Pair Flees Wagon Train At Boise Stop

Authorities are searching for two young men who walked away from the VisionQuest wagon train in Boise.

The train is a hard-work alternative to incarceration for 50 youths convicted of crimes, including 12 from Idaho.

It stopped in Boise during the past week on a southern Idaho tour. About 3 p.m. Thursday, the group visited Boise State University to take showers.

“While they were there, they slipped out the door,” Tom Fowler of VisionQuest said.

The program notified the Ada County Sheriff’s Department, which has jurisdiction over Boise State University.

Fowler would not disclose the identities of the youths or what offenses they had committed. Physical descriptions were unavailable, but Fowler said one of the youths had lived with a foster family in Boise.

The private, non-profit VisionQuest program is based in Tucson, Ariz., and has 1,200 youths enrolled. It is named for the rite-of-passage from adolescence to adulthood among Plains Indians.

In the program, youths care for the horses, take high school classes and study Indian ways.

The wagon train was slated to leave Boise over the weekend.