Displaying items by tag: Summer Camp
As camp director of Swift Nature Camp and an American Red Cross Lifeguard Instructor I know how important proper safety at the waterfront is. Learn about some of our water safety guidelines...
Be on guard
Swimming areas are filled with distractions, lifeguards must always be aware. Kids could die if one lose his or her focus. Actively scan your area. All at the swimming area must realize that the waterfront is an area of grave danger.
Buddy pairs are very important
“BUDDY CHECK” Swimming in buddy pairs adds a layer of redundancy to the active scanning that lifeguards perform on the dock or shore. Buddy pairs also give lifeguards something to look for the camper that is swimming alone.
Buddy separation is common and therefore becomes a good target for lifeguards who are actively scanning their area. Lifeguards who make sure buddies are together are making sure campers are safe while swimming.
“Where is your buddy?” is a great question that tells me the lifeguards are doing what needs to be done. This is often followed by the reminder for buddy pairs to swim within 8 feet of one another. THis provides verbal confirmation that the lifeguards are doing their job.
Buddy separation is common and therefore becomes a good target for lifeguards who are actively scanning their area. Lifeguards who make sure buddies are together are making sure campers are safe while swimming.
“Where is your buddy?” is a great question that tells me the lifeguards are doing what needs to be done. This is often followed by the reminder for buddy pairs to swim within 8 feet of one another. THis provides verbal confirmation that the lifeguards are doing their job.
Staff must always swim in buddy pairs
Staff set a good example for campers and help protect one another when they also buddy up during staff swims. No one at camp should ever swim alone, even briefly.
When I need to hop in the water at an odd time to fix Sally or Wally ( our swimming structures) , I always have a fellow staff member actively spotting me and acting as my buddy. Other staff should do the same.
When I need to hop in the water at an odd time to fix Sally or Wally ( our swimming structures) , I always have a fellow staff member actively spotting me and acting as my buddy. Other staff should do the same.
Avoid so-called “triples”
Triples are only allowed for a short period of time, until another shows up at the waterfront. If singleton swimmers show up for a swim, I find them another swimmer with whom they can buddy or they often buddy with a lifeguard.
Never swim at night
As Director, I am at the waterfront for any early or late swims and I call time over when the sky is to dark to swim. Never should campers or staff swim between sunset and sunrise.
Never exceed ratios
Programs vary, but I’m most comfortable with a ratio of 1 staff member to every 12 swimmers in the water. On particularly hot days, We train our own lifeguard’s so our staff is made of 80% Lifeguards so that ratio is never exceeded. This exceeds the state of Wisconsin’s codes.
Use PFDs
When an off-camp trip includes a water element, we follow this rule: “Above the knees requires PFDs.” Even when we are at an island near camp we wear PFD’s to ensure safety.
PFD’S are always used when a child is in a watercraft. Every time and always no exceptions.
That means that dipping your feet in a cool mountain stream is fine, but as soon as there is any significant wading or swimming, every person is wearing a properly fitting life jacket.
Children enjoy water activities more than any other while at Overnight Summer Camp but it is also a very dangerous are if not all safety precautions are not being met.
That means that dipping your feet in a cool mountain stream is fine, but as soon as there is any significant wading or swimming, every person is wearing a properly fitting life jacket.
Children enjoy water activities more than any other while at Overnight Summer Camp but it is also a very dangerous are if not all safety precautions are not being met.
Camp Bean, All Things Woodsey from UCLA UniCamp on Vimeo.
Saw this video and when I watched it seemed to be what SNC is all about.
Being a kid is never easy, As parents we remember what it was like. Children get pressure from all directions;social, academic and athletic. And today add Cyber Bullying to the list. It was so much easier when all that was need was to stay out of the Bullies way. But today the Bully can hunt you down right from their bedroom.
Teens claim that 1/5 have been Cyber Bullied. In response, Facebook has launched an anti-bullying campaign and other programs,have been started that that aim to empower kids to promote kindness.
