By Trace Garcia
Hello! My name is Trace Garcia and I would like to tell you a little about my Emily’s Outpost experience. I am 11 years old and last year was my 3rd summer at the ranch. I had heard many stories about the outpost experience years before and was exited when I found out that this year they were bringing it back. I was was super exited when I found out that I had been chosen to go along with 10 other kids to go to the outpost.
At first I had worries that I might miss out on the normal camp activities, later I would find out that I was completely wrong. When we began our hike I didn’t know most of the other campers too well, they were people that I wouldn’t normally hang out with. Most of them were much different ages and had extremely different personalities, but after the outpost I could go as far as calling them my best friends.
Each day at the out post we woke up and had breakfast before we would do projects to help construct and maintain the land. All of our meals were cooked by us campers and it showed how hard that can be, and if we didn’t have food, we couldn’t eat. This improved all of our responsibility and awareness. After we did our “Homestead chores” (This is what we called our constructing and maintaining time) We would go down to Emily’s swim hole and have fun, some times we hanged out at the swim hole jumping off the huge rock into water or sometimes we enjoyed going on long river walks. We got to choose whatever we did and that was the best part.
I would now like to go into further detail on some of the projects we did. Are group built a trench connecting the water source to the spring box (basically a nature refrigerator) and hammered in the shakes (long wood pieces) to the roof of the spring box. We also continued to dig the outhouse hole so we could move the out house. These are just some of the projects we took part in.
After dinner when it had just gotten dark we would usually play a game or two of mafia, or my favorite Murder in the dark, a tag-like game. At the end we would all be so tired after a jam packed day and would need rest for the next.
Lastly I would like to talk about the friendship we have all made. Like I said earlier this would probably not be the group I would hang out with, but by the end we were one outpost family sharing the weirdest but funniest inside jokes that makes us crack up. We also keep in touch outside of camp, we have a large group chat on iMessage that has almost everyone on the outpost. We all talk about once a day and it distracts me from everything else in the world, whether it had been a hard day at school or you are just having a rough day you can always count on your outpost family to cheer you up.
I would love to go on and on about more stories from my outpost experience but that would be way to long for anyone to read so I guess I will end it there with a super high recommendation to try the outpost next year!
Thank you for letting me share my story
Of course! Thanks so much for writing such a wonderful reflection!
Trace,
Your description of your experience on the Outpost takes me right back to that same stretch of river when I was there as a kid. What an incredible place to spend time and do those important work projects. Thank you for sharing your story.
No problem! It’s so cool how little bar 717 has changed!