wow...i'm REALLY bad at this blogging thing.

again, let's pretend that it's waaaay back in October.  September 30th to October 2nd to be exact.  Moral of the story: I completely forgot to post THIS work weekend's day-to-day journal.  yeah, i fail.

9/30/2011

Day 1(again): Ahhhhh, the glory of not having ridiculous quantities of car troubles.

                We made excellent time today!  It certainly helps that we didn’t get 3 flat tires on a crappy home-made trailer and instead hauled butt!!!  It was a fun drive up, lots of excellent music!

                I’m always so surprised at how relieved I feel to get here.  I seem to continuously come to a new understanding of how much I need this place each time I get here.  We brought two new girls with us today, which meant a camp tour!  We went on a big hike up one canyon and beyond, over the ridge and down the other canyon.  The whole way we talked of our plans to take a big backpacking trip to Colorado the summer before all of us go off to college.  We made plans to take some weekends next semester to train with packs in the local mountains such that we can really be prepared for the high mountain terrain of Colorado! It’s gonna be amazing!  I loved going on the hike today; this place is just amazingly beautiful.  It is almost October now and it’s interesting to see how the plants have changed so much just over the last few weeks.  It seems like I’ve been gone for a long time since our last adventure here…but at the same time it feels like I never left.  I’m so happy to have an escape here at camp.  Most people have some sort place that they go to in their head when they daydream, mine is camp…and I actually get to go here in real life.  It feels so good to get away from everything.  The first 6 week term of my senior year ended about a week ago and I’m beginning to realize just how fast this year is going to go.  I feel like this is going to pretty much be my last weekend to relax (how relaxing is it really when we’ll be working tons tomorrow) because once I get back I have tons of college applications and scholarship applications…it’ll feel good to be able to put the fact that I am a Girl Scout Gold Award recipient (or soon will be) on those applications.

                It’s only the troop this time at CMW.  This means that we don’t have to stay up the canyons in one of the units, and, therefore, don’t have to stay in the cabins.  As I sit here shivering I am so happy I have four walls because it is super cold even though we are staying in the lodge and have a fire going.  It feels so nice to be able to sleep on the floor next to the warm fire in my favorite place in the world.

                We’ve already had some pretty great adventures during the 7 or so hours we’ve been here, let the adventures continue tomorrow!!

~Runner

10/1/2011

Day 2: My. Body. Hurts.

                Today started at 6:45 with the noise of my beeping watch alarm.  It signaled the time to get up and go up the new trail to watch the sunrise at Halfway to Heaven.  What we didn’t take into account is the fact that as we get closer to winter, the sun gets closer to the equator…which means it doesn’t rise in the same place…which pretty much made the whole thing really anticlimactic.  But I still got some good photos of the colors that the sky took on and some of the new wildflowers that have come up over the last month.  We stayed up there for a long time and came down practically right when breakfast started at 8.  Breakfast was (as usual) ridiculously delicious.

                Our first part of the day consisted of all of us going up to the arts and crafts building to work on Sparky’s Gold Award Project.  A couple people and I built a set of steps going up to one of the side doors…it was pretty awesome!  I was super surprised with how neat and professional they looked, we’re pretty damn good for people who have never done any sort of carpentry.  The time at A & C was filled with bees (which we later discovered have an underground nest in front of the building) who stung practically everybody except for me and a couple others.

                We ate lunch, which was, as usual, ridiculously delicious.  After lunch we split into our various groups to go work on our individual projects.  Today, that included painting lots of rocks white.  We painted all the rocks along the perimeter of Quiver’s archery range and ran out of white paint about halfway through painting the rocks on the lower edge of my trial.  We eventually decided to white-wash them using a mixture of lime and water.  Somewhere in the middle of all of that we went up to the top of the canyon to gather tons on trash to haul.  In that process we found an old Jacuzzi.  Yeah, I know.  What the hell is a hot tub doing in the middle of the woods?   I have the same question.

                It was a long day.   I did lots of drilling, hammering, sawing, walking, bending over, and painting…rocks…which was strangely satisfying, especially since it was the least precise thing ever!  I feel quite excellent at the moment, which is mainly fueled by the fact that I just washed my hair; given, we don’t have hot water so I was washing with really freaking cold water, but it still feels really good to have clean feet and clean hair.  Time to play cards!!

~Runner

10/2/2011

Day 3: Finishing touches.

           Last night after dinner Ninja and I went up to put glow-in-the-dark thumbtacks in the trees lining the trail with flashlights literally strapped to our heads.  This morning right after breakfast we went out and finished whitewashing the rest of the rocks and walking the trail to scatter some pine needles in order to prevent it from getting muddy and washing away.