Swift Nature Camp has long promoted fairness and kindness with our children and has lead the way in being non-tollerent towards those children that physically pick on other. Once back home its hard for us as camp directors to know what is going on...so if you find yourself being cyberbullied please reach out to us, your counselor or your parents so we can stop this type of bullying.
State legislatures across the country have passed or proposed laws against what they call cyberbullying. But how do young people parse bullying from being mean online? And when it happens, what do they do about it?
A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center and released Wednesday teases out these complex, often painful threads of teen life on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Two-thirds of the teenagers surveyed said people were “mostly kind” to each other on these networks, even as 88 percent said they had witnessed “people being mean or cruel.” One in five admitted to having joined in on the cruelty.
Notably, one in five teens surveyed said they had been “bullied,” but of those, the largest share said they had been bullied in person, not online. Indeed, online and offline sentiments often merge: one in four said an online squabble resulted in a face-to-face argument or worse.
What do they do when they see or feel the brunt of cruelty online?
The vast majority say they ignore it. Girls are more likely to seek advice than boys. And when they do seek advice, teenagers are more likely to turn to their peers than their parents. Parents are not entirely useless. The survey found that 86 percent of teens said parents advised them on “how to use the Internet responsibly and safely.”
Those surveyed expressed a certain savvy in manipulating their online profiles: Close to half lied about their age in order to access a site off limits to children under 13. Most said they tweaked their privacy settings so their posts were not widely visible.
The survey also revealed some of the new anxieties that parents experience. Three out of four parents said they “checked which Web sites their child visited.” Pew researchers said that could have been as simple as checking the browsing history on their computers. And among parents who have a Facebook account, 80 percent were on their children’s list of friends.
The survey was conducted by phone earlier this year on 799 children, aged 12 to 17, and their parents or guardians. The margin of error was plus or minus 5 percentage points. Nearly all kids in that age group are online, and among them, four out of five use a social network like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. The report aptly calls them “spaces where much of the social activity of teen life is echoed and amplified—in both good and bad ways.”
A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center and released Wednesday teases out these complex, often painful threads of teen life on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Two-thirds of the teenagers surveyed said people were “mostly kind” to each other on these networks, even as 88 percent said they had witnessed “people being mean or cruel.” One in five admitted to having joined in on the cruelty.
Notably, one in five teens surveyed said they had been “bullied,” but of those, the largest share said they had been bullied in person, not online. Indeed, online and offline sentiments often merge: one in four said an online squabble resulted in a face-to-face argument or worse.
What do they do when they see or feel the brunt of cruelty online?
The vast majority say they ignore it. Girls are more likely to seek advice than boys. And when they do seek advice, teenagers are more likely to turn to their peers than their parents. Parents are not entirely useless. The survey found that 86 percent of teens said parents advised them on “how to use the Internet responsibly and safely.”
Those surveyed expressed a certain savvy in manipulating their online profiles: Close to half lied about their age in order to access a site off limits to children under 13. Most said they tweaked their privacy settings so their posts were not widely visible.
The survey also revealed some of the new anxieties that parents experience. Three out of four parents said they “checked which Web sites their child visited.” Pew researchers said that could have been as simple as checking the browsing history on their computers. And among parents who have a Facebook account, 80 percent were on their children’s list of friends.
The survey was conducted by phone earlier this year on 799 children, aged 12 to 17, and their parents or guardians. The margin of error was plus or minus 5 percentage points. Nearly all kids in that age group are online, and among them, four out of five use a social network like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. The report aptly calls them “spaces where much of the social activity of teen life is echoed and amplified—in both good and bad ways.”
Wiki says Mindfulness: is a state of being in which greed, hatred and delusion have been overcome, abandoned and are absent from the mind.
