Description of Camp

Camp Sheppard is a place, a place in time and an event. It is sweat dripping off your nose, dinner cooking in a # 10 tin, blistered feet, 14 inch trout, 100 mile per hour winds, crabby 11 year olds, rain and cold, unbearable heat, existential delight, bitter disappointment, youthful exuberance and old fuddy-duddy adults. It is 10 miles hiked and 50 miles to go, a steep coulier of snow and a field of avalance lilies, building trail in an old growth forest and kicking steps up the side of a crevasse. It is swollen, sunburnt lips, filthy weekold underwear, team climbing, packing food bags and building pipelines. It is girlfriends missed, lifelong friends made, seasoned veterans and ignorant novices. It is goals set, opportunities missed, accomplishments made and defeats suffered. Camp Sheppard holds all in its grasp accountable for their actions and exacts a toll of those who sidestep its protocols. It is a place for young men to grow up, middle age men to relive their youth and for old men to share their knowledge.

Someone watching from atop a ridge would say it was a metaphor for life, and he would be right. From a ridge on the other side of the valley another watcher would say it was like no place on earth, and he would be right, too.

For nearly twenty years Camp Sheppard was a factory churning out a product down a convoluted assembly line. This was not mass production. The raw material for production, young boys of 15, was as inconsistant and varied as their genetic code. The end product sought was not a homogeneous line of uniform men, but a group of diverse, trained leaders each carrying their experiences as tools for the future. In the process of production, these units of the assembly line, the Camp Sheppard Staff, were themselves in charge of producing their own line of remade boys, the clients they served during the weeks of summer camp.

Each Sunday the cars arrived at the gates of Camp Sheppard, depositing their children in the gravel parking lot. They were as varied as the Camp Sheppard staff members who greeted them. Within two hours their packs were loaded with a week’s worth of food, climbing and camping gear and they were hiking through the timber or meadows of Western Washington’s Cascade mountains. From the moment the car doors opened in the parking lot to disgorge their children, to the time they closed, sealing them back inside 7 days later, the Staff was responsible for their safety, training, well being, and health. It was this responsibility that acted as the machinery of the assembly line, forging the staff into leaders. Week after week the mill pressed, cut and shaped with each outing the staff members led. Pelting rain blown horizontal through a fog-obscured alpine meadow molded resilience. Wet, complaining children so cold they lost their initiative cut patience, prodding and caring. A gaping glacial crevasse requiring fixed ropes and belay pressed perserverance, problem solving and command.

If responsiblity, decision making, physical challenges and required leadership are the machinery tooled for building men, then Camp Sheppard was a factory custom built to the task. And like all machinery, at times it went arie. On occasion, the raw material going in was too defective to be molded to a finished product. Other times the machinery itself was defective, its tolerances set to loose, thus forming leaders of poor quality. But more often, it banged and clattered along, bending and molding, fitting and forming until four summers later a glistening finished product, a man with the experience, expertise and knowledge to lead, emerged.