Where do I even start with what a fun girls camp this was? Lucky for us we were able to reserve Heber Valley Girls Camp again just as our ward. Of course we all met bright and early to get our camp on. This year was hard because Hollie had just been released as our counselor and YW just isn't the same without her, but she was nice enough to make sure I got a little birthday surprise before we left for camp that morning. It wouldn't be a year of girls camp or youth conference without celebrating my birthday with my young women girls. Our camp theme this year was "Be Your Own Kind of Beautiful". Teaching these girls beauty is more than just your appearance. We taught them about physical beauty, but also about spiritual beauty and emotional beauty
One of the days at camp was our service project. This camp ground is beyond beautiful and its because of all the many hands that put in their time daily to help keep it clean and nice. Our service project was chopping wood (or more like sliding wood on to a powered axe!) and then piling it in each campsite so everyone had plenty of wood for fires. The girls were so helpfully and an hour or so later we had chopped and stocked many pounds of wood! The girls favorite was this HUGE log that took so many hands and different chops to finally break it down.
Some of the other things we did besides all spiritual learning was have FUN! One of my favorite highlights was beating Lauryn at ladder toss. We created a tournament with all the girls interested competing round after round. The luck landed on me and I ended up kicking all the girls butts! So much for being the nice leader, right? Other things we did was go canoeing on the little lake. We had a mystery dinner that Pam, our camp cook put on. She gave all the girls random utensils and cups to use and then served them up dinner to eat with what they had. They girls were so confused at first but quickly caught on and dug into their food with no problem. We also took a small hike/walk around the lake and then a lot of hang out time goofing around at our campsite.
Our last night at camp is always the most anticipated night of camp because the Bishopric and wives join us for dinner and testimony meeting. Its always filled with tons of laughter and good tears. For our program before testimony meeting I asked a couple speakers to join us that I thought represented each "beauty" topic we had already talked about throughout the week. What a good job Janelle, Jessica and Stephanie did! Overall, this was my favorite girls camp as their YW President. All the girls got along and actually let down some tough barriers that have been up for years. We also had great leaders and priesthood leaders joining us all week, with delicious food and very 5 star camping facilities. The whole time at camp I speculated and had a feeling it would be my last camp in this calling so I tried to soak it all in as much as possible. Little did I know that felt release would come a week later! Totally bittersweet, but two weeks after that I was called to Stake YW's and the first thing I thought was..."I get to go to camp!!" Nothing better than a few days in nature with some great women.
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