Summer camp is a place where mindfulness is promoted each and every day. When we live with others it is important that we take the self out of our actions and think more about the group and what we need to accomplish. Today, business’s are doing the same.....
Summer camp is a place where mindfulness is promoted each and every day. When we live with others it is important that we take the self out of our actions and think more about the group and what we need to accomplish. Today, business’s are doing the same.....
Developing Mindful Leaders
3:32 PM Friday December 30, 2011 by Polly LaBarre
Organizations invest billions annually on a success curriculum known as "leadership development," which ends up leaving so much on the table. Training and development programs almost universally focus factory-like on inputs and outputs — absorb curriculum, check a box; learn a skill, advance a rung; submit to assessment, fix a problem. Likewise, they leave too many people behind with an elite selection process that fast-tracks "hi-pos" and essentially discards the rest. And they leave most people cold with flavor of the month remedies, off sites, immersions, and excursions — which produce little more than a grim legacy of fat binders gathering dust on shelves.
What if, instead of stuffing people with curricula, models, and competencies, we focused on deepening their sense of purpose, expanding their capability to navigate difficulty and complexity, and enriching their emotional resilience? What if, instead of trying to fix people, we assumed that they were already full of potential and created an environment that promoted their long-term well-being?
In other words, what if cultivating a successful inner life was front and center on the leadership agenda?
That was the question Todd Pierce asked himself in 2006 after years of experimenting with the full menu of trainings, meetings, and competency models in his capacity as CIO of biotechnology giant Genentech. He had just scoured the development reports of some 700 individuals in the IT department and found that "not one of them had an ounce of inspiration. I remember sitting there and saying, 'There's got to be a another way.'"
At the time, Pierce was benefiting personally from work with a personal coach and had recently woken up to the power of the practice ofmindfulness. He called in a kindred soul, Pamela Weiss, a long-time executive coach and meditation teacher, to help design an experiment that would cast out the traditional approach to leadership development to focus instead on helping people grow.
"If you want to transform an organization it's not about changing systems and processes so much as it's about changing the hearts and minds of people," says Weiss. "Mindfulness is one of the all-time most brilliant technologies for helping to alleviate human suffering and for bringing out our extraordinary potential as human beings."
Pierce and Weiss distilled a set of principles that form the basis of what became the "Personal Excellence Program" (PEP), now heading into its sixth year inside Genentech (Pierce left the company this fall after 11 years to join salesforce.com). Together, these pillars offer up a short course in unleashing human capability, resilience, compassion, and well-being (and they're unpacked in even more detail in Weiss and Pierce's entry).
1. Developing people is a process — not an event. "Development is all too often considered a one-time event," says Weiss. She and Pierce designed PEP as a ten-month-long journey that unfolds in three phases, with big group meetings, regular small group sessions, individual coaching, peer coaching, and structured solo practice.
2. People don't grow from the neck up. Too much training focuses on the the mind — it's about transferring content. "We talk about the head, the heart, and the body," says Weiss. In fact, they do more than talk about it — they enact it every day at the start of every meeting. The "3-center check in" is the gateway drug to mindfulness. As Weiss describes it: "You close your eyes for a moment and you notice, 'What am I thinking — what's happening in my head center,' then you notice, 'What am I feeling — what's happening in my heart center.' then, 'What am I feeling — what's happening in my body.' It's a way in which people start paying attention and practicing mindfulness without ever practicing meditation."
3. Put mindfulness at the center (but don't call it that!). Weiss and her team were careful to keep the language of specific belief systems and religions out of PEP. The program revolves around three phases: reflection on and selection of a specific quality or capacity you want to work on (patience, decisiveness, courage); three months of cultivating the capacity for self-observation; and the hard work of turning insight into deliberate, dedicated, daily practice.
4. It's hard to grow alone. "People grow best in community," says Weiss. "People don't grow as well just reading a book, getting an online training, or just taking in information. There's an exponential impact in having people grow and learn together." That's why the PEP "pod" (small 6-8 person group) is the main vehicle throughout the year.
