By Michael Andrews
Mountain Life Editor
The director of a local back-to-nature camp will be doing a number of things differently this year to increase safety for participating teens and their family members.
Jay Zipperman said this is the 18th year in which his nonprofit, Mountain Wisdom, has offered summer camps for young men and women.
“Our goal is to still offer something to serve these kids and families who’ve been cooped up for all these months,” Zipperman said.
Normally, Mountain Wisdom offers two weeklong outings a year -— an adventure camp for teen boys and an empowerment camp for teen girls. Because of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s camp schedule has been trimmed to two separate daylong events.
“There could be, but I don’t know of any overnight camps in Georgia right now. All the big camps in Georgia and north Georgia already have (been) canceled. To be safer, we’ve decided to go with a day program,” Zipperman said. “We’ve done the overnight weeklong camp for all these years and, while it’s disappointing this is the first year we can’t do those, we are glad to be offering something.”
When Zipperman planned the first Mountain Wisdom summer camp in 2003, he wanted to design a back-to-basics team-building program for boys entering adolescence or young adulthood. That type of experience was hard to come by locally, he said.
“Everything we do is (about) team building and helping to build self-confidence and self-reliance. We want them to feel like they can make a difference in their own lives and in the world,” said Zipperman upon the camp’s 15th anniversary. “There’s actually such a thing as Nature Deficit Disorder or nature deprivation where young people aren’t spending time in nature much anymore. There’s a book, Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louv, that talks about how not spending enough time outdoors can result in a range of behavioral problems caused by inactivity.”
This year, along with putting together the camp’s activity plans, Zipperman has made multiple first-time adjustments including added safety precautions to reduce the possibility of exposure to the coronavirus.
“We had to completely figure out a whole new thing, a whole new protocol. I started really digging in to create our COVID-19 safety plan. We start off with a prescreening questionnaire, similar to when you go to a doctor, that asks things like if you’ve been around anybody in your family who’s had COVID-19 or symptoms. We start with that before they even come to camp as a way to mitigate risk,” he explained. “We’ll also be doing a whole other screening before the camp begins. When they come in at registration, we’ll take their temperature with an infrared, no-touch thermometer. If somebody has a temperature of 99 degrees or above, they’ll have to be sent home.”
Zipperman described some of the precautions that Mountain Wisdom staff members plan to cover in safety training sessions for campers.
“Those things will include washing hands multiple times during the day and using 80-percent alcohol hand sanitizer that’s really strong. We’ll have plenty of spray bottles around. (To help with) doing our physical distancing, we’ll have different color foam noodles you use in a swimming pool. When you hold one out, you have 6 feet or more distance,” he said.
“We want to do it in a good way where we’re not shaming them for forgetting, so we’ll be using these colorful noodles to make the physical distancing a little more fun. If you sit down to talk, you can also use them for spacers. In some parks, they’re designating areas for people to sit where they can keep that physical distance between each other. That’s similar to what we’ll be doing with the noodles.”
Zipperman said, out of all the years he’s led the nature camp, this is the most he’s ever had to change and amend the existing structure of the program. Recommendations and guidelines issued by the American Camp Association and the CDC were used to develop the new safety plans, he added.
“Right now, in Georgia, the guidelines are for 50 people or less you don’t have to do anything (differently). We’ll have less than 50, but I’m not comfortable doing that so we’ll still be putting these stringent plans in place,” Zipperman said. “It’s not ideal, but you have to be really creative to have a camp where you can do (these safety precautions) and still have a good time and have the results you’re looking for.”
Some activities that would normally be part of be the camp curriculum will not be possible this year, Zipperman noted.
“I feel like what’s important is we have to adapt and do things in a safe way. So much of what a camp is about is that bonding experience where you’re sitting close together or giving high fives. That’s going to be somewhat missing, but our goal is to still come together and safely have that socialization. We’ve worked hard at creating our agenda and programming with interactive stuff, leadership training and activities like archery, hikes and wild edible learning,” he added.
Wearing protective masks will be another safety step for camp participants and staff.
“We will give them a mask if they don’t have one. We’re not planning on wearing masks the whole time at this point, but we’ll have to see if things get worse by the time we have our first camp. The plan is, if you find yourself in a situation where you are in close proximity, you put your mask on,” Zipperman said.
The two camps will take place closer to Gilmer County than in past years.
“We were at Tray Mountain for many years. Last year, we were at Bear Creek Campground, which is a beautiful site, but the whole campground is actually still closed right now,” Zipperman said. “This year we’ll be at Twelve Stone Farm, which is a beautiful 100-acre horse farm in Talking Rock that’s pretty close for people (who live) around here.”
A Men’s Ultimate Adventure Day for boys ages 12-17 will take place Saturday, July 18, while a co-ed Young Men and Women’s Gathering, also for ages 12-17, will take place Saturday, July 25. Hours for both camps are 9:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m.
“For the Men’s Ultimate Adventure Day, we’re making it available for guardians like a father, stepfather, uncle, grandfather or whoever is a special man in their life to come with them. The Young Men and Women’s Gathering is for moms, dads and teens,” Zipperman said. Accompaniment by a guardian is not required for either camp, he noted.
There is a fee for both camps, but scholarship opportunities are available.
“We’re still offering scholarships. We don’t turn anybody away and we want to be available for everybody,” Zipperman said.
The Mountain Wisdom team has used video conferencing to keep in touch with previous campgoers during and after the pandemic lockdown.
“We used video conferencing to have a spring reunion (in April) that was a whole hour-and-a-half event and we still have a program every other Thursday night on Zoom for our young people,” Zipperman said.
For more details on the camps, see MountainWisdomInc.org or email zipperman@ellijay.com.