Camp Evergreen

 Although I have no REAL details.. at the beginning of school, Carter went to Camp Evergreen with his whole grade 9 grade. The intent was just to build team spirit for the grade 9 year. The final hoora you could say. No learning, no school interjected into the camp.. just fun. Campfires and activities and a TON of rain but so much fun.

Carter really is a man of little details. However, he said it was so much fun.. the best! He told us about the obstacle course and horse back riding and only a few bunk bed night adventures but really no REAL details. Im glad he has these core memories banked though because I am positive he will recall Grade 9 Camp with his best friends. 3 days away will be remembered forever. 

We missed him so much! It felt nice to go to bed a little earlier and eat peanut butter cups but nothing felt better than having him back home in one piece and all smiles. 

He got off the bus, walked on over, gave me a hug first and said "I love you mom". Didn't matter that everyone else was around, I love this so much about Carter at this age. He just loves his mom and shows me every day. I will forever cherish that! 

Im hoping the school sends photos and when they do I'll add them but for now, I'm leaning into letting this camp be his own memories and loving that so much for him. 

Update!!! Oh this is great news!! The students had to write an essay on Camp Evergreen! This makes me so happy because I got a few more details and even better... I got how he really felt. It makes me so happy to hear how much he loved this and how happy he was! 

We definitely need to keep these memories forever.. so, here we go! Carter's essay! 

"This September I went to a camp with my school and all of my friends were there with me. When we got on the bus I was so excited to be at camp evergreen. I did not know what to expect and what the camp was going to be like. The bus ride was about an hour long drive and once we got off the highway onto the dirt and rocky road I knew we were close to getting to camp. Once we got there I was so excited to see what our cabin was going to be like. Our cabin was called the crestwood cabin. There were two rooms in the cabin for two different groups. In the cabin there was a divider between the groups. In my group it was me, Toby, Oliver. L, Oliver. B, and Aiden. I was happy with these groups because I knew a lot of these people for a long time and I was excited to be with them. The first hour we were there we went between all of the cabins and played football with a small cushiony one and we did that for about 45 minutes. The next 15 minutes we all met up at the facility and we talked about all of the activities that we were going to do. The first activity we did was leap of faith, and I'm going to talk about this in the next part of my story. One of the best things that we did on the first day was eating in the cafeteria. We had  baked ham and it was awesome, and it was probably the best meal we had all day. One of the very strict policy’s was no phones and I was happy with this because I knew if it was allowed then that’s the only thing everybody would be doing. I was just so excited to do all of our activities and grow as a person and bond with our friends. 

During camp evergreen I learned a lot about myself and others around me. I feel that I grew confidence in myself when I was there because I did things that I have never done before. On the first day of camp I had an activity called the leap of faith. Leap of faith was climbing up a giant pole and getting very high in the sky then standing on a platform. When we were walking over to the leap of faith my heart started pounding. I saw how high this platform was and I knew I was going to do it. I volunteered to go first because I wanted to have courage in myself and overcome my fear. When I put my harness on I felt like I was already in the air. Our instructor for these activities was named Dutch and he was a very nice person because he was funny and I trusted him when he was holding onto my rope. Every step I took I just told myself repeatedly, don´t look down, don´t look down. When I finally got up to the platform which felt like I was climbing for hours I was relieved. I was relieved that there was no going back and I had to jump. There was also a challenge to this leap of faith. There was a dog toy hanging on a rope in front of me and I needed to touch it because I love to challenge myself. When I finally took my jump I hit the dog toy and fell down and landed on the ground. Once I hit the ground I wanted to do it again and It was awesome. After this I did it a couple more times and on the other tropes activities that were really high, they felt like a breeze. The leap of faith turned out to be an awesome activity to do, and I'm glad I did it. 

