The Climb

(CBS)  60 Minutes II updates a story of 10 women who went to an Outward Bound camp in the woods of Maine in 1986. For four days and nights, these women from New York's Westchester County lived in tents and endured physical challenges and obstacles more closely associated with soldiers than with middle-aged suburbanites.

What set them apart, what made them different from others who have gone to Outward Bound, is that each of them had a serious bout with cancer. Ed Bradley updates his report, which aired on 60 Minutes in February 1987.

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Click here to read the two-part report:

1987 Report

2000 Update

1987 Report
For that first broadcast, Ed Bradley asked the women in the group what they found most frightening about learning that they had cancer.

"That you're going to die," one woman answered plainly.

"You don't think of people who've gone through it and survived," said Anne. "You just think of those who have gone before you. And, you know, it's just really scary. And then, you know, you just build up this courage and just say, 'I'm going to lick it.'"

These women were part of a small support group sponsored by the American Cancer Society to try to help each other get through the ordeal of cancer.

"A lot of people said we were crazy to do it," Sally said.

The first challenge was the low ropes course.

"Concentrate. It'll make it a little easier," instructed Seran, who along with Andrea worked for Outward Bound as an instructor.

What Outward Bound tries to do is to build up confidence and the ability to trust others. The women are being prepared for much more difficult obstacles to come.

"Each person in this group has their own badge of courage, whether it is a physical badge," Sally said. "The mastectomy...you hear people describe as this horrible, disfiguring operation and this and that and the other thing; on the other hand it's something that's happened to you; it's part of you. It doesn't make you an ugly person."

That first day was tough, but that was just the beginning. The next morning, when they got to the top of the mountain, they were overwhelmed. The challenge was an 80-foot cliff. They had to rappel, go down the cliff on a rope and then climb back up.

"And there's no skill to rappelling, no skill at all," declared Seran, the instructor. "It just takes a little courage in the head."

Anne was terrified but determined to go forward.

"All of us have felt that we've lost control of our lives to a degree, having had cancer," Anne said. "This will kind of help us to get back into control. And it's a big risk, and I have not taken many risks in my life."

Everyone who rapelled down the ciff made it safely. Climbing back up was a lot harder.

"Try to use your feet rather than your knees," Andrea advised. "You can go farther with your feet."

"OK, but I'm going to make it," Sally said.

"You are," Andrea reassured.

Sally made it, but a few of the others couldn't and had to be lowered back down to the ground.

Nancy, for one, didn't think she could beat it. She said, "Oh, I saw everybody else this morning, I said, 'No way!' They said, 'Are you ready to go now?' I said, 'No, I'm not going to do it.'"

"When you finished one task and you've been successful, it's really the greatest feeling," Margaret said. "It gives you so much confidence that you want to go on and try another thing. And each thing that we've tried and each thing that we've done has been a real challenge."

The last day provided perhaps the greatest test of all, the high ropes, and a course similar to the one they did the first day. But these ropes were 40 feet in the air. Sally went first and finished first.

"I never want to do any of this again," Sally said, laughing. "I want to get married once. Certain things, you want to - you know, it's nice to do once, and that's it; you've had it."

How does such an experience help in dealing with the cancer and the battles they continue to face?

"I think it gives you courage," Margaret said. "I know, in our group, we're all afraid of recurrence, and that's one reason we have the group."

"This experience was about living, and I bet you (that) we thought very little about having cancer," Sally said. "It was just so healthy and so wonderful for all of us. It's kind of a putting behind for me and going ahead with life."

So, they headed off in the afternoon for what they called their solos.

Said Nancy: "I'd like to be able to take this experience and in my solo think about how can I apply it to my daily life on an ongoing basis so I don't forget, you know, what it is, in fact, you know what we went through. Because it's too important, and there's got to be some ways to bring it back and say, 'What did I learn?' And then, 'How can I apply it to my everyday life?'"

Outsiders need to understand "how hard it is to cope with it," Rosanne declared. "It's the biggest obstacle I can think of," she added. "And if you've never been through it before, you just don't know how to cope with it. And you don't have people cheering you on because they haven't been there before. That's what's so great about a support group."

So, five days after they got there, they left - each woman feeling she had regained something of herself, something she felt she had lost along the way.

