MIDLAND Vol. XCII
Midland School
MIRROR
Los Olivos, California
May 2024
No. 4
Tea Time
100 Miles, 9 Students, 6 Days: The Thacher Hike Midterm By Jay ‘26 & Lyssa ‘26 Saturday, February 10, 2024. A group of nine students, plus faculty Dan Susman and John Babbott, awoke at around five in the morning. We trudged through the cold and silent night to Stillman, had a quick meal, and received an inspiring speech from our Head of School, Christopher Barnes. We were about to embark on a journey not undertaken by anyone in almost twenty years: The Thacher Hike. For decades, since the first Thacher Hike in 1978, Midland students have, for some reason, undertaken the ridiculously long trek to The Thacher School in Ojai. Midland has close ties with Thacher since our founding, and this excursion is a prime example. It’s around eighty or so miles of walking over about a week, usually undertaken in February or April, where a group of Midlanders hike out to Thacher. One Midland alum, Adam Xu ‘05, who was on the most recent Thacher Hike in 2005, recalls the time when they got hopelessly lost in the snow during a snowstorm and were too scared to light a fire because of all the bear markings in their campsite. They all survived, and didn’t even need an airlift, although there were times when they thought they would. The disastrous 2005 hike led to the school ending the tradition, presumably for safety reasons.
Aquila ‘25 after building a snowman on the trail
But in 2023, after Dean of Experiential Learning Dan Susman’s sixth year, he began to cook up a plan. Upon interview, Dan mentioned his thinking that “this hike is a cool Midland tradition, I’d heard about it for years from other Midlanders, and I thought we had a good group of students who would maybe be excited about it.” When he broached the idea to the faculty, looking for a volunteer to help him lead the trip, John Babbott expressed immediate interest. A Thacher School alum, he looked forward to the idea of being able to go “full circle” and trek from his current workplace back to where he went to high school. When the two faculty brought up the idea to the student body, they were surprised to find that there were a lot of interested students — almost twenty kids — who wanted to go trekking a ridiculously long way to another boarding school. “[It] seemed like a grand adventure that maybe wasn’t possible–seemed like a pretty good goal,” Dan recalled, explaining that before the trip, he estimated our chances of success to be about 10-20%. Although records of the Thacher Hike and its completion are spotty, the password-protected highly secure, nearly unassailable Midland Mirror archives show that this trip has been attempted at least eight times before, with varying levels of success. Over the years, there have been many different routes. Some of these were interspersed with car rides in the middle, and others followed more direct routes. The route taken this year covered about 100 miles over six days and five nights and took us through snow, across rivers, and over multitudinous monumental mountains. (Continued on page 2)
Faculty John Babbott and Dan Susman on a snack break
1