Can We Do It Again?

Can we do it again? Would there really be enough people to try again in 2023? Again, with the math. Eight camps were a lot, but Steve said, "Let's do all the camps that ask us." Well, that was 12. Yes, you heard it. Twelve STEAM in the PARK camps.

We quickly realized that we couldn't do this without help, so thankfully, our campers stood up again, and we were able to bring 33 ambassadors with us in 2023. It's not just about the actual week of camp; there are months beforehand that we utilize for building community. We needed people who believed in our mission, supported us, and wanted to move forward with us. So we set out to plan 2023.

This time, we didn't need to worry about finding parks. They had heard about us and were reaching out to us. We were heading to Great Smoky Mountains (GRSM), Mammoth Cave (MACA), Cumberland Island (CUIS), New River Gorge (NERI), Hawai'i Volcanoes (HAVO), Redwood (REDW), Jimmy Carter NHP (JICA), Acadia (ACAD), Rocky Mountain (ROMO), Olympic (OLYM), and Voyageurs (VOYA).

On January 1st, we opened up applications again, and this time, there was no panic. Applications from around the country poured in, and we were overwhelmed with the goodness that came out of them.

This summer, we decided to try something new. We invited educators to Acadia National Park and allowed them to bring their families. It sounded a little scary to have tiny humans in the tidepools, but what could go wrong? It was an amazing summer, one of our best, and at the end of year three, we knew we had started something that just couldn't end. 

The experiences of salamander hunting, waterfalls, sea turtles, dragonfly surveys, volcano searching, python hunting, banana slug searching, celebrating Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, tidepooling, horseback riding, Salish canoeing, and chasing loons would be our best yet.

2024? Continued tomorrow.