"We did things we never ever thought we could do, never ever," Rosanne said. "And I think it really puts the cancer behind. You never forget it. You never forget tht you had cancer; you never forget that it could recur. But you can know we really have some very tangible issues to focus on now when we're anxious again. We can think of the time we jumped from the one step to the next."

"And that is a very positive thought," Rosanne concluded.

2000 Update

Keeping that positive thought has not been easy. Some experienced a recurrence of cancer. Two are no longer part of the group. Two others have died. But the six who remain say the courage they gained and the friendship they fostered during those four days and nights in Maine has helped sustain them through it all.

Recently they got together again - this time in Florida.

Fourteen years later, while they no longer live near each other, they still try to get together at least once a year to take trips that are a little tamer and remember the one trip that changed their lives.

What do they now think that first Outward Bound trip accomplished for them?

"Bonded us," Margaret says.

They don't think they would have become friends without it.

"If we hadn't had cancer, we never would have met, never," Nancy says. "'Cause we just come from different - social, economic backgrounds."

"The Outward Bound trip is just - it's so indescribable - what happens to you," Anne says. "We had been through so much together over those four days."

"Each of us learned a lot more about our own self and what we were capable of," Rosanne says. "And at the end of it, it was very clear how each of us had grown and how we had all grown together as a group."

"I was thinking about this last night - we're like a really good marriage," Sally says. "We know absolutely what's wrong with everybody else," she says, amid laughter. "We can laugh at it. But we have absolute loyalty and just an unceasing love for each other."

"Unconditional love" is how Anne puts it.

"I think that we're more of a sisterhood now," Margaret says. "When we got off the plane the other day, we just hugged and started talking and laughing, as if - as if no time had passed at all. We're so close, I think we're almost like sisters."

So when two in their group died - Fran in 1991 on the eve of her 42nd birthday and Phyllis in 1998 - they were with them until the end.

"It was very difficult," Sally says. "But I think we all feel good about it in the way we were able to support them....That we came out of it, really, even stronger."

Sally needed this type of strength as she dealt with two new bouts of cancer. Eight years ago she had colon cancer, and less than a year ago she had a lung removed.

"I'm very good at getting cancer," Sally quips. "But knock on wood, I seem to be very good at dealing with it."

But she says it's her memoris of those four days in Maine that help her through endless hours of medical testing.

"Every time I have, say a PETscan, which you go through this machine for 45 minutes, I go through the whole Outward Bound trip," Sally says. "I do the ropes, I do the...whole thing."

"But the other thing is really - it taught me was to push myself and to challenge myself," she adds. "And it gave me this group, and that's been a tremendous help."

"When I'm with these women, these women know what I'm going through, so that I'm not isolated sometimes," Sally notes. "And I love my friends. But they can't understand really what it is, and these people can. And especially Rosanne can."

Rosanne had a recurrence of breast cancer in 1996, 15 years after her mastectomy.

She was not prepared. "You are for the first five years," Rosanne says. "And then each time you go for a test, you worry about it. But it doesn't become an overwhelming part of your life, because you've gone over the first milestone of the five-year period."

"I was feeling great physically, very fit,...successful in my career. And that was the last thing in the world I thought about."

Can one become complacent with cancer?

"I'm finding it - today because of the recurrence, that it is, again, in the forefront of my thinking and my daily life," Rosanne says. "And yet - I feel fabulous, and I'm not going to let the fact that I've had a recurrence hold me back."

"People hear about reoccurrence, or lung cancer, and they think - Uh-oh, she's a goner," Sally says. "Well, we're not goners."

After getting hit again and again, does she come close to saying, 'That's it?'

"No. I got depressed," Sally says. "When I had lung cancer, I called together my support team....And it becomes like a project. You know, this is how I'm going to attack it. And this is what I'm going to do. And hopefully this is how I'm going to find a way to be happy and deal with it - and get around it."

And she has come to terms with her physical abilities.

"Well, I can play golf, and I can hike, and I'm not ever going to climb Everest," Sally says, with laughter. "And I'm going to read about places that I would like to go and I'm not going to be able to go. But when I go for a walk in the morning, I say, 'Nothing hurts me today. I seem to be cancer-free. I can enjoy this. And aren't I lucky?'"