5. Everybody deserves to grow. Pierce felt strongly that PEP should be available to people across the board — not just the usual "stars" — and that it should be voluntary. "The program is by application and not declaration," he says.
As PEP heads into its sixth year at Genentech, some 800 people have participated in the program. (Weiss added a graduate curriculum and a student training program to create "PEPtators" as few people want the journey to end.) The impact has been nothing short of transformative for individuals and organization alike. When Pierce took over the IT department in 2002, its employee satisfaction scores were at rock bottom; four years into the program, the department ranked second in the company and is now consistently ranked among the best places to work in IT In the world (even in the wake of Genentech's 2009 merger with Roche Group — always a turbulent and dispiriting experience).
Pierce attributes that to "the emotional intelligence of people and the capacity to change" developed in PEP. But don't take his word for it. The data-obsessed Pierce commissioned a third path impact report on PEP. It came in glowing: 10-20% increase in employee satisfaction, 50% increase in employee collaboration, conflict management, and communication; 12% increase in customer satisfaction; and nearly three times the normal business impact.
"Through PEP we have created a smarter, more agile, and more responsive organization," says Pierce. "The reduction of suffering, the capacity to deal with difficulties, the level of engagement — these things are very powerful and you can't call a meeting to get them or give people stock options and have them. These are skills and qualities you have to cultivate and practice."
So how's this for a new year's resolution for hard-charging leaders: turn every ringing, pinging, tweeting, and blinking thing off — especially your mind — and just breathe.
Summer Camp Should Be Mandatory for a Child:
It Changes Lives
By Phillip Morris
Call it an emotional report card.
It was one of those moments that give you a reality check on how your kid really feels about you deep down.........
Call it an emotional report card.
It was one of those moments that give you a reality check on how your kid really feels about you deep down.........
I had just rounded the bend that led to her cabin at Camp Christopher, a residential campground in Bath Township. It was Saturday, and she had been gone for six days — the longest she had been separated from her mother and me during her eleven years on the planet.
I was busy running my mouth, so the little girl spotted me first and set upon me like a blur. As she screamed “Daddy!” while racing the fifty yards or so toward me, I noticed that she had a large black boot on her left foot and a sandal on her right.
She nearly bowled me over as she leaped into my arms and exclaimed “Daddy!” several times and hugged me tight.
She told me she missed me “so much,” and then shifted her weight, which was my signal to put her down.
Once on the ground, she stepped back, looked me up and down, and then spoke to a friend who had come running up behind her: “My dad has a hole in his t-shirt. Daddy, why are you wearing that shirt?” she asked, redirecting her gaze toward me.
I could only shake my head. That’s when I knew my loving moment was over. Now Faith was back to being a pre-teen.
My designer t-shirt, with the strategically placed designer hole in it, was fair game. Now, after being separated for a week, I had to stand there and listen while my gear was publicly critiqued by a sixth-grader wearing a rubber boot and a sandal.
It wasn’t until we got the girl to the car with all of her luggage — including the broken sandal that had been replaced by the boot — that I started to understand how a week away from the parents, how a week at a well-run summer camp, can change your kid’s perspective, if not their life.
Only after she did a rapid checklist of everything she had done during the week — the swimming, the hiking, the canoeing, the fishing, the archery, the zip-lining, the horseback riding, and the learning of more campground songs, cheers, and prayers than any kid she should learn in six days — did she finally get to the heart of her camping experience.
“Daddy, I know what I want to do now when I grow up,” she said about thirty minutes into our drive home.
“I want to work with mentally disabled people.”
The short statement that seemingly came out of left field momentarily stunned me.
The girl has told folks for years that she plans to become a singer, a writer, and possibly an attorney when she grew up.
But as we drove, I recalled that she had enthusiastically spoken to a mentally-challenged young man as we left the campground. She had called him by his name. They had exchanged high-fives with each other and smiled broadly as they departed.
