Taking Responsibility at the Ropes Course

When I showed up at camp on Monday morning, I was informed that my director was going to be stepping down, to deal with some medical issues.  Two of us from the program staff were being asked to take over her leadership responsibilities.  The fact that there were two of us sharing the job made me more comfortable with taking on that level of responsibility, since I still had the possibility of being called away to work in LA at any time.  Co-leading with a female was helpful since half the staff we were overseeing was female, so she would be more sensitive to their needs.  And the people I would be leading were some of my closest friends at camp, so I saw it as an entirely positive change.  And I suddenly had the official authority to do a bunch of the things I had already been doing anyway for quite a while.  We spent the next week rewriting schedules and work assignments, to prepare for the last three weeks of campers.

 

P was also there that week, and one evening we found ourselves at the gutter-ball table, which led to a very good conversation after everyone else had left.  I don’t know how many games we played, nor who won, but it was good to finally talk in person again, and also to get an outside perspective on some of the issues I was now dealing with as an official leader.  We didn’t really talk very much for the rest of the summer, but I was pretty preoccupied with the task at hand.

 

Since the aspect of camp that I was responsible for was the activities, primarily paintball and ropes course, that is were much of my focus was.  During that week off, I made a number of modifications to the paintball course, to make available new styles of play, which were successfully used for the rest of the summer.  It added a pretty cool element to that already popular activity.  It was also during this time that I went through all of the camp’s ropes course documentation.  While helping with that, one of the permanent staff members asked if I would be interested in rebuilding the ropes course.  I had no experience doing things like that, but I was very interested in learning.  There wasn’t time to do much of that during the summer, but it was an exciting idea.

 

I did manage to spend one day doing work on the course.  I was the primary rescue climber at that point, and Mr. Hassler had spent much of the summer reinforcing the lower anchors for the zip-lines and ropes course.  He needed to install guy lines for the Leap of Faith, and the first step in that process was to drill two holes three feet deep, eighty feet off the ground.  That was definitely my idea of fun, so I accepted the challenge without hesitation.  Not having the ideal gear for the job back then, that seemingly simple task took me about three hours, but I thoroughly enjoyed the process.  I did at one point drop a three foot long drill bit, which was a bit embarrassing.  It didn’t hit anyone, but it took Mr. Hassler a few minutes to find it deep in the black berry bushes.  I went the entire summer without having to do any sort of rescue on the course, until the last day, when I had to go comfort a little Buckhorn girl, who was bawling at the top of the ladder jump.  I don’t think I even had to touch her, just being there and having a little chat was enough to calm her down so she could let go.