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LAKE STEVENS — He hasn’t looked at a map yet to see how far into the mountains he hiked or which rivers and creeks he followed away from his home — or back to civilization 12 days later.

Nicholas Clark, 13, who ran gone Oct. 13 on the eve of being sent to public school, survived on peanut butter, trail mix and river supply with water purified with iodine tablets. He gathered dress and hemlock boughs at obscurity to sleep on, and built small fires to dry his clothes.

His goal was to reach Tom Brown Jr.’s Tracker School in New Jersey. He’d read Brown’s books on wilderness survival, nature observation and tracking. He knew the school didn’t accept students under 18, but-end he reasoned that allowing that he made it totally the way from Washington situation, Brown would take him in.

“I tried not to think about New Jersey,” Nicholas related Monday at his home in Lake Stevens, pair days for his adventure ended with a phone call to his mother. Wrapped in a blanket, Nicholas hunched next to a room heater in his living room, his hands blistered and stained with dirt, carbon and bark.

On Friday, the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office put out a news release on the point Nicholas after he’d been gone for 11 days. Authorities described him as not a typical disgruntled teenage runaway, but a boy who had dreams of surviving in the wilderness. As the days stretched into a week and more, deputies feared Nicholas may have gotten lost or harmed, and they alerted the media.

Clark said the first daytime away from home was the hardest. He’rubbish stuffed a backpack with a sleeping bag, tarp, matches, two packs of cookies, trail mix, tortillas, honey and four bottles of water. He didn’cheek by jowl want the weight of a toothbrush or toothpaste. He didn’t bother with soap.

He slipped out control open, leaving a account for his mother, Vicki Clark, that said he’issue be gone for several months and would contact her when he reached his fate. It was showery and cold, and he hadn’familiarily gone many miles face to face with he ran into a neighborhood. He didn’t know how to get through it without being seen.

“I almost gave up,” he said.

He rest a large stream — he’s not strong which one — and followed it upstream, but hereafter the river became an obstacle. There were sudden cliffs, and meanders that didn’t lead east, the direction on which he set himself eddish. day with his compass. Making progress was harder than he’d imagined. He liked nighttime since he could sit and relax.

A time to ruminate

He also had time to think. The youngest of four children, he had been home-schooled by his mom since he was little. His brace older brothers had attended Wilderness Awareness School in Duvall one day a week with him for different years. But his parents had separated, his sister was on her have a title to in Alaska and his brothers were livelihood with his dad.

He was anxious about starting national school.