Camp evergreen was also an awesome opportunity to have teamwork experiences. One of the experiences was called Jurassic park. This was a game that we had at camp evergreen. It was not really an activity, but this was a great opportunity for us. There was an instructor named Finn and he told us about this game. The rules were that you had a group and a mat and with the mat you had to carry it around the campsite and if you saw a dino then you could put the mat down and you would have a safe zone if you stood on it and the dinos would not be able to tag you. The goal was to get 3 different color rocks from archery, rock climbing, and the general store. Once your group got all 3 rocks you had to bring them back to the main facility and you would win. If you got tagged by a dino then you would have to also be a dino and tag other people that are not dinos.  We had a group of people and in my group I had griffin, ethan, isaiah, justin, and zoravar. The dinos were nixon, toby, oliver, and aiden. They gave everybody 30 seconds to run to where you needed to get to and once that 30 second time was up the dinos could come and find us. Our group first wanted to go archery and get a rock, but when we least expected it, Aiden jumped out of a bush and tagged our whole group other than me and griffin. The worst part about it was that the part of our group that got tagged were the ones holding the mat so we lost our mat, and me and Griffin ran as fast as we could in another direction until we found a bush we would be safe in. Promptly we thought it was the right time we ran as fast as we could and got our mat and booked out of there like nothing about it. Once we got our mat we needed to we tried to go back to the archery and quickly get a rock, but we saw aiden through the bushes and we tried to run away from him and we thought we did but then he sneaked behind us and me and griffin dropped our mat and ran for probably 3 minutes straight until we went separate ways and aiden decided to chase me and we ran for another minute until I hurdled a barbed wire which was a mistake, but I luckily missed the barbs and I fell into a bush and then aiden tagged me. When I was running I felt like my adrenaline was going crazy so once I fell into the bush I sat there for a bit just to catch my breath. Then I got up and walked back to the center to see if there was anybody else that was not a dino. When I got there I saw an extra mat in the facility so I asked if we could make another group, and the instructor said ¨yes¨ and me, Fletcher, Oliver, and Max were in my second group. We got our mat and ran to the general store to get our first rock. We had to work as a team to hold the mat and stick together. We did not see any dinos roaming around the general store so we went and got our first rock. Thereafter this we went to archery to get our second and we ended up getting it after 20 minutes running away and getting on our mat. Once we finished the archery we needed to get our last final rock from the rock climbing, but most of the people that were dinos were there waiting for us. We sneaked around to the back side of the climbing wall with our mat. We secured our spot at the wall climbing and got the final rock with our mat. We just needed to get to the facility and we would win and have our amazing ¨bragging rights¨. We went the longest way around to get to the center, but it was the safest and we finally got there just in time before the game ended and we won our bragging rights. This is an awesome opportunity to have a team working together because without our team we would have never been able to win. 

My next part of camp evergreen was finding joy. I felt that I found the most joy when we were doing our rope activities. In my opinion the best rope activity was the teeter-totter. I was on it the most by far out of the people in my group. The teeter-totter was basically you had a harness on and you had to climb up a pole to a giant wooden teeter-totter. Once you were up there the second person that you were fighting against went up on the other side, you would then balance yourselves evenly and start bouncing and jumping on the pole. It would take about 2-3 minutes for the battle to end, but once you were over the loser would fall down off the teeter-totter and fall back down to the ground. Each winner had a choice to go back down to the ground or stay up and wait for the next opponent. I enjoyed this activity the most because I felt calm and I felt like I was the only one up there and it was awesome. The next rope activity was called flying squirrel, this activity was my second favorite activity. In this  activity there would be a person with a harness tied up to a rope, then 4 or 5 people were holding the rope from over a metal wire about 40 feet in the air. From the ground they would pull on three and the person attached to the rope would go flying to the moon. I enjoy this activity not because it was calming or anything, but it was awesome! I went on this ride about 3 or 4 times, I went on this as much as I could. I also enjoyed pulling the person attached to the harness into the air, the best part about this was watching them fly into the air and hear them scream in joy. The next rope activity was called high ropes. In this activity you would climb up a pole with a harness on and once you got up there was a very wiggly wooden bridge with giant spaces between them. Once I got up I did not hesitate and I just went, I surprisingly did not fall and got to the end in one piece. On the way back there was like a rope you were attached too and the rope was attached to a metal wire. It was basically a zip line you would go across and I enjoyed this rope activity because of the bridge. When I first saw this activity the first thing that caught my attention was the bridge. After all of these activities I think I grew as a person and learned new things about myself and I enjoyed these the most. 

Once we finished our activities we packed all of our luggage up and put all of it on our front porch. We had an hour of free time, so we all decided to go to the general store and get some pop and play gaga ball. There were about 30 people in the very small general store and Trinity was the cashier selling us our pop. We had the whole grade playing gaga ball and it was awesome! It was inconvenient, but I got out when there were about 15 people left. Once you got out you would cheer on your friends in the circle. We played this game for about 30 minutes and it was just straight fun! Once we finished we put all our luggage in Mr. Dubs trailer and he towed it from his truck all the way back to Red Deer Lake. Once we got on the bus, I think we all felt a little sad, but I think we had an awesome time and It was worth it to go. We sang a bunch of songs on the bus, and when we got back from the trip I was so happy to be home. Overall this trip was awesome and I could not ask for anything more about it."