          We got to the top and took lots of excellent and silly pictures.  And of course had the usual excellent experience.

          On the way home we stopped by the big fancy playground in Alamagordo...it was AWESOME!

~Runner

wow...i'm bad at this blogging thing.

let's pretend it's waaay back in September.  Labor Day weekend from the 2nd to the 5th in fact.  Moral of the story: I completely forgot to post my day-to-day journal of one of our work weekends at camp so here it is!

9/2/2011

Day 1: never thought I would be more satisfied to be here…

                Well, today has definitely the most eventful trip up to Camp Mary White we’ve ever had.  Our journey started innocently enough: an adventure in WalMart.  I bought the essentials…candy corn, cheezits, and rings that match Quiver and Ninja (the rings seem to have magical powers, we were all in each other heads all day: constantly saying the same things at the same time and the like.  But after that…well, let’s just say that the proverbial poopy hit the fan.  Since we had to haul an enormous amount of supplies, we borrowed a trailer from a friend.  Our troop leaders didn’t get a chance to look at the trailer until about 9 o’clock last night…which meant they couldn’t see the amazingly horrible condition it was in.  We got less than an hour in and blew one of our extremely bald tires.  By the time we had called them to tell them to pull over (it was our job to drive behind and watch for any problems) the tire was totally shredded and all that was left was the rim and two sidewalls.  DJ, Quiver, and I drove my car about 5 miles to Estancia to find some place to get a tire.  We found a garage full of exquisite people.  They drove back to the other car to find out what type of tire we needed and to take it off the wheel (the guy actually drove all the way back to Moriarity to borrow a proper lug wrench to fit the nuts), brought it back to the garage, put a new tire on the rim, brought it all back to the other car, put it on the trailer, checked the pressure in the rest of tires, and only charges us $40 when it would have been perfectly reasonable and fair to charge us much, much more.

                And so our adventure continued, and soon enough (about 20 miles before Carrizozo) I saw the same smoke I had seen issuing from the tires before the first one started throwing chunks of rubber.  We didn’t have cell coverage to call them so we honked and flashed our lights and eventually had to move into the oncoming lane in order for them to see us and pull over.  We had blown another tire.  This time it wasn’t completely destroyed, so we drove the remaining miles into Carrizozo slowly and with the hazards flashing.  At this point DJ told us to just go ahead and head to camp without them, they would get the tire fixed and meet us there whenever they had managed to get moving.

                This is where two different stories come into play.  DJ and Coach went through Carrizozo, found a tire place, got the tire replaced, got another tire replaced (another one had blown), fixed the axel (a bolt was missing so the suspension was only attached at one point), fixed the hitch, showed Coach a gigantic lug wrench for 18-wheelers, and only charged them $40.

                Meanwhile, in the land of crazy teenage girl scouts driving on their own to camp, we were having a blast.  We could go the speed limit at this point which was excellent!  Our sanity seemed to digress: my mp3 player was refusing to play for my car, I only had one CD and it got boring after 4 plays, and, as we ventured further into the mountains, we lost any radio reception except for one mariachi station.  I turned off the radio and we sat in silence for a moment.  “And…this is the moment where we sing,” said Ninja.  And sing we did.  We sang “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” in its entirety as well as “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen, and parts of other popular Queen hits…seriously, we should make an a cappella Queen cover band.  We went over approximately a thousand cattle guard: holding our breath, touching the ceiling, lifting our feet of the floor, and closing our eyes as we rolled over each one.  We quoted Lord of the Rings and made geeky math jokes.  We made the “All hail the magic conch!” noise from Spongebob when we went through a tunnel.  We ate copious amounts of horrible food.  We made strange noises with our throats.  We lost the hand (game)...if you don’t get it, don’t worry about it, really, once you start playing the game, you never win.

                Finally, we reached the end of the 5 mile road and entered camp property, while passing Muleshoe Ranch, one of the huge great piranese, aka polar bear dogs, was blocking the road to protect the goats.  Well…this reminded us of Lord of the Rings, so at the same instant all of us yelled “You shall not pass!”  Yup, it was ridiculously nerdy.  We crossed the last cattle guard, got moved into our cabin, came down to the ranch house, at delicious food, and sat outside on the porch.  And here I sit, typing away watching some of the people I love most in the world laugh together.  I have gone from being extremely sad to being exquisitely happy again.

                Tomorrow, the work begins.

                Tonight, we will sit out with nothing but our thoughts and remember why we love this play so much.

                Today has restored my faith in humanity.

                Thank you.

~Runner

9/3/2011

Day 2: I’m too tired to figure out whether I’ve ever been this tired before.

