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~