During his undergraduate studies at BYU, Larry Dean Olsen was promised $90 to teach survival skills without modern gear to his fellow students. After an influx of students showed up for his month-long course, the school increased his pay to continue these courses. The university noticed that the students had unexplained improvement in their school performance after the course. This caused the university officials and Olsen teamed to start offering these excursions to failing BYU students. For the failing students, they were offered a chance of readmission if they learned survival skills and went on the month-long backpacking trip through the Utah desert with Olsen. These experimental expeditions are what many believe gave birth to the wilderness program industry. Most directly: One BYU student, Steve Cartisano, dropped out of BYU and used many of Larry Dean Olsen’s ideas to establish several problematic troubled teen wilderness programs – which, in turn, spinoff wilderness programs began to open up.