                7 hours.  93 pin flags.  4 people.  Lots of tools.  And, most importantly, 550 feet of brand new trail.   Wow.  I never expected to finish it all today.  Rip said it is the most beautiful trail we’ve had up to Halfway to Heaven since the ‘80s; I was thanked by many for making it accessible again.  I probably hiked up there at least 10 times today, not to mention the fact that at least one of those trips was spent hacking away at the hillside, throwing rocks, cutting branches, and packing down the soil…I’m so unbelievably exhausted.  It’s time to rest.  Goodnight.

~Runner

9/4/2011

Day 3: Another extremely exhausted day.

                Pretty much woke up this morning cold and exhausted.  And stayed that way for a long while.   I basically made up for being so productive yesterday by being completely useless this morning.   I wore tons of clothes and sat in front of the fire for a while trying to thaw myself out a little.  It felt awful.

                Eventually I got my crap together and helped Jazzy build two benches from scratch.  It was pretty excellent, plus way fun not to be spending my whole day doing back-breaking (but oh-so-rewarding) manual labor.  Not gonna lie, spending a few hours screwing wood together is a lot easier than spending a few hours building trail; of course, I’m not complaining or anything.  A while before dinner some of the members of FCMW went and worked on lining the downhill-side edge of the trail with rocks to make it look neater.  The rocked part of the bottom segment and called it “Lower Josh” and rocked part of the top segment and called it “Upper Joker,” named, respectively, after the adult counselors who worked on them.  They decided that I should go up in the morning and work on the larger middle section that will be informally called “Middle Runner.”  I definitely think it’s an excellent idea!  I went to look at the trail after dinner, and I must say, it does look quite nice with the row of rocks on the downhill side.  It looks so neat and official…and trail-like!

                Tonight was like the classic Camp Mary White campfire.  We had it inside the lodge because of the burning restrictions and just made s’mores and sang songs together.  I even got to play guitar for everybody for a while.  It was perfect.

                Feels good to be warm again…both in my toes and in my heart! J <3

~Runner

9/5/2011

Day 4: Sucks to be home.  I don’t miss not having flushing toilets at all.

                We were going to wake up this morning and hike the new trail to watch the sunrise at Halfway to Heaven, but my watch reset itself during the night so my alarm went off an hour later and we missed it.  It’s so crazy to think we didn’t get to do our traditional pre-dawn trek to watch that first rim of sun come over the mountains.

                The trail is pretty much as done as it gets.  We finished lining the lower edge with rocks today before we left.  We then ate lunch and headed up to Halfway to Heaven to do our usual goodbye ritual which consists of basically sitting up there wishing we didn’t have to leave and talking about how we wouldn’t rather be doing anything else but just sitting there being surrounded by nature.  This is our first time being here at any other time of the year other than July…there are different wild flowers in September.

                This place is so beautiful.

~Runner

camp tomorrow!!

Tomorrow we leave for Camp Mary White!! This seriously could not come at a better time, I've had an awful week...long story short: high school sucks and needs to be over asap!  Hopefully CMW will be its usual refuge and I can forget all my problems.

I'm seriously thinking I need to be up there, so this is a good thing that we are going really soon.

Anyway, get ready for some super awesome posts and pictures onceIi'm back because we won't have internet there but I'll be writing while I'm away!

Sorry about the super short, potentially grammatically incorrect, last minute post...but I must pack, and therefore i cannot, shall not, must not (quote from Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton) spend hours blogging this evening!  So excited!!

 all my love <3
~Runner

ahhh...the time for school has come again...

Two days from now will be my last first day in high school, that's right I'm going to be a senior!  And am I looking forward to school at the moment? No, I'm pretty much just looking forward to the first couple of weekends.  This next weekend my troop and I are putting on a Dove workshop for our Journey project (the other prerequisite to the Gold Award).  During this project we will be teaching girls of all ages about true beauty.  I'm pretty excited to help girls build self esteem and realize that social pressures and media pressures shouldn't control them.  Being a typical teenage girl I have also struggled with this: confidence issues, eating disorders, bullying, warped self image, peer pressure, and at this moment I feel like I've gotten through it all and found myself as much as I can, which makes me want to help all girls even more.
     The second weekend of the school year will be one of the weekends that we go to Camp Mary White to work on our Gold Award projects.  Since this summer has been really dry and full of forest closures and wild fires, camp got cancelled.  This was not only sad for us to hear (tragic, really.  It's hard to hear that you don't get to go to your favorite place in the world), but it was also a "well, what about our gold award projects??" moment for all of us.  But alas, we get to go to camp for a couple weekends during the school year!  The first weekend we will have about 30 members of Friends of Camp Mary White coming to help us solely on our projects...it's absolutely amazing, I love them!  The other weekend we'll be going up there will just be our troop working our little butts off, which will be super excellent!
     So here goes another year of high school and another year of girl scouts.  Hopefully it'll be the best so far! :)
~Runner

work is work.