“Why do you want to work with the disabled?” I asked.
“Because they seem so happy. It’s like they don’t know that they are disabled,” she responded.
“They’re always smiling. I like them.”
Camp Christopher accommodates children and young adults from all over the region. The diminished mental capacities of a few of the campers doesn’t subtract from the camp's potential to transform lives — it only adds to it in ways many might not imagine.
My little singer, writer, future lawyer now has an appreciation for others with whom she had never had much exposure with before. Her capacity for compassion has been expanded. We have the Catholic-run camp to thank for that. It clearly lived up to its motto: “Come grow with us.”
Only perhaps next year they might also teach her how to sew. I know just the shirt I’ll be sending with her.
I was busy running my mouth, so the little girl spotted me first and set upon me like a blur. As she screamed “Daddy!” while racing the fifty yards or so toward me, I noticed that she had a large black boot on her left foot and a sandal on her right.
She nearly bowled me over as she leaped into my arms and exclaimed “Daddy!” several times and hugged me tight.
She told me she missed me “so much,” and then shifted her weight, which was my signal to put her down.
Once on the ground, she stepped back, looked me up and down, and then spoke to a friend who had come running up behind her: “My dad has a hole in his t-shirt. Daddy, why are you wearing that shirt?” she asked, redirecting her gaze toward me.
I could only shake my head. That’s when I knew my loving moment was over. Now Faith was back to being a pre-teen.
My designer t-shirt, with the strategically placed designer hole in it, was fair game. Now, after being separated for a week, I had to stand there and listen while my gear was publicly critiqued by a sixth-grader wearing a rubber boot and a sandal.
It wasn’t until we got the girl to the car with all of her luggage — including the broken sandal that had been replaced by the boot — that I started to understand how a week away from the parents, how a week at a well-run summer camp, can change your kid’s perspective, if not their life.
Only after she did a rapid checklist of everything she had done during the week — the swimming, the hiking, the canoeing, the fishing, the archery, the zip-lining, the horseback riding, and the learning of more campground songs, cheers, and prayers than any kid she should learn in six days — did she finally get to the heart of her camping experience.
“Daddy, I know what I want to do now when I grow up,” she said about thirty minutes into our drive home.
“I want to work with mentally disabled people.”
The short statement that seemingly came out of left field momentarily stunned me.
The girl has told folks for years that she plans to become a singer, a writer, and possibly an attorney when she grew up.
But as we drove, I recalled that she had enthusiastically spoken to a mentally-challenged young man as we left the campground. She had called him by his name. They had exchanged high-fives with each other and smiled broadly as they departed.
“Why do you want to work with the disabled?” I asked.
“Because they seem so happy. It’s like they don’t know that they are disabled,” she responded.
“They’re always smiling. I like them.”
Camp Christopher accommodates children and young adults from all over the region. The diminished mental capacities of a few of the campers doesn’t subtract from the camp's potential to transform lives — it only adds to it in ways many might not imagine.
My little singer, writer, future lawyer now has an appreciation for others with whom she had never had much exposure with before. Her capacity for compassion has been expanded. We have the Catholic-run camp to thank for that. It clearly lived up to its motto: “Come grow with us.”
Only perhaps next year they might also teach her how to sew. I know just the shirt I’ll be sending with her.
Phillip Morris is a Metro Columnist for The Plain Dealer. He also blogs, discussing general interest topics with a focus, on Cleveland.com at www.cleveland.com/morris/.
Summer school, all-year school, summer sports programs, and electronic media have become the staples of children’s play in recent years. Children are kept fully scheduled...
with mostly indoor activities these days. The arena of play has come indoors. The light of the sun has been supplanted by the flickering lights of computer monitors and hand held game screens. Soon, however, changing times may call for a change in the way we consider our children prepared to live a whole life in the world they will inherit.
