Inner-tubing down the Root River through Lanesboro, exploring caves in southeastern Minnesota, hiking to the top of Barn Bluff in Red Wing, cycling through the pine forests surrounding the headwaters of the Mississippi River, kayaking Lake Superior, and rock-climbing at Shovel Point on the north shore of Lake Superior are just some of the activities middle school students have participated in on different camping trips over the last nineteen years.
A “Family-Style” Camp with Plenty of Fun
Skipping Stones is a summer program that has been offered to FSMN middle school students every summer since 2006. Each summer for five days and four nights students go camping in one of Minnesota’s state parks (we’ve also recently added three-day / two-night trips for our 5th and 6th-grade students). They hike, swim, play night games like “kick the can” and “ghost in the graveyard”, and usually participate in a larger adventure like rock-climbing, or exploring a cave. There is downtime for students to hang out in camp telling stories, sitting around the campfire, or playing board games. The camps are run “family-style” meaning the students are expected to help with setting up camp, preparing food for the group, cleaning up after meals, and other camp chores.
How Skipping Stones Got Started – Something for Middle Schoolers
The program has its origins back in 2005 when Kathy Glover (the former summer program coordinator) noticed that although our summer program at that time had good enrollment there weren’t many middle school students participating. Kathy, Amy Lyga (a former middle school humanities teacher and my wife), and I had several conversations about starting a summer program that was more attractive to middle school students. Our shared mutual love for the outdoors led us to create an “outdoors adventure camp.”
A Camp that Aligns with Our Mission
As an extension of our school’s program, we strove to create something that would be developmentally appropriate for middle school students. We talked about taking groups of students camping in various state parks, incorporating adventure, allowing lots of student choice, and providing students an opportunity to socialize with other FSMN students in a low-risk environment. That next summer (2006) we offered our first two camping trips (one to Tettegouche and a second to Whitewater).
Including those first two trips we have now taken students on 29 different Skipping Stones trips over the last two decades. In addition to Tettegouche and Whitewater State Parks, students have camped in Itasca, Blue Mounds, McCarthy Beach, Afton, Interstate, William O’Brien, Jay Cooke, and Gooseberry State Parks. We even ran two trips to the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan back in 2011 when Minnesota’s State Parks were closed because of a government shutdown.
A number of FSMN staff have worked as camp counselors including Amy Lyga, Marshall Anderson, Janet Thometz, Veronica Guevara, Shane Zack, Rebecca Slaby, Melissa Anderson, Max Meier, Becca Walling, Karen Salter, Egohsa Awaah, Amber Todd, and me. Over two hundred students have participated in Skipping Stones camps over the last twenty years and we’ve enlisted numerous alumni as camp assistants.
Over the years I have really enjoyed sharing these beautiful natural places with our middle schoolers. It is a chance to get to know a different side of them. They get to be themselves and get to know each other in a way they may not get a chance to at school. There are no screens to distract us. They spend time connecting with, and being inspired by, the nature around them and each other. I consider myself lucky to work at a school where a camp like Skipping Stones exists because it embodies our mission and values.