So I had a fun-filled weekend! On Friday I hiked all of La Luz and then some with a couple of guy friends (it was so great!) and then woke up early on Saturday to make my upper body just as sore as my legs!  I went out with a local Open Space group to work on some trails a few miles from my house.  It was pretty much perfect!  The trail we built was on a hillside, just like Halfway to Heaven.  Except here the soil had tons of rocks so it was actually more challenging then the trail at CMW will be.  I thought I would get away with doing my project with the tools I already have, but I gotta say, I really want some of those fancy tools that are specifically designed for trail building.  There's this tool called a MacLeod, it's pretty much magic.  It is part rake, part hoe, and you can even use it as a finishing tool to flatten the trail.  And being the daughter of an engineer, I MUST get my hands on this gloriously simple yet extremely useful piece of equipment!  Since there is an obvious lack of funds to purchase this amazing tool I sent out 9 super-professional letters to a bunch of stores to get donations (many of them probably will be unable to donate since they would probably have to contact big corporate higher-ups, but I sent one to a local business so hopefully they'll recognize my name and help me out).  I have to say, I found it weirdly enjoyable to write a business letter!  I learned a lot about trail building too!  I'm definitely feeling more confident in our ability to complete the project in the short week we have to do it.

Guess what??  only about three weeks 'til camp! :D

~Runner

done stressing! ...mostly...

So this week has been pretty stressful...like really, really stressful.  But now that today is over, I'm pretty much in the clear.  Today was my US history final (it was supposed to be a little "testy-doodle" but it was 160 questions...yeah that's what we like to call a large testy-doodle...) and most importantly, today was also my gold award project proposal presentation (say that 5 times fast!).  I think it went quite well, especially considering I did all of the paperwork yesterday!  There I go with my teenage procrastination...but what can I say? I work well under pressure!  In fact I seem to thrive.  So, here I am: no longer panicking, no longer on the verge of tears (as I was all of yesterday...yeah, finals + gs gold award = stress!), and with 2 days left of my junior year.  I know everyone keeps saying it to me, but I'm finally seeing it: I've really grown up.  One year from now, I'll be an adult.  I'll be out of high school and getting ready to leave home and go to college.  I have my own opinions, I can have intelligent conversations, I try to expose myself to as many thought-provoking ideas as I can, I have a sense of right and wrong, I have confidence, and I can communicate professionally with adults.  It's just weird...it seems to have just fallen on me like a ton of bricks today purely because of the proposal presentation (which was pretty much like a job interview).  I don't know how to describe it.  I guess all I can say is that I have adult friends, genuine friends who treat me as an equal.  I enjoy the company of my parents' friends, and they enjoy my company (as far as I can tell).  Looking back, it's amazing how much I changed.  From introverted to outgoing; from overly sensitive to strong; meeting new people used to terrify me, but now I get up on stage and I play guitar and piano and I sing, and it still terrifies me, but that's just it, I do it anyways.  I have true passion for life and an appreciation for what I have.  I hope no one thinks I'm bragging, but I'm really happy with where I'm at right now: mature but not too terribly serious...it just seems like a good balance.
I think I'm finding myself.
I'm realizing all those little plans I've made as a kid aren't that unfathomable.  Backpacking in South America.  A bike tour across Europe.  Climbing every fourteener in Colorado.  It could all happen.  Even those strange creatures called boys have stepped into my life (not far, but baby steps)...I know! it's just weird haha!
And I think some credit needs to go to Girl Scouts: a constant in my life, a support system, and something that has helped make me a better person.
And if my parents think us kids grow up fast, well, it seems to have caught me by surprise, too.
I'm just loving life. :) Now quit reading and go hug somebody!!
~Runner

woot! i have an advisor!!

