This year at Sangre de Cristo Wild Camp, Localogy’s teenage camp, we continued our tradition of helping the community and challenging the teenagers in a week-long back packing trip. Our intense two week adventure proves a success once again.
The Sunday camp starts sets the tone for the rest of the session, and this year the teenagers did a stellar job in taking control and owning their camp culture. After picking work crews, we spent the next 4 days serving Questa Farmer’s Market, cleaning Casas Culture next door, continued a building project at Veterans Off Grid, and cleaned up and restored our Camp campus. The teenagers at Questa Farmers Market did some much-needed weeding, indigo dying of clothes and Suki-Ban wood burning. The Casas crew peeled off-putting plaster off of 110 year old adobe relleno walls, revealing the beautiful earth plaster underneath. At Veterans Off Grid, Ryan Timmermans taught our teenagers a lot about sustainable building through insulating a healing structure with straw-clay slip between studs.
The backpacking trip took place in the beautiful sea of mountains that is the Weminuche Wilderness in south western Colorado. The teenagers embarked on a 52-mile hike that took them through a river, up a peak, running into several moose, and swimming in Emerald Lake. Stargazing late into the night and hiking under the sun through the day, the teenagers had a deep-dive of wilderness and they came back to camp in good spirits ready to take on the world.
We had an amazing time and the teenagers were truly the best our camp program has ever had.
Keaton Karvas - Wild Camp Director
