As We Begin to Move Forward…
This week we learned the Girl Scouts of New Mexico Trails Board of Directors has voted to sell Rancho del Chaparral Girl Scout Camp. We received the news at the same time as many of our supporters, through an email sent by the council on Monday, February 2.
Rising Trails is an association of “Camp People.” We not only believe in the skills developed at camp like responsibility, resilience, and citizenship (American Camping Association), we have lived them. Rancho was our greenhouse. As we grew up there, we gained the confidence to be most fully ourselves. As campers, we learned to create, explore, risk, and fail. Rancho was also our proving ground. As staff and administration, we learned how to foster such growth in both the campers that came after us and the staff we trained and empowered. Together at Rancho, we bonded with other girls and women, and carried those friendships off the mountain and into our daily lives. Many of the people we were campers with remain lifelong friends.
However, our dedication to Rancho doesn’t only come from nostalgia. If our effort to save Rancho was only about the memories, we would sing our favorite camp songs, tell stories, shed tears, give virtual hugs, and let camp fade into the past as a quaint feature of a bygone era. But no, we spent our energy on saving our camp because of a deep passion for ensuring the same opportunities that existed for us exist for the next generation.
As youth development professionals as well as parents, we consider all children who have ever been in our care to be ours. We want all our children, all of today’s children, to have a chance to experience camp for themselves. We want them to make their own choices, learn from mistakes, and become independent, in a safe space like Rancho. We want them to not have to worry about who’s texting who or what the latest TikTok trend is, at least for a while. We want them to get dirty, ride a horse, shoot an arrow, see the Milky Way, giggle with their friends after lights out, and experience feeling connected to this small piece of the wide and wonderful world of nature.
That’s what camp is for us. It’s not what we do. It’s who we are.
We feel we have an obligation to do everything possible to ensure that Rancho remains a part of today’s world for our children, for all children, and not something lost to history.
We expected the decision to sell Rancho, but that hasn’t made it any easier. Along with Rancho’s supporters and sister (and brother) alums, we are grieving the loss of Rancho as the Girl Scout camp we knew and loved.
At the same time, we are shifting the work of Rising Trails into a new phase: finding partners and fundraising, with the goal of buying and operating Rancho. More information is coming soon about our vision for the future of Camp. In the meantime, if you’d like to help, follow us on social media, subscribe to our newsletter, contact us by email at risingtrailsnm@gmail.org, and most importantly, become a donor!. We’re going to need your support to save Rancho.