Well, being a teenager, I am an expert at procrastination!  Seriously, I'm such a pro at it I really should be paid.  So I sit here 3 days before we all present our project proposals, I still have to fill out the whole entire project proposal and get it signed by my advisor!  BUT...that means that I have an advisor!! *drum roll* the lovely Lash, friend/counselor/badass/the master of all things construction-y at CMW, has agreed to by my advisor! :D  I'm pretty much stoked right now!
   I was chillin' (look at me and my cool teen words!) with my parents (oh shoot, there goes the cool teenager facade) and their mountain biking buddies telling them all about my Gold Award plans, and they suggested that I do some trail days this summer with some of the local organizations that do trail construction, restoration etc. around here.  So yeah, I'm going to learn from the experts so I actually know what I'm doing when I'm putting switchbacks into a mountainside!
   ANYWAYS! my brother (who's pretty much the coolest person ever) suggested that I put some links up here so people can get the inside scoop on everything!  campmarywhite.com is all about the organization that was put in place solely to own the camp, they are absolutely amazing, allowing us to use this camp and working to make rustic camping available to anyone who wants it.  The other organization that is absolutely amazing is Friends of Camp Mary White.  It is an organization comprised of generations of CMW alumni, they're all so fun and a huge part of our time at camp.  They are our counselors, our role models, and the most caring group of people I have ever had the honor and privilege to work with.
   Thanks for the lovely comments, and even a few followers!  love you guys :)
~Runner

what I'm doing. why I'm doing it. and why I'm sharing it with the world.

Camp Mary White.  200 acres of pure magic cradled in the Sacramento mountains of southern New Mexico.  The oldest Girl Scout camp west of the Mississippi and certainly one of the only rustic camps left in the country.  Camp Mary White has fallen into disrepair: structural damage, no water up the canyons, overgrown trails, etc. and that's what we are trying to change.  This camp has captured our hearts so well that we absolutely cannot let it go, that is the mission of our Gold Award project: to make this amazing place available for generations to come.  Those who have been lucky enough to visit the camp know what I'm talking about.  This place touches lives in profound ways: changing lives, enhancing lives, even saving them.  I've only spent about two weeks at CMW, one week for each of the last two summers, and it has had influence over my life, my way of thinking, and the young adult I am becoming more than any other individual thing.
     There is one place in particular that my project is focusing on: Heaven on earth...well, not exactly heaven, but the place is called "Halfway to Heaven" (for a good reason).  CMW has two canyons, and on the nose of the ridge between the two canyons is an East-facing clearing.  It has been a camp tradition for as far back as anyone can remember to make the steep trek up the hill from church logs before dawn and watch the sunrise.  There is nothing like sitting with the people you love, silently watching the sky change, and being one of the only people in the world to see that first rim of pure white peeking over the mountains.  The chills you get as you feel the first warmth of the day seems to course through your veins, seeming to skip through you like an innocent child, burdened by nothing, full of hope, joy, love, excitement, and a raw appreciation of the world.   All the world's cynics would forget their troubles in this moment, no matter how hard they tried to hold onto them.  For me, this is the only place I believe in God.  This place has awed me, caught my tears, listened to me laugh, and broadened my perspective.  If I were to die today or 80 years from now, I would want my ashes spread there because that place is heaven to me.
    Anyway, enough of the cheesy, unprofessional stuff, eh?  Here's the deal, I'm going to rebuild the trail leading up to Halfway to Heaven such that it is more accessible...and such that no one trips and scrapes their face off on the way up before dawn.  In addition to rebuilding that trail, I will be restoring the trails that lead to all the cabins up the canyon that we use for our camp.  This task will be quite daunting seeing that it is probably over a mile of trail (most of which needs to be completely cut, not just cleared) and I only have about a week to do it this summer.  I believe I can finish my task with the help of the other three lovely ladies in my troop also working on their Gold Awards at CMW this summer, but even if I can't, I at least got the ball rolling, right?
   So here I am, blogging (which is totally new for me!), updating whoever will listen with our progress in restoring this unforgettable, unimaginably beautiful place so that girls from all over the country can come and be captured just as I have been.  As a troop we want to help the organizations associated with CMW to get camp up and running.  We seem to be the new generation of Camp Mary White: we were the first campers to come for decades and will be the first new round of counselors after we complete our CIT 2 course this summer.  Turns out that in one week a year, you can get so attached to something you absolutely adore.  If it's hard to walk away from camp for a year, it would be unimaginable for it to be unavailable to old and new campers and counselors for the rest of our lives, which is exactly why we're throwing our everything into this.  It's going to be a whole lot of work, but I will do absolutely everything I can to make it possible to keep coming back until I'm literally physically unable to.  I love this place more than anything in the world, and through this Gold Award and certainly beyond it, I pledge to help other girls realize what I have: there is a place where everything can be perfect, where you can escape from all the stress of growing up, where you can learn to appreciate people and nature, where you can find a kind of love you can't find anywhere else, where friendship becomes sisterhood, and acquaintances become life-long friends.  When the sun sets, it rises somewhere else, and you can know that you have learned to appreciate just how amazing those simple moments that most take for granted can be.
~Runner~