A Day in the Life: Survival Camp August 21st-27th

We ended our summer season with an exciting new program: Survival Camp. This camp featured a close knit group of participants who soaked up a good deal of knowledge about and appreciation for the outdoors. The camp focused on teaching a variety of survival skills with workshops in fire building, shelter construction, knife safety and carving, camouflage, stealth and more. It was amazing to see the focus and dedication our participants brought to these new skills.

Holmes is a beautiful land, and for many of our participants it is the first place they went to an overnight camp. For these participants the week was a homecoming, having spent the past two summers away from the land. Along with survival skills the camp featured some wilderness appreciation in the forms of hiking and nature inspired art.

Both of the Adventure Games had a survival theme as well. The first Adventure, The Year King by new staff member Devon Brinner, was the tale of a small Yorkshire town in the 1700s in the midst of a famine. At the yearly harvest festival, a group of fairies arrived in town and entreated the townsfolk to help them in their quest to bring back the health of the land, ending the blight. The townsfolk provided this help but the cost was great.

The second Adventure, Nevena Loop by the Sets & Props master Ruby Lavin, took place in a not so distant apocalyptic future, in which the survivors made new lives for themselves out of the rubble. With water being scarce, gangs formed and fought each other over control of the precious resource. Little did these groups of ruffians, scientists, and survivalists know that they would take the creation of this world into their own hands and end the existence of gods once and for all.

Even with two epic Adventures and time set aside for learning new survival skills we still managed to fit in a good deal of fun. Each morning the bunking groups would have a goofy team base survivor challenge pitting them against each other. From scavenger hunts to making wacky human obstacle courses to complete, these morning challenges were the highlight of my day. We also had time for some Wayfinder classics such as Mask Workshop, where we saw some amazing examples of “go with the flow,” and Ninja the Flag, where we used our new camouflage skills to make that game even more intense.

It was a great end to our summer of adventures.