Durham

Each day River Explorers embarked on a new expedition to a different water source here at West Point on the Eno —

Highlights of Crawdad Camp included a nature ramble to the big rocks, decorating treasure boxes, bouncing on “the ride,” playing werewolf, beckon, and sock wars, finding clams in the river, making grass bracelets, and watching a wasp attack a spider and drag it across the forest floor.

Highlights from a fantastic week in Old Timey Adventures camp:

• Built an old timey village with armory, cabin, bank, stores, and even a mayor. Toward the end of the week there was even a bank robbery and courtroom drama.
• Archery, cross-cut saw, old-time games like graces and hoop n’ darts
• Primitive fire-making with quartz and steel
• Six Feathers, werewolf, storm the castle, kick the can, beckon, sock wars, attack and defend
• Singing on hike to secret beach and for the other group (moose song)
• Secret beach and Sennett’s Hole
• Stories like tailey bone and brer rabbit
• Plant walk and pine needle tea
• Big yellow yellow bellied slider, rough green snake, 5-lined skink
• Overnight camp out – evening water time in the river, sleeping outside, meteors, making scrambled pancakes and butter

Our campers braved some cold temperatures to cook up sweet and savory delights. We practiced slicing and dicing veggies for our hobo packets and pita pizzas, mixing and measuring for our scrambled pancakes, and strengthened our patience with doughboys, pine needle tea, and minty hot chocolate. When we weren’t busy prepping, cooking, or enjoying our hard work we squeezed in some time for whittling, fort building, and games like Grandmother’s Footsteps, Park Ranger, and Werewolf. 

Winter weather didn’t stop our villagers from building forts, banks, police stations, and more! Using our theme of village creation we were also able to practice some cross-cut sawing and learn about diagonal lashing. When we weren’t exploring, climbing, and digging around the village we had time for lots of games including some epic rounds of Jump the Creek, Sock Wars, Six Feathers, and Windigo. Check out our pics to get an idea of what our awesome week was like!