Leave it to the Menendez family to bring the heat (pun intended) with tribal spirit. anybody out there want to show their Iroquois or Choctaw spirit in the form of wintry precipitation?
Dan
Seminole Snowman
news from merri-mac
How Do We Train our CIT's?
We send them to Costa Rica!
But seriously, there is nothing quite like a group of people working together in the outdoors to learn leadership (and life) lessons. So with this in mind, we have begun training our future Counselors in Training with Black Mountain Expeditions. We run two different leadership training ventures in both Costa Rica and in here in NC.
Our Black Mountain Expeditions staff recently led a nine-day, fun-filled adventure through the Costa Rican rain forest. We surfed, backpacked, rafted, and rappelled while visiting the village of Piedras Blancas and volunteered with the local community. The itinerary included exploring remote caves, rappelling down a waterfall, making sugar from sugar cane using a “trapiche”, rafting down the Savegre River, and surfing the waves of Manuel Antonio. Over the course of the expedition our future CIT’s grew in leadership and developed appreciation for Costa Rican culture.
Black Mountain Expeditions offers many different amazing trips such as this and we actually still have a few spots available for this summer for folks who aren’t a part of our CIT program. Give us a call or check out the website for more information.
Director Dan
Camp Friends
I was recently asked to speak to a class about the importance of community in the way we work as a business. I was reminded that it is not just important to us, it is what we do.
About ten years ago we set out to answer three questions: what do we do, how do we do it, and what if we did it intentionally? The idea was not to decide what we wanted to do, but rather to try to figure out what has been happening here all along, and then decide how we can get on board. What we discovered was that the primary factor for why camp is so effective, the reason our campers come back, and the reason our staff fall in love with camp every summer, is very simple. Friends.
We are made to live life together. It is in our DNA. Put another way, we are made in God’s image and at the very center of who he is is relationship (the Trinity). So it is no surprise that placing career or accomplishments ahead of family and friends usually ends poorly.
In most places developing community, is means to an end, a by-product of what they are there to do. Schools want strong community to create a better learning environment. Businesses want strong community to create more effective sales teams. Even reality TV stars want community to avoid getting voted off the island. But camp is different. For us community is an end in itself, it is what we are here to do.
We also have a leg up over other groups. We live together, like families. In other words, we do not just spend some time together and then go back to our real lives at home. For a short period each summer camp is our home. This is why camp friends are different, closer, than any others. We are made to live life together, and at camp doing that is not a strategy; it is the end itself.
Adam Boyd
What happens there when we leave camp?
Great question! It is quiet for a few days…and really clean. But then come the dancers! We run rentals most weekends from August to the beginning of October (before the first freeze). Camp apparently is greatly sought after by dancing groups who want to put on “dance camps”. All of them are wonderful, but the old faithful of our groups is Old Farmer’s Ball, which put on an event called “Splash Dance”, a contra dancing weekend that actually runs from Thursday to Sunday. They are amazing and fun people who have their program down to a science! My wife and I love to sit up in the balcony of the Mike and just watch the dancing. Now I’m no dancer, but it is truly beautiful! The dancing looks a lot like a cross between old ballroom dancing and country style square dancing. Lots of spinning and circling with fiddle music and a person “calling” the dance.
After the Old Farmer’s Ball we had another group in August that was the Stiletto Dance Camp. These were a group of Salsa dancing ladies who were also delightful. They had workshops during the day and then big dance parties at night. I made some fires for them at the tepee where they made s’mores and had a “camp experience” in the midst of salsa lessons.
Then last week we had Veritas Christian School stay at camp for three days. We ran activities for them like swimming, battleball, archery (I taught this), and the original sultan of fun, Steven Owens, even ran Sock War for them! Then we took them on trips one day to kayak, to play in swimming holes, to climb, and it was just like a normal camp day (but in September). It made me miss camp a lot.
Just this past weekend we held a fish fry for Jay Watson, who is running for a judge position locally, and that was a lot of fun too. He is a friend of mine and he loves to camp! We usually go fishing together once or twice a year. Great guy! If you live in Black Mountain, you should vote for him! I certainly will.
Other groups that we have had in the past have been Volvo employee picnics, various men’s weekends (from churches), A group of Girl Scouts from the Piedmont area, various weddings, an African dance camp, a belly dance camp, and a group of herbalists (who loved all of the flora and fauna on camp).
So we stay busy when you aren’t here to keep our minds off the fact that we miss you folks.
Happy Camping,
Director Dan
This place is looking Beautiful!
We knew it was going to be nice, but we had no idea…
Are we going to finish the new pavilion?
He's not worried!
Guys, it is looking good. The weather has been holding off for us, the floor is laid, and as of today the beams are going up! We are all just a little giddy this afternoon. And as you can see from the opening photo, as usual, these guys are cool as cucumbers. Here are some more shots of the progress.
Beams all around
Needless to say…At this point we are thrilled!
Happy Camping…
Adam and Ann
Camp has a new pavilion on Spencer's green
One of our goals at camp is to constantly be developing the property to facilitate the needs of our camp program. Camp needed another rainy day location so that the Mike would get less traffic on days when we play inside. This is yet another wonderful solution to allow campers to have fun even when the weather isn’t cooperating! Rain is a good thing!
This pavilion will sit on the upper field above Spencer’s green and be a choice spot for tribal activities, daily, and evening activities. Did I mention that the view from where it will sit is breathtaking?
From this Haven!
