Back In The Saddle

People often ask me how summer went - my answer - good, in fact very good.  Each year as July gets closer, I get more and more excited about the start of summer camp.  One of my favourite things is having tuck every day of the week!  Any excuse to have an ice cream cone is a good one - even on a snowy day in September.  On a side note I just discovered this summer how good Chapman Super Cones taste.  I was more of an ice cream sandwich type of guy preferring the natural grains in the sandwich part...

I love our Sparks camp which is our youngest camp with campers going into grade 1 to 4.  Even though some of these campers are very small, they carry very large sticks - everywhere!  We seem to always be cleaning up sticks after our younger camps leave.  In fact, I remember keeping one behind the door in my office for a year...

We had the usual amount of stress and challenges this summer, but nothing really out of the ordinary.  The ordinary includes an ambulance run - we had one.  The ordinary includes homesick campers and discipline challenges - we had both. 

But through it all God was at work as many of our campers experienced transformed lives because of their experience at Camp Evergreen.  That is exciting and that is why we work so hard all year. 

So in answer to the question, yes it was a good summer and I can hardly wait until next July!

Reaching Higher continues to move forward and the more we move ahead the more we realize how much work needs to be done before we can start building the new lodge.

At the end of August we hired Clifton Associates to drill for geotechnical investigation and slope stability.  (I thought briefly about using one of those words for my blog word of the week...)  Most of you already know that we want to build the lodge close to the bank overlooking our lower playing field and canoe pond.  We received good news that our ground is solid and we can build closer to the bank than we had originally thought.

We are also working closely with SD Consulting Group and have narrowed down our septic options to six (or maybe seven)!  How exciting is that!  (OK not that exciting but still...)  We want to narrow our options down to the one best option by the end of October.  We've drilled three test wells and need to do some further soil sampling.

We found out just before summer started that we received a significant grant from the Calgary Foundation to help us with a fundraising strategy.  Thank you very much!  Now that summer and those first few crazy busy weeks of September are over we are focusing on the funds needed to build the lodge.

It's good to be back in the blog saddle again!

Thanks for your continued support.

Bob "Ranger" Kroeker
Executive Director

*Please note that no horses were injured in the filming of this weeks blog word of the week and a fully trained wrangler (we'll miss you Naemi) was in control of Alf the entire filming sequence.  That is why Ranger was able to wear a "cowboy" hat and not a Helmut - oops helmet.