The High Road

He says he's been clean since then, but work has been tough to find. So he's enrolled in a master's program in depth psychology through Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California. In 1993 he co-founded the James P. Beckwourth Mountain Club, an outdoors exploration group named for an important but little-known black explorer.

Beckwourth was an adventurer who traveled around the country in the 1800s. He fought alongside Californians rebelling against Mexico, farmed, set up trading posts and discovered what was later called Beckwourth Pass, at the northern end of the Sierra Nevada range in California.

The Beckwourth Mountain Club brings together dozens of adults and children, mostly black, to go on wilderness expeditions that range from hiking to backcountry skiing to rafting to fishing. Ostensibly the group is about honoring and carrying forth Beckwourth's legacy, but it also provides an opportunity to introduce young minorities to outdoor activities. The nonprofit group conducts about forty trips a year and is growing, says Stevens.

For Stevens, it's the culmination of a lifetime interest in the outdoors that has taken him climbing all over Colorado and even in Africa. The club, says another founder, Charles Corbin, is "man versus the wilderness. Jerry would want to climb the highest peaks. He enjoys the quest, the experience. In general, he likes the challenge."

In the meantime, he's working on both his thesis and a novel (about "self-awareness," he says) and pondering how to combine his psychology studies with the law.

Stevens already talks like a therapist: "Every moment is filled with the possibility of what might be." And he insists he's happy. His friends wonder what "happy" really means. "Jerry'll never be out of the wilderness," says Johnson. "This wilderness is something like clinical depression, something you have to fight against for the rest of your life. He'll have to be on guard.

"But I think he loves it--the lone wolf, him against the odds.