Finally the Snow is Here

For those of you who followed the fire we had in December, our wood supply is looking good.  We took a lot of trees down in the maintenance yard and cut them up for boiler wood this weekend.  It was a lot of fun and we had some major help from some of Mike Baker's nephews. 

They were able to lift some huge chunks of wood onto the splitter.

Because of the extra help and extra work over the past couple of weeks we've been able to basically catch up on our wood supply already.  The splitter has saved us countless maul strikes.  Now Randy is thinking we have just about enough wood split to get us through the retreat season for the boilers.

The Skytrak lines them up, and Mike Alchin cuts them up.



Some of the guys kept the brush pile going all day.



We left about 12 stumps around the yard.  Now it's open for some landscaping and a redesign.

When we weren't moving wood around, we had a stove to replace in the East Side Dining Hall.  Last week one of the stoves caught on fire through what I'm told was an electrical issue.  Thankfully there was no damage to the dining hall, but the stove sustained too much damage to fix it.  So this week we moved the old stove out and then put the new stove back in.  It was one of those lifting things where you can hardly get enough guys to carry it around.

I think Kieth spent a lot of time wondering exactly how we'd sort all of this out.

And finally... SNOW!  We got the snow we needed to run the tubing hill this weekend.  It loaded up all the trees so they sagged real low.  Very much a Winter Wonderland for the weekend.  With that came a lot of work on Friday to clean it all up.  Brad Smith, and 6 kids from Mike's family really helped out, cleaning up the whole West Side of camp before lunch.  It was a great effort.

Something about 6 inches of snow on a tether ball caught my eye.

So the snow was here for the Father/Son and Winter Teen retreats.  It was neat to see so many people I recognized this weekend.  I had about 3 campers on the East Side and several folks that I've just met over the years here at camp.  Several of the dish workers were former summer staffers, and of course I was excited to see Rob and Elizabeth helping out this weekend. 

Tom Harmon and Brian Harmon were the speakers this weekend and I was really excited to have both of them here.  They speak so much differently, but they both are very clear about the Gospel message which I understand was well received this weekend.  Praise the Lord for that!


The sun trying to break through the clouds on Monday morning.