when we got to camp, sometime around 1 in the morning, Lisa called a group to talk about it. But instead of telling Brenda what a bitch she was -- and that would have been pure Lisa -- she said only that she understood Brenda's loneliness, that she knew about the anger she felt being here. That things would get better. That if she needed to talk . . .

So much craziness, and on one of the most beautiful nights I've ever seen. The kind of desert night that feels like a gift. Delicate. The air filled with the smell of juniper and sage, desert holly and cliff rose, sandstone and alkali dust. And out beyond camp hundreds of sego lilies, one to a stem, their ivory blooms glowing in the wash of the moon. Lying awake through these wee hours I'm thinking maybe all this wouldn't be so hard to get my head around -- wouldn't seem so filled with contradiction -- if my culture hadn't spent the last hundred years thinking of the wilderness mostly as some kind of tonic: sedative, blood pressure medicine, speed. The wilds as the place we go to smell the pine and the rain, dangle by ropes from the chins of mountains. It's been such a long time since deserts and woodlands were places of confrontation, stages on which to wrestle with shadows and cry for visions, holy lands hiding strengths that go unsuspected in more common hours.

The old people of this place, the Paiute, knew full well that beauty and craziness would be found together like this, standing hand in hand. Paiute creation myth tells how long ago the earth was danced by two brothers, Coyote and Wolf. Wolf with his perfect, wholesome vision of the world, a creator who never wanted anything more than an abundant life for the people, a life free of anguish, free even of death. And the younger Coyote, spoiled, mischievous, the glib talker who time and again pulled his older brother away from those plans for perfection. And how after a time Wolf went away, leaving the world to unfold according to the imaginations of Coyote. We cast our fate with Coyote, said the Paiute. And so our lives are driven by this strange mix of urge and shadow, by schemes going out into the world meaning to be clever, coming back full of pain.

Now these smudged, sweat-stained girls, kids who never knew of or cared a damn about the Paiute's brother gods, lying here in the shadows of these same ancient canyons, wrestling with Coyote things of their own. With their habits of crank and speed and crystal meth. With late-night trips to the police stations, to the streets, to the suicide wards. Early in the afternoon with girlfriends at school, in the toilets, throwing up lunch. Hammering together pieces of whatever's in reach, trying to survive. Like Nancy a couple of days ago, walking down that dusty trail, talking about her bulimia: "How could I deal with things if I didn't throw up?" she said. "What else is there in my life I can control?" Then later, around the fire, before bed, she starts rapping on the bottom of one of the tin cans we use to cook in, and then someone else starts in with her thumbs against the bottom of her blue porcelain cup, and then three more cups and a pair of wooden spoons, until there's this heady thrum drifting out across the desert -- in some moments disjointed, but in others, perfect. And right in the middle of it a coyote comes up to the edge of the bench that runs along our camp to the south, gives three bright barks, turns and walks away. All of us sitting there looking at one another, amazed; never slowing the rhythm, though, never stopping that drumming.

"That coyote," Nancy says over breakfast the next morning, as if only then was it was proper to talk of it. "It was awesome." And she slipped that memory into her pocket and she's been walking with it ever since, all across this empty desert, drinking from it like a spring, smiling over it when the weight of her pack, when the long, black nights start pressing on her shoulders.

Read part two here.