Adam and Ann
Single Gender Camping
Not long ago I was having lunch at Merri-Mac with my friend George. He had recently retired from 15 years as a camp director and he missed camp. As we finished eating the girls cleared their tables and then the tribal leaders stood on their benches and began leading their tribe songs. First Iroquois would cheer, and then Seminole would answer, finally Choctaw rallied in response. George was stunned and he asked me what they were doing. Who was leading this? Was it a special day? I said simply, “George, this is lunch. After the tribe songs they will sing side by side, then the Princess Song, and finally the announcement song.” I then explained that at dinner we would sing cabin and state songs, and at breakfast the next morning we would sing breakfast songs. Of course there were also chapel songs, and Lakeside songs, and Final Campfire songs, but that was getting off subject. I got the impression that George had never seen anything like this, and I knew exactly why. George had directed a co-ed camp, and girls will not stand up and sing, at least not like they do at camp, with boys in the room. I think that is sad, because you have never seen a person have more fun than when they sing with their friends.
Most people agree that boys and girls develop differently. In general girls develop language more quickly while a boy’s develop in their visual/spatial abilities. Other studies show that boys focus when under stress while girls tend to take less risk in stressful situations. So it is no surprise that children consistently perform better in single-gender schools. Settings focused on their particular strengths are simply going to be more effective.
Camp, however, is different. We are not making our campers better students (though I suspect they are), we are making them happier, more adventurous people. Our strength is that camp is both an intensely social (we live together!) and a low stress setting. The result is a place where it is safe to try new things. It is a place where the girls live together in their cabins as families, and like a family, it is a place where they can cheer for each others’ success and encourage each other when they fail. This is why girls who attend single-gender camps are more likely to develop a healthy sense of adventure, make life-long friends and return year after year.
Adam Boyd
What Camp Offers
You have probably heard from a million different people the benefits of camping for kids. Or as you scour the web for the best camp for your child there are aspects of each that seem to “fit” what you think your child needs and then there are others that don’t. The fact is that there are so many types of camps (and so many types of children) that bringing the two together (your child and a camp) is not an easy! As a parent and a camp director I have found one common concern that I think most parents can relate to:
We want our kids to find success. Whether it is in a particular sport, the arts, social skills, or spiritually, there is nothing quite like seeing a child excited about something that they are personally investing themselves in. The problem I hear about from most parents (which I can absolutely relate to with my own family) is that their child has not yet found their best avenue for success. At this point the path of least resistance is often to gravitate towards video games where no one knows if you try and fail! Insert a good summer camp here.
A good summer camp will provide:
- Plenty of activity options for your child to gradually invest themselves in. No child is the same and there should be a healthy variety of interesting possibilities to choose from.
- The opportunity for each camper to measure their success within each activity. They need to see their own progress and be rewarded for their efforts.
- An environment where failure is not a source of fear. Some children are so afraid of failure that the possibility paralyzes them from pushing ahead. Camp can be a unique environment to try new avenues of success without fear because:
- Everyone is learning new things at the same time so it becomes part of the culture.
- A child is in an entirely new surrounding both socially and physically. This offers them the opportunity to re-make themselves into a person who thrives in this new, uplifting camp environment.
- Counselors who care about the children finding success. The greatest part about camp for me as a boy was the fact that these amazing, college-aged men actually wanted to spend time getting to know who I was. My parents had told me a lot of things about life that I needed to do (and what to avoid) but I heard those things only marginally. However, when my counselors said the same things I hung on every word and incorporated those things into my life immediately! The result was lifelong.
In the right camp setting, children can walk away from their camp experience with more ability to handle what life throws at them. They can know finally what success looks like personally. And they can walk unafraid of failure. This will help them when they go off to college, get married, make tough business decisions, make tough family decisions, and they might even learn how to tie some handy knots for wilderness survival in the process!
Dan Singletary
Director
How To Choose a Camp
There are well over 5,000 summer camps in the United States. There are traditional camps, sports camps, girls camps, boys camps, riding camps, academic camps, wilderness adventure camps, clown camps, surf camps, day camps, overnight camps…you get the idea. So the question is not how to find a camp, but how to find the best camp, or better, how do I find the right camp for my child? Here a few a few ideas that we found helpful when we sent our own children to camp.
- Involve your child in the decision. A child who is adamant about not being at camp be slower to experience the best parts of camp. A great counselor will eventually win over just about everyone, but campers with some degree of buy-in will be the happiest soonest.
- Make the final decision yours. You need to be even more excited about the program than your camper. If you are uncomfortable with a camp then keep looking. My parents were camp directors so when they sent me to camp they chose two camps that they trusted. They then handed me the brochures and let me decide. It was a great mix of involving me while keeping control of the process.
- A lot of campers feel more comfortable going to camp with a friend. This is fine; it may help with pre-camp jitters. However, after the first several hours most children have made friends with every child in their cabin. Simply put, camp is not school; we live together so close friendships form very quickly. You should certainly consider where your child’s friends go to camp, but do not limit yourself to those camps alone.
- It’s all about the counselors! Look hard at how the camp hires staff. How many were former campers? How many return each year? How many are hired through international staffing services? Ask about their grades, where they go to school, what interview questions they are asked. If you choose the right camp your camper will be there summer after summer for many years and a great staff will become a wonderful part of their growing up.
We’ll try to add to this list over the next several weeks, but if you cannot wait then please call any time. We love camp and would be happy to help you find the best fit for your camper.
Sincerely,
Adam and Ann