Our kids will need to find a way to reconnect with our natural environment to become participants in a global effort to restore ecological balance. Environmental awareness begins with a sense of personal connection to nature.
How do parents bring back balance to a child’s experience? One answer has been around since the 1920’s: summer camp. Modern summer camps can guide kids back into a natural alliance with nature through the pure fun of movement. The challenges of summer camp are fun rather than stressful, but they are no less effective for developing a child’s sense of confidence and independence.
One good example of a modern “green” summer camp is Swift Nature Camp near Minong, Wisconsin. The directors have developed policies that promote camper experience perfectly attuned to the needs of the times, without sacrificing the great fun and memorable friendships that are the classic benefits of summer camp.
Jeff and Lonnie Lorenz, directors of Swift Nature Camp, begin with their policy on electronic devices. “We do not permit cellular phones, BlackBerries, pagers, radios, iPods, cassette or CD players, laser pens, TVs, Game Boys or digital cameras. They simply are not what camp is about.”
Swift Nature Camp combines traditional camp activities with ways to immerse themselves in and learn about nature is likeliest to succeed in inspiring environmental awareness in campers.
Looking for the best choice among countless summer camps can appear to be an almost endless task. Camp information is everywhere, especially on the world wide web. There are day camps and......
overnight campseverywhere in the world. If you and your child know have discussed what you want in a camp, you can make a successful choice.
Every imaginable kind of camp can be found in the variety of summer camps. Some are traditional and others are limited to certain areas of interest. If you study camp information carefully you can find the right camp for your child. Discussing ideas with your child can be a useful guide to choosing the kind of camp that will give the most to your childs life. If you want to choose an overnight camp the information needs to be considered and followed up on even more carefully.
If you compare camp information about all summer camps in the geographic areas you prefer, especially if you are looking at overnight camps, you will find a wide variation of offered facilities and activities. The web sites of specific summer camps will give you a starting place, but it will be up to you to ask questions and study the camp information with a critical eye.
Asking the right questions about summer camps once you have thecamp information in hand will make the difference for a successful search. Basic questions about license, accreditation, quality, camp history, time in existence, philosophy, personnel and facilities are your starting place. But the key to a great choice will be in the details. Can you contact references from campers and parents who have gone to that camp? How is the food? How are the sleeping facilities forovernight camps? What happens when its a rainy day? What are the rules about cell phones and computers? How will the camp personnel handle a medical emergency?
When you are just starting out, preparing the right questions before you study camp information can help you find the right camp from all available summer camps. The way you approach information aboutsummer campscan make all the difference to the eventual experience your child will remember all his or her life.
Summer seems a long way off, but now is the time to be looking atsummer camps to find just the right camp for your child. Remember that the best camps fill very fast. For that reason.......
Signing up far ahead of time is important. The first thing to do when selecting a kid summer camp is to look at your child’s needs and wants. Will they thrive in a sports camp or a general camp. What do they want from their summer? Skill building or building friendships?
Summer camps should be a complete departure away from teachers and a time for mentors to step in. The essence of the best camps are imaginative, experienced and quick witted people who staff them. These mentors shape up the milieu of the camp so that every camper brings life lessons learned when he or she returns home. The experience which is gained and the knowledge acquired in every case go a long way in shaping up the overall persona of the person a camper becomes.
Kids Summer Camp is a resource with more focus on arts and crafts with special regard to environmental consciousness. Kids go on from camp refreshed, delighted and full of experience when they return to regular classes in the fall. The exposure that summer camps offer a child will stay with the camper for the rest of a life as the wisdom that can only come from experience. How can parents with a good grasp of what is good for their kids find the right camp? The best place to search for obtaining precise information is of course the World Wide Web.
