Week ten: entering the homestretch

When I first got my assignment for week ten, I was a little nervous. It wasn't about the group, since I had the Mustangs (11-13 year old girls). They tend to have all of the energy of a younger group and the activities and attention span of an older one. I didn't have a problem with my wingman either; I was working with Morgan, an eighteen year old who seems to have become such by combining the enthusiasm and spirit of two nine year olds. The tricky bit was that we were assigned to two kids: ideally you would have eight to twelve of them - thus giving you a personal connection with all of them but still giving you enough people to play games with. Failing that, a bigger group is better than a smaller one; you don't necessarily learn all of the names, but at least you can play some of the more epic games. With a small group, everything you try to do takes less time than you want or expect it to, and then you find yourself scrambling for new things to keep their attention.

On Monday morning, only one of our girls showed up. It was a mind-blowing development - we've never had a group of one before unless the kid had a severe developmental issue. Fortunately, necessity is the mother of invention and Morgan and I did what we probably should have done in the first place: we combined our group with the Trailblazers. Obviously, dropping a girl into a boy group had a few logistical issues - starting with the overnighter and the infamous "blood talk", but Hope fit right in with the boys. Okay, they wouldn't sit together, but they didn't mind playing together.

I felt a little bad joining the other group, since I have a tendency to take over, but Pam and Emily didn't seem to mind. We switched the all day hike to Crater Lake so that we could spend the night at the Stockade instead of setting up two separate campsites at Hunting Lodge. We had to sleep with Hope in one tower, the girl leaders in the other, the boys under the roof and me in the kitchen, but we got it done and we even managed to have a roaring campfire.

This weekend's adventure was Mt. Capulan, the last volcano in this part of New Mexico. It wasn't really a hike, just a long drive and a stroll around the crater, but it was everything you'd expect a volcano to look like: a perfect cone caved in at the top.

The sad news is that everyone is leaving. There's a lot of hugging going around, but the goodbyes aren't as tearful as you'd normally expect. Maybe we're just tired, or maybe we all expect to see each other again (I know that just about everyone expects me to be back next year). Perhaps it's just that we've had too much joy this year to be sad. Our staff have hiked almost every mountain on the ranch, we've gone to campfires at half of the camps out there. We've bonded at Colfax and the James and over a hundred movies in the staff lounge. We've messed up our lines at opening program, danced at cobbler night, done the tush push at western night, sung "follow me boys" whether we liked it or not, and forgotten what group we even had at closing and gone back to do it all again. And, God willing, most of us will get to do it even more.