Archive for July, 2009

We’ve been here for what feels like ages and moments at the same time. In the last few weeks campers have been on amazing adventures near and far. They’ve built beautiful friendships and worked through tough moments. I’ve been endlessly impressed with the skill and initiative of the staff this summer who have led some of the consistently best activities I’ve seen. We’re working a lot on baskets and containers, as well as antler-handled and stone knives. It’s… awesome.
Sadly, it’s also coming to an end for a bunch of campers and a few staff. We’re saying goodbye this week to friends new and old, including three really strong staff members. Moon’s Embrace left this morning and will be in Japan by the end of the week where he’ll be teaching English for the next year. Forge Song is finishing his first summer at Farm and Wilderness and we look forward to having him back for the full summer next year. Hawk Shadow is also departing after holding a powerful place in our community as the true pillar of our wilderness skills program. His mentoring will be sorely missed, but I’m sure we’ll get him back too.
To give you a sense of the rowdy and wonderful crew of staff this summer, here’s our official FC 2009 staff photo:

Though the end is coming, we also just welcomed a handful of FCers into the community by giving them FC names. Please join me in holding these inspiring young men in the light: Robin Friend, Linden Brushes the Clouds, Otter Dreams, Chestnut Jay, Stone Turtle Shines and the counselor now known among his brothers at Flying Cloud and his friends in the Farm and Wilderness Community as Tundra Warrior Sings.

I’m sad to have to talk about this part, I do want to remind you of the pickup schedule for campers going home this Friday, July 24th. Parents of guardians retrieving their FCer can arrive as early as 9:00AM, and are expected to head down the road by 2:00PM at the latest. Folks who are coming up to visit their full-season camper can stay until 5:00PM and are invited to join us for lunch. As usual we strongly discourage taking your camper out of camp, but we’re aware that there are good reasons to do so, and that’s okay as long as he’s back by 5:00. I look forward to seeing you all soon.

“This was the best trip I’ve ever been on in my F&W career.”

That’s what I heard from campers and staff returning from trips yesterday. We sent out a Mammal Tracking trip to northern Massachusetts, a canoe trip on the Raquette River in the Adirondacks of New York, and a local area Survival trip, and apparently every one of them was a wonderful adventure. Flagstaff, our canoeing and hiking trip to Maine for our older campers returns tomorrow (it’s our only six day trip) and we’re expecting rave reviews there as well. In part the success of trips this year is due to Sun Panther Gives, our trips coordinator who’s been in his position for three years now, but it’s equally a result of a fantastically skilled and passionate staff and of course a whole passel of great campers.

Here are some of my favorite stories from trips so far: Raquetter River saw an otter and a bald eagle and made a chocolate pancake scramble for their last breakfast; on the Survival trip every camper slept in a debris shelter he had made himself, and they apparently made a delicious wild-edibles stew for dinner one night with cattails, nettles and leeks; I was on the Mammal Tracking trip so I know those stories the best. We had seven campers and went to the Montague Sand Plains in Massachusetts. While there we tracked dogs, coyotes, deer, possum, squirrels, raccoons, mice, and a handful more, plus we got to see a mother bird feed its baby just a few feet away from our faces! There are of course a ton more stories, but you’ll have to wait to hear those from your very own camper. The piece I wanted to share with you for now was that thanks to everyone’s hard work, these were some of the most enjoyable trips FC has run, and your camper was there.

Though it’s hard to believe, we only have one more week left in the session, so I’ll write again next week and then say goodbye to many of you. Of course you’re always welcome to keep reading the blog or sharing it with friends and I hope if you have questions or ideas you’ll be in touch.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the FC blog. This is my first update since the summer actually got going, so for some of you this may be your first visit. Feel free to take a moment to look around, read about me, FC and everything we’ve done in the past.

Really the point of this post is to share with you the names of our recently named Flying Cloud campers. Last night was the first Naming Ceremony of 2009, and we had something like 250 people there! It was great fun! We played games, sang songs and danced the night away. In the midst of all that, Forge Song, Alpine Iris, Starfall Hunter, Elk Stands, Daybreak Heron, Heartwood Visions and Wind Harvester were all named. Please join me in welcoming them into our community.

I’ll be adding more photos to the private “parents only” section of the website soon, but for now I just wanted to let you know that your sons are doing a great job of keeping me on my toes!
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Before I go, I also wanted to say with no small amount of pride that this summer is going fantastically well. We’ve got a wonderful crew of campers, and our staff are great too. We’ve got a lot of returning counselors, none of our support staff are new and despite the rainy weather spirits are high throughout the clearing. Actually, there is one staff member who’s a little out of control, but we try to keep him locked up in the food shelter mostly.