With a bit of patient research on the internet, you can easily lay your hands on some resourceful data. Parents might assume that if they are paying a higher rate for the kid summer camp that the child will return home with more education. They disregard the fact that the true meaning of summer camps is all about the experience. With the guided presentations of web program directors, the best traditional camps included have woken up to the archetypes involved in the whole process.
Parents ought to seek the best professionalism from persons representing summer camps. There is always a lot of apprehension and questioning for parents in terms of pros and cons their child will face in every social situation life brings. But the right kid summer camp is a good opportunity for every camper to socialize at a level which encompasses every facet of life.
We All know how wonderful summer camp is. But have you ever thought about what Swift Nature Camp looks like in February? A few days ago we were at a MN summer camp show and after that made our way up to camp. It was great....
Be sure to see the Movies
to see Super Tom. You might recall his back had been hurting last summer after his surgery. Well, Im happy to report that he seems finally to be on the mend. He has not been to his winter job of school custodian but will be ready for camp. YEA!
As you know the Midwest has been very dry this year with almost no snow. When we first arrived it seemed more like April with many bare spots around the bottoms of the trees. But, snow was covering most of the land and the lake. Giving us a chance to play.
As you can see from the movie I tried a new sport. I got out the water skis and put them on over my socks...it was very tight and then I hooked up to Super Toms 4 wheeler and off I went for a little skiing on the frozen lake. Look at my Hitch Hiker! It was much harder to turn than when you are in the water. Yet, it was fun to try something new. Much of the time we were in sleds being pulled. We tipped so many times yet it was very fun and seemed like winter even though it was near 40 degrees.
One of the most exciting time we had was when we woke up one morning and looked out the window to see two dog like creatures run from Picnic Island across to Sawtooth Isle. They looked like Wolves to me. Later that day we went for a hike to see if we could find the tracks and we did. That was so cool.
After a few days we left and that very night, the snows came and came and came. Tom reported that Swift Nature Camp was covered with over 15 inches of snow. Sadly we missed the real winter that finally came to camp. If you are ever up in the Northwoods in winter be sure to stop by camp and take a look, it is beautiful but kind of depressing with out all he campers there having fun.
As you know the Midwest has been very dry this year with almost no snow. When we first arrived it seemed more like April with many bare spots around the bottoms of the trees. But, snow was covering most of the land and the lake. Giving us a chance to play.
One day we walked out to Picnic Island just to see what was going on. It is a different place in the winter with no low plants so you can see almost across the island. We particularly wanted to go look at the Eagles nest. It seems that the winds from one of the storms destroyed the nest. However, we still saw eagles flying around so they are still nearby but we did not see where their new nest might be.
As you can see from the movie I tried a new sport. I got out the water skis and put them on over my socks...it was very tight and then I hooked up to Super Toms 4 wheeler and off I went for a little skiing on the frozen lake. Look at my Hitch Hiker! It was much harder to turn than when you are in the water. Yet, it was fun to try something new. Much of the time we were in sleds being pulled. We tipped so many times yet it was very fun and seemed like winter even though it was near 40 degrees.
One of the most exciting time we had was when we woke up one morning and looked out the window to see two dog like creatures run from Picnic Island across to Sawtooth Isle. They looked like Wolves to me. Later that day we went for a hike to see if we could find the tracks and we did. That was so cool.
After a few days we left and that very night, the snows came and came and came. Tom reported that Swift Nature Camp was covered with over 15 inches of snow. Sadly we missed the real winter that finally came to camp. If you are ever up in the Northwoods in winter be sure to stop by camp and take a look, it is beautiful but kind of depressing with out all he campers there having fun.
See Ya next Summer
Lonnie, Jeff & Forrest
Ever wonder why SNC is Soda free? Do you know what happens when you drink soda? More than you might imagine. Look at the various health effects of that sip of soda on your body, from your teeth to your heart to your bones. Maybe you will stop drinking it at home as well.
Live Long and take care of your Health.... Make good choices
A Wisconsin DNR Property leased by Swift Nature Camp