Share
BOSTIC Thirteen-year-old Breondra Newman isn't exactly sure of the moment this week when bugs became entertainment – rather than something to shriek about – at Girl Scout camp here in the mountains of Rutherford County, 80 miles west of Charlotte.
Perhaps the “creek stomping” had something to do with it – when the girls donned water shoes and entered a free-flowing creek at spacious Camp Golden Valley to find and identify water beetles, mayflies, water pennies and centipedes.
“We saw salamanders. The salamanders are cute,” said Breondra, a rising eighth-grader from Charlotte. “Now we see a bug, we're still kind of scared of it, but we know how to handle it.”
Building that kind of confidence with nature and the outdoors is the point behind the 600-acre outdoor camp run by the Girl Scouts Pioneer Council in Gastonia. It's also the focus of The Summer Camp Fund – a fundraising effort by the Charlotte Observer and the nonprofit Partners in Out-of-School Time – that helped send Breondra and seven other girls to camp this week. The initiative helps children from low-income families throughout the Charlotte region attend outdoor camps, where they can enjoy safe, supervised time.
Fifteen-year-old Rebecca Hill of Rutherfordton, also here this week through The Summer Camp Fund, ticks down one camp adventure after another:
The campfire dinner, cooked by the girls, which included chicken fajitas and “dump cake” – peaches and strawberries, cake mix powder and butter all dumped in a Dutch oven and cooked over open fire.
The lake swimming, where girls in lifejackets and watched by lifeguards learned how to flip out of a water-logged kayak or canoe and get themselves to shore.
Their above-ground cabins – accessible by ladder-like stairs – that look like tree houses. And the Hawaiian Luau, with fresh kiwis and dancing. “I did the limbo,” Rebecca reports, “and about broke my back.”
“I actually like the camping experience,” Breondra said. “It brings you out of what you normally have, into the woods.”
