Dear Treetops Families,
It was so wonderful to welcome many of you to Treetops last weekend! It’s such a joy to watch our campers proudly show their families around campus, delighting in their favorite spots, their carefully made handiworks, and their most dear friends, both of the human, and farm animal variety. As usual, it’s hard to believe that another week has passed. Last weekend, not only did we say goodbye to our families and loved ones after Visitors’ Weekend, we also parted with our beloved four-week friends. In this fifth week of camp, our community is smaller, allowing more opportunities for new friendships to form and more specialized and individual instruction to be given.
As I write, I see yellowed leaves outside my window on the Mountain Ash, an early sign that summer’s peak has passed, and a reminder to cherish these final weeks together as a community.
Since last week, so much has happened. Our junior campers performed a spectacular play, in which forces of evil tried to steal away the whimsy and independence that thrive at Treetops, casting a spell over the campers, causing them to turn into mindless and uninspired sheep. Luckily, the spirit of Huxley the llama was summoned and was able to return the sheep to their prior camper forms, and the magic and whimsy of Treetops was restored! Our senior campers also exhibited their powers of performance with the Sunday night talent show, entertaining their peers with song, dance, drama, and of course, a healthy dose of humor.
The week kicked off with one of our most transformative, important, and treasured Community Monday traditions: the Senior Camp Chicken Harvest. With reverence and care, our Super campers—those who opted to—brought a chicken through each step of the process, while staff and campers participated in a station of their choosing: plucking, evisceration, tweezing pin feathers, rinsing, or weighing and bagging.
Chicken Harvest is a challenge-by-choice activity, and campers are encouraged to participate to their appropriate challenging edge. With the support of their peers and trusted adults, campers learn that their abilities often exceed their expectations. The morning is both solemn and celebratory: there’s a reverence for the chickens that we have lovingly cared for over the past five weeks, who are giving their lives to feed and sustain us, yet there is also celebration for the great feat accomplished as a community. By lunchtime on Monday, we completed the harvest of 75 meat birds, yielding 455 pounds of meat, which will feed our camp and school community in the coming months, beginning with a barbecue chicken dinner this Sunday.
Meanwhile, on Monday, our junior campers and the senior campers who opted out or moved on from Chicken Harvest helped to harvest our garlic, pulling out all seven beds of our crop, bundling it, and setting it out to dry. As always, the work done during Community Mornings astonishes us all as we see how much we can accomplish when we work together towards a common goal.
Tuesday marked a return to our normal daily schedule with campers resuming swim lessons, returning to the various shops to finish projects or begin new ones, as well as the launch of more off-campus trips. Day trips headed to the Olympic Museum in Lake Placid, The Wild Center for the special Thomas Dambo troll exhibit, and went out on hikes, paddles, and farm trips. Our most avid hikers and paddlers in both Junior and Senior Camps also embarked on numerous overnight trips.
For a dozen of our Supers, this week brought the launch of our longest and most challenging wilderness trips: the five-day canoe and five-day hike in which a group of six campers and two counselors embark on a five-day, four-night jaunt into the Adirondack wilderness. This tremendous feat is not only challenging for the body and mind, but it also bonds the group closely together as they learn to rely on one another, literally pull their own weight, and experience the satisfaction of accomplishing a challenging goal with the help and support of one another. It’s been a very rainy week for these trips, but reports back to Camp have all been positive, and both groups are on course. We can’t wait to welcome them back on Saturday and hear stories of their days and nights away.
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For Supers still at Camp, they have begun their Super project work: a new horse wash station at the barn. The site was measured out, postholes dug, and warm water pipes installed. Not only will this project yield a necessary improvement to our barnyard and equine program, our Super campers are also learning important skills of basic construction: designing, planning, measuring, and the essential tool skills needed to accomplish such a project.
Yesterday brought a day of whimsy across campus, as we embraced all things backwards during Backwards Day! Dinner for breakfast, dessert before lunch, and as many clothes, daily routines, and activities that we could imagine doing, in reverse. It’s a silly day to spice up the normal in-camp routine!
As our fifth week draws to a close, we are excited to celebrate together with another square dance, now a smaller group, more secure in ourselves and more comfortable in one another’s company. As the days pass, the sun is setting earlier, and the nights are growing cooler. As we head into week six, we’re reminded to cherish our time in this special community, to take advantage of the activities we love as well as those we haven’t yet tried, and to hold our camp friends close in these last weeks together.
With gratitude,
Hannah Edwards
Camp Treetops Director