Saltash Mountain Newsletters

Hey SAM Families!

We’ve had a busy week jam-packed with fun here at Saltash Mountain!

Cabin trips were successful across the board, prepping our hikers for even more grand adventures. Highlights included many animal sightings, dancing in the rain, and “the best ever trail mac and cheese”! They came back with tons of inside jokes and good memories.

Upon return, some of our oldest campers took on leadership roles as Chore Guides, helping the rest of our community stay on track with keeping our spaces clean and functional. They have mentors who meet with them regularly to help them continue to develop as leaders.

We’ve had several activities for Wilderness Adventurers, including learning 5 knots, building fires (even a wet weather fire for our most advanced adventurers!), and building shelters, both with tarps and also with sticks and brush. We’ve had a huge turnout for WA activities! It’s so cool to see our campers eager to learn new skills and become more competent outdoor explorers.

All the campers had a chance to flex their trail cooking skills in a Whisperlite Top Chef challenge! We saw some very creative dishes, judged by our kitchen staff. Everyone worked together and laughed a lot as they tried to make something delicious out of combinations like oatmeal and cheese powder, or incorporating a carrot into a dessert.

The last evening in camp before long trips was spent dancing the night away with our neighbors from Flying Cloud. We enjoyed a delightful meal of chili and cornbread and then gathered on the dance floor for contra dancing called by Marcos! We had a camper step in to play fiddle for the SAM Jam Band, which was so cool.

Right now, our whole crew is out for long trips. After missing out on long trips first session due to flooding, our community was so psyched to finally go out on major adventures! We’ve got one group hiking Minerva, enjoying rolling hills and opportunities for swimming in Little Rock Pond, one group hiking Camel’s Hump, including a 9-mile day (wow!), and one group hiking Mt. Mansfield, the highest mountain in Vermont! Our support staff is hard at work preparing for Fair while the rest of our crew is out hiking, and we’re so excited to hear their stories when they get back.

We have such a cool group of campers and staff. I’ve been noticing how great they are at supporting each other and how eager they are to get involved with what’s happening at SAM this summer. It’s a joy to get to know them and see them grow together. I can’t believe how quick this session is flying by!

Next, we’ll be putting together our traditional SAM skit, and it feels like we’ll blink and suddenly be performing it at Fair. I can’t wait to share our community’s whacky creativity with you all then!

Happy trails,

Adair

Hello SAM Families!

What a joy to welcome your campers yesterday! We were blessed with a full day of sunshine for arrival day, which this season feels like finding a golden ticket! Our staff was so excited to meet our new campers and get settled into their cabins for session 2.

Once all the trunks were transported, all the beds chosen and made, and all the name games played, we gathered for our first pre-meal circle, a major touchstone of our daily routine at SAM. It was so funny to hear everyone’s responses to our Program Director’s icebreaker question, “If you could shoot anything out of your fingertips on command, what would it be?” Some of my favorites included cheese puffs, Oreo blizzards, and owls.

Then, we enjoyed a delicious dinner of pasta and zucchini prepared by our incredible kitchen crew. With full bellies, we made our way to Singing On The Hill for the first time this session. It was an incredible start for the SAM Jam Band, because we currently have Miles Crabtree visiting! Miles was the Program Director here for many years, and served as Interim Director in 2021. He is a professional drummer, and his drum skills brought the energy up to 1000%! Never before have I heard a punk rock cover of the F&W classic “Iowa”, and I don’t think I can ever sing it any other way now! Many new campers volunteered to choose and hold song cards, getting right into the SAM spirit. In the evening, cabin groups got together to create their cabin contracts and agree on rules for their cabin community. It was sweet to each group coalesce.

Hey SAM Families!

As so often happens on even the greatest of adventures, we’ve rerouted! We were so bummed to have to cancel our long trips, but thankfully, our little community up here has been very understanding that safety must come first. In true SAM Camp fashion, there’s been no shortage of fun and creativity as we navigated a week full of surprises.

Last night we had a variety show, where our campers regaled us all with their many talents!

It was truly a huge variety of acts, and once again, these campers blew me away with their unbridled creativity. Some highlights included a fully staged, fast-forward version of the movie “Mama Mia!”, a “Tour de SAM” marble race down a crazy course on our big hill, and a dramatic reading of a camper-written, humorous “horror” story (the closing line was, “And the man with the bloody hand was ME! And I need a band-aid!”). There were so many great songs, magic acts, and of course, silly costumes. We had a blast.

This morning, we all spent an hour together working on our trails to make them less muddy and washed out after all that rain. Campers and counselors hopped right to it, fully embodying the Farm & Wilderness adage, “Work is love made visible.” I am so grateful for their hard work and dedication to this community.

We’re also grateful to be hosting our neighbors, Red Spruce Grove! It’s been greatto have more people around for all the fun things. They’ve introduced us to some new songs, took part in our variety show, and helped in the garden during chore time when they saw it needed weeding. While we hope they can return to their mountaintop paradise soon, we’ll miss them when they go. 

We’ve been finding little ways to bring the fun, like having breakfast for dinner, or creating a Jeopardy game on the fly! (I had no idea how competitive these kids could get over trivia! What is “all in”?) Singing On The Hill has become more and more of a party by the day. Our favorite songs right now include “Firework”, “Rip Tide” (which we’ve sung like 20 times now and still aren’t sick of it!), and of course, old classics like “Iowa” and “Angel from Montgomery”. Our percussion section is growing as more kids step out of their comfort zone to join the SAM Jam Band and try playing drums for the first time! Sometimes we have one camper on the drum set and three or four more on hand drums, egg shakers, and tambourines. The energy is incredible!

