Maple Dell Family Camp

We joined the my Sister D's family at Maple Dell family camp this year. It started July 2 and finished on the 4th. It was 3 very busy fun filled days. Thursday was a swamp of rain with mud past our ankles, but luckily it tried out for Friday and Saturday.

My nephew J. (who is 16) found this snake and let us hold it for a few pictures. Princess seemed happy and not scared a bit. I freaked out when I held it, but I did successfully hold it for about 5 seconds.

Each night they had a campfire for all the families (except there was no fire this year) The first night the scouts that help run the camp led funny songs and put on some skits. Starboy laughed a lot.

Starboy loved all of the classes (they split the kids up by age and they get to do crafts and learn fun things.) He also loved all the high adventure things like archery. He got good enough to use both the adult and child bow and shoot either the far away or up close target.

I also tried my hand at archery. It took about 15 shots before I felt comfortable and was actually hitting the target consistently.

The theme this year for family camp was Arctic Antics. They had all these great painted cutouts to make the theme come to life. These are our families Eskimo's (Starboy is in the boat). They had great skits about arctic living and a presentation on the Northern Lights that was really well done. They had arctic games and crafts at the Topek. They did "dog sled races"-older kids or parents were the dogs pulling the smaller children. They really did a great job with the theme.

Here is Starboy with his cousin M. He made that walking stick at his class. It has a baby seal on the top of it. (it looks kind of like an owl to me). His teachers were two older sisters that come every year to family camp and teach a class. They did a skit on the 2nd night from Ice Age.
Enjoy the video.

This is one of the games to win prizes in the Topek. Starboy loved going for the prizes. They gave out way to much candy but the kids thought it was great!

My first time shooting a 22 rifle. It was pretty easy with the scope to get pretty close to center of the target. The hardest part was loading the rifle. I found out that though I am left handed, My right eye is the strongest so I shoot right handed. I also do archery better right handed.

Coach and my nephew J. also had a lot of fun on the shooting range. You have to be 11 years old to shoot the rifles. They give you each 1 round (10 shots) and then you can buy more for $0.25
Starboy was really jealous that he didn't get to shoot the rifles.

He got to shoot the BB gun's instead. He really struggled with it the first couple times (they don't have a scope so being accurate is much more difficult. The first few rounds he didn't hit the target at all. But by the end he would hit 2 or 3 of the 10 shots. You can shoot BB's as often as you want with no charge.

The other fun part was the lake. It was quite murky and swampy, but it was great for canoeing. I was able to go out with both my sister, and then later with my Coach. Coach and I took a canoeing class quite a few years ago through the UofU. We did a 4 day canoe ride down labryinth canyon on the green river. It was an awesome adventure. This was much more calm than that, but still enjoyable. Starboy got to go out with his uncle and cousins and swamp the canoes and crash into each other, which he thought was awesome.

They also enjoyed swimming and jumping off the pier. Uncle G. was hilarious and really helped Starboy have fun on the lake while we were taking care of Princess. The water was really cold, so I had no desire to swim in it, but the boys didn't seem to mind at all.

The 3 days was a lot of fun and I am so glad that we went. We all slept in tents and cooked at our campsite. The walk from our campsite to the rest of the activities was about 10 minutes down hill there and uphill back, so we got our exercise. I would definitely recommend it to others and go again myself. It was a great way to spend our 4th of July weekend.