A nature camp designed to help teenage boys build leadership and life skills will enter its 21st season this summer.
The weeklong Mountain Wisdom summer camp will run from July 8-13, said “Hawkeye” Jay Zipperman, founder of the local Mountain Wisdom nonprofit.
When Zipperman, a carpenter and homebuilder by trade, set out to organize the first camp in 2003, the goal was to provide a back-to-basics team-building program for boys entering adolescence and young adulthood.
“It’s all about leadership training with a nature connection. We don’t claim to be therapeutic, but it’s very healing what we do,” Zipperman said.
The camp is built not only on teaching skills and a community atmosphere, but it also provides mentoring to help teens better navigate what’s normally a challenging time for their age groups.
“They’re in that in-between stage and can be influenced positively or negatively by their peers,” Zipperman said.
“That’s where the idea of mentoring comes in. Kids don’t always listen to their parents, so it’s important for them to have other people in their lives to be there for them. (The camp staff) acts as mentors to help guide them through this experience.”
The summer camp, which has been held in several north Georgia wilderness locations over the years, presents a back-to-nature, electronics-free zone where participants can focus without those distractions, Zipperman noted. Past camp activities have included hiking, fire making, archery, rope courses, primitive shelter building, understanding the benefits of organic foods and water sports.
“The basics are still the same from when we first started, but nowadays we have things like social media, gaming and other things on the internet and the pros and cons of all this stuff. We address a lot of the teenage issues and the overuse of electronics and screen time,” Zipperman said.
The camp is for boys age 12-17, but sometimes campers a little younger or a little older than that also attend. Hundreds have attended the camps over the past two decades, and there have been plenty of repeat campers, some of whom continue to participate after they turn 17, Zipperman noted.
“We have many who come back year after year. For the (older kids), we have places for them to help out as peer mentors and staff in training,” he added.
There are partial camp scholarships available for those who qualify.
“More than two-thirds of the kids who come are at least partially scholarshipped,” Zipperman said. “We’re serving a lot of single moms and grandparents raising children, (which we see) more of in our society nowadays. We’re here to see that young men have this opportunity they wouldn’t normally get to have.”
For the past few years, the camp has been held at Tri-Mountain Retreat, a wilderness retreat and outdoor event space in the Big Creek area. This has allowed Mountain Wisdom to maintain a steady home for the camp, where a challenge course has also been constructed, Zipperman noted.
“We’ve done several of our events there, and it is a beautiful home for us,” he added. “We don’t use cabins. It’s still a primitive skills camp and camping with tents.”
For more details on the camp, Jay Zipperman can be contacted at zipperman@ellijay.com or 706-273-1474. Details are also online at MountainWisdomInc.org. Zipperman said the application deadline is normally the week before the camp begins.