There have been many silver linings to the storm that scrapped our plans, but the best one by far is that I’ve had six extra days to spend getting to know your kids, watching them mesh more and more as a community, and seeing more deeply what each of them brings as individuals. Right now, they are all at the waterfront, playing and laughing together with such joy that I had to leave my office to go soak it up with them for a few minutes. These are the moments that make camp so magical—and these are the memories that will stay with us for a lifetime.

Happy trails,

Adair

*Read more about our official storm update HERE*

Well, Mother Nature threw us a curveball this week! What a rainstorm we weathered. SAM Camp was the place to be—our neighbors from RSG came to join us for an epic sleepover! We spent the day cozied up in the lodge playing board games, making song cards, and baking cookies. Tonight, after dinner, we will decorate the cookies we made, and tomorrow we’ll enjoy a lazy morning to finally sleep in for once!

We’ve been hard at work prepping for our Interdependence Day skit, a SAM tradition. We will kick off this F&W community event with an amazing performance to get the party started!

I was really impressed today by the patience and kindness our campers and staff showed to each other in a moment of disappointment that our long trips could not go out as planned. We all showed up to support each other and to embrace the changes as an opportunity for joy. I was especially proud of Glastonbury and Shrewsbury, our boys’ cabins, who spent their rest hour, unasked, repairing washed-out trails so that all of us could have a safer, dryer pathway through camp. These kids are amazing.

Until next time! 

Happy trails, 

Adair

What a week we’ve had at SAM! Even through many rainy days, we’ve been finding the fun in all kinds of different ways.

Wilderness Adventurers has kept a solid group of our campers and staff busy skill-building! So far, we’ve learned 6 knots, fire building, how to put up a tarp shelter, how to build an emergency shelter out of brush, and how to navigate with a map and compass. I’ve been so impressed with campers’ commitment to trying new things and sticking with them through the end! Yesterday we had our first WA “initiation” for our Explorers level—4 kids have proven their skills and earned their first pins while the rest of the community cheered them on. Many more are almost there!

Before cabin trips went out, we had a silly murder mystery dinner party! Each cabin dressed up and embodied the characters of a different mythical creature, while support staff members served a fancy dinner at Saltash Manor and dropped clues about which of us actually murdered the greedy businessman Old Man Moneybags. We had a blast, and seeing the camper’s creativity and enthusiasm was so awesome!

Cabin trips were a great bonding experience for each group, as they ventured out for the first time on F&W trails. While they had some scattered rain showers, we were lucky with weather for the most part! All groups came back safe and sound and with lots of new cabin inside jokes that we got to see in their cabin skits.

A huge thunderstorm hit the lower camps, but up here at Lake Ninevah it was much more typical of what we generally expect a summer storm to look like. We stayed cozy and dry in the lodge and thankfully didn’t experience any major disruptions. After steady showers through the morning and afternoon yesterday, we were blessed with a break in the rain for perfect weather for our SAM dance!

This was a long-standing tradition that has been disrupted by Covid for the last several summers. We welcomed our neighbors from Flying Cloud and Red Spruce Grove for a delicious dinner of chili and cornbread, then had tons of fun contra dancing til the sun went down. We were accompanied by the SAM Jam Band, a surprisingly large and very talented group of campers and counselors who jumped right in to learn jigs and waltzes! Many of our campers have been accompanying us on guitar and drums for “Singing On The Hill”, a post-meal tradition while dishes are done, and this past week the campers voted on their official band name. We took four suggestions, but the clear winner, SAM Jam Band, came from our cook, Sam Arfer, because SAM traditionally makes jam for Fair! I love to see that little bit of camp history and tradition baked into our band name, and I’m incredibly impressed by our young musicians.

Tomorrow our campers and counselors depart for their 6-day long trips. They are busy packing bags and organizing food as I write this. I can’t wait to hear their stories from the field, knowing that they are headed to some pretty amazing destinations!

More to come! Thanks for sharing these awesome kids with us—we, the SAM leadership team, are so grateful for this community of unique and amazing young people.

Happy trails,

Adair

We are off to an awesome start here at SAM!

We kicked things off with our traditional spaghetti and meatball dinner, prepared with love by ourlegendary cook, Sam Arfer, who is celebrating his 33^rd summer with us! I personally sat with the Shrewsbury boys, some of whom had fourth andfifth helpings!

The evening was spent performing silly skits and drawing up cabin contracts, in which the kids decide on ground rules for their cabin community, facilitated by their counselors. After a good night’s sleep, we started our first day of camp activities with a fire building lesson! The campers self-selected based on experience whether to attend a first-time introductory workshop, a one-match challenge led by me (spoiler alert: they absolutely nailed it!), or a wet-weather fire class where they learned to build fires in adverse conditions with wet wood. All our groups ended their lesson with surprise marshmallows to roast! We got back together for lunch and then retreated to our cabins for rest hour. As I write this, the campers are working on taking their swim tests and tippy tests so that they can fully enjoy all the waterfront has to offer, and then they’ll be choosing between “Noodle Tag” or making patches in embroidery club, led by my husband, Arris!

Tonight we’ll embark on the Magical Mystery Tour, a very creative camper orientation full of costumes, silliness, and songs.

Stay tuned for future updates!

Happy trails,

Adair