Archive for the ‘staff’ Category

Hello Flying Cloud 2010! Camp is fast approaching and all the staff are here getting ready for another amazing summer in the woods. The staff this year is quite a crew. We have many familiar faces making their return to the clearing, a couple former campers and of course some great new additions to the Flying Cloud family! Please join me in celebrating such a spectacular group of guys . . .

Our solid Support Staff, also know as the “Funkies”

Striding Ash (Sensible Health Person / Maintenance) a certified Wilderness First Responder (WFR)
Sun Panther Gives (Program Director / Trips Coordinator) a certified Lifegaurd (LGT)
Forest Flame (Assistant Director) (WFR)
Tends the Grove (Food Coordinator)

and where would we be without a well rounded group of Lodge Staff?

River Sways (Waterfront head, WFR, and LGT)
Kodiak Weaves the Thunder (LGT)
Forge Song (WFR and certified EMT)
Badger Pool (certified as a Wilderness EMT)
Loon Dreamer (WFR)
Elk Sound
Twilight Cub
and two all new Staff Members Vince and Rafe!

Hopefully your excitement for the summer is ramping up and we look forward to seeing you all walk into the clearing in just a couple weeks.

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.

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!
​

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.

Well it’s been too long since I’ve written here, but there have been lots of great things happening. Since I last wrote I’m happy to say that more than one hundred people helped get the Ice House stocked full, so we’re sure to have a summer with great food up at FC! Check out some photos from this year’s Ice Cutting here. Of course if you have more photos to add, send them along!

In addition, I’ve been working hard on getting the staff all figured out for the summer of 2009, and I’m happy to say it’s going to be a truly amazing group of men. I think I say that every year, and of course it’s true. As it happens though, this year feels exceptional already. Won’t you join me in welcoming back….

Our glorious “Funkies”
Striding Ash (Resource/Program)
Sun Panther Gives (Trips/Logistics)
Forest Flame (Sensible Health/Forest Garden)
Tends the Grove (Food Coordinator)

And then there’s the lodge staff…. Oh boy, what a crew they are!
River Sways
Moonlit Raven Echoes
Kodiak Weaves the Thunder
Hawk Shadow
along with three new guys I’m excited to welcome to the FC community:
Alex, Andrew and Ried.

Happy Holidays to one and all! I’d like to take a moment to say how thankful I am for each and every one of you, and for the special web of connection we all share thanks to Flying Cloud. So often I’m amazed at how far our network stretches, as well as how deeply it’s rooted in me. As I travel the world, I always fall back on the values I’ve learned in my special summers at Flying Cloud.

I’m writing to let you all know about one of my favorite F&W events of all time…. That’s right, Ice Cutting is coming up! In just a few weeks, hundreds of F&W campers, families, friends and alumni will be gathering at the Tamarack Farmhouse for a weekend of playing in the snow, delicious food and lots of good hard work packing away ice for next summer!

No matter what your connection to FC, it would be great to have you there as part of the team. Perhaps you’re a former camper or staff member and you just need to get a little of the Flying Cloud love. Perhaps you’re a current FC’er and you know how important this work is for making camp run. Better yet, you’re new to the F&W community and this will be your first experience. Lucky you!

Ice Cutting this year will happen on President’s Day weekend, February 15th–18th with the official cutting all day Saturday. Usually this means that everyone arrives Friday evening and settles in at TF, and then after a big breakfast of Farm sausage, scrambled eggs and hot tea, we all head up to FC where the fun begins! Whether you’re sawing ice, pulling blocks out of the water, or running them up the hill, you’ll have a blast, and whenever you need a break there’ll be hot chocolate, GORP and oven-fresh pizza to get you fired up!

So far, we’ve got a nice little handful of FC staff on board, and I’ve heard from a few more guys who really want to be there. I’ll be flying across the country from Washington to see you all! I wouldn’t miss it for the world. You can also expect to see Medicine Shield Dancer, Buffalo Brother Smiles, Wind Stirs the Embers and Osage Panther out there cutting up the ice and packing the Mines chock full!

Come for the weekend or come for the day, however it works out, it’ll be great to get together as a Flying Cloud community and show just how much we love life in the woods. For more information, please contact Janet Stocker in the office at (802) 422-3761 or check the website: http://www.farmandwilderness.org/.

As a reminder of how great it can be, here are a couple of photos from last year (click on them for a larger version):

First you have to get there, which can be hard if you don’t follow the trail!

After cutting ice for a while, it’s time to pull it out.

And make sure to take some time for fresh hot pizza and igloo building!

Once the ice house is full, it’s time to reflect on all our work before heading down the hill for a hot dinner and some dancing! Just one more reminder that work really is “love made visible”.