Elk Creek Ranch™ offers teenagers a unique summer camp experience in the western wilderness through a traditional ranch setting combined with a wilderness backpacking program. It is a summer of enjoyment, with groups sharing the camaraderie of youth and the recreational opportunities of the West. It is a summer of challenge, confronting each individual with rugged wilderness surroundings and a rustic life style. It is also a summer of involvement, with each teenager participating in a small camp community.
The Sandhill Crane couple has returned to Elk Creek. This one enjoyed a break in our recent monsoon to do a bit of preening.
Sunlight Moments April 2013: The Power of Mountains
Dewey Peak: Supreme Court Justice Douglas was an avid mountaineer. In the middle of the last century, he wrote, “Of Men and Mountains,” a memoir of growing up in the mountains of the Northwest. He remembered and honored the counsel of a mentor, Jack Nelson whose language uses “man” in the general way of times past. Whether hiking, backpacking, riding, or packtripping, we Elk Creekers, girls and boys, women and men, come to live some of Jack Nelson’s ideas: ”When man can look at mountain peaks with a deep sense of his own littleness and still have faith;”
Heart Mountain: “When man can learn how to make friends with others and how to keep friends with himself; “When man can find the time to stop and look at the grass and trees and mountainsides and come to know them and call them friends;”
Steamboat: “When man can feel the sense of eternity even in the wind that blows from the northwest off Rainier;”
Pilot and Index: ”Then man has found contentment and harmony and peace.”
Fortunately for the coyote, it visited the trail cam site at a different time than the wolf.
Today we woke up to a half foot of snow and six ducks on the pond. If last summer was any guide, the ducks will have some company in a few months!
