With us again, returning from last year, are two youth groups, this time both opting for Wednesday, July 10th, coincidentally (and giving us the opportunity to lead the largest number of guests ever in a single day). These youth groups were Camp Tel Noar and Forever Friends International. It was a terrific time for both groups. Read about last year here (CTN), and here (FFI). Now, this year’s summary…
Group One: Camp Tel Noar Crawford Notch Hiking Adventures — (Jump to Group Two)
The first is Camp Tel Noar which is a Jewish summer camp for children ages 7 through 16. It’s located in Hampstead, NH on the shores of Sunset Lake. The camp, based on our observations (as stated last year) “offers a quintessential experience that is meant to last a lifetime for its youth campers and staff alike.”
This year we took them into the Gateway of Crawford Notch — instead of Pinkham Notch as we did last time — to do some hiking, coming together over by Crawford Depot. With varying levels of fitness within the group and desired levels of excertion preferred in the muggy weather, we broke up the kids and young adult leaders into three groups offering Mt Willard and Mt Avalon from the 52WAV list and Mt Field from the NH 4k list. Doing the leading on-mountain were Redline Guides Tim Jones (on Mt Willard), Ken Hodges and Hayley LaPointe (on Mt Avalon), and Chase Hall and Brian Wasiewski (on Mt Field).
Group Two: Forever Friends International Rock Climbing Intro
While the hiking was going on in Crawford Notch the Friends Forever International (FFI) group was busy learning the ropes in North Conway. This youth leadership camp is cool and interesting, the way they carry themselves, introducing a vegan way of thinking and eating to the group, the campers challenged with various areas of study from language to science, to what we do here at Redline Guiding.
The group started a Rock Climbing Intro Course at our Basecamp gearing up and prepping. When ready the team caravanned to the top of Cathedral Ledge, where we drove to the top of the cliff and headed over to “The Wall of Hurley Morning Light” — a fun area ranging from 20 to 25 feet high with routes rated from 5.2-5.7. Before moving on to nearby routes, they worked on face climbing, crack climbing, corners, and other techniques like hand-jamming, and laying back. Also belaying and tying in was of course covered. The team even got into some rappelling. Every one loved that! Leading this group were Redline Guides Pat Ferland, Glenn Van Neil, and Gregg Ludvigson. Check out the photos of their day.
Our climbing students dodged the rain just in time, the clean up crew (Pat) wasn’t so lucky. Photo by Glenn.