Teen Camp

This past week was spent chaperoning 80 teens at 4-H Teen Camp in Alpine Wyoming. It was tons of fun, but also really tiring! I certainly got to learn a lot about teens these days from listening to many conversations going on in my car :) For example I learned that 7 Minutes in Heaven is a kindergarten game that the teens were far too old for (what?!? I'm not even sure how they got started on that convo). But one thing I really noticed was how conversations and teens were changed over the course of the week and as they made friends-it was great to see them all include each other and make new friends. I especially loved seeing a kid come to camp that I had recruited to my mentoring program when I first started working here almost 4 years ago. I had seen him around recently(they graduate from my program at 14 years old and he is now 15) and he was hanging out with a pretty rough crowd-he really got along well with the other teens though and is planning on coming to the next 4-H activities so I'm really excited about his new friends! I also heard him talk about how he still spoke with his mentor I had matched him with and how his mentor was helping him think about the future-going on a mission, college, careers-music to my ears :). Stories like that really motivate me to work hard at keeping this program around!

 Here are some pics of the week-activities included rock climbing, river rafting, shooting, archery, Bar J Wranglers dinner and show, Yellowstone, canoeing, and more!

 I may have been overly prepared for this trip-I had the largest suitcase of everyone, but I brought everything I thought we would need-and it all came in handy :)

 Games!

 We had dance lessons the first night-we amazingly had the same number of girls and guys so it worked out awesome!

 We discovered I close my eyes when I shoot arrows....not really recommended.

 Rock climbing on the Tetons was awesome and scary!

 Some falls we hiked to at Jenny Lake in the Grand Tetons.

 Myself and some of the other leaders.

 Bar J Wranglers is a really popular dinner and show that involves these cowboys telling jokes and singing cowboy songs-it's awesome and every teen loved it! They are open 7 days a week in the summer and are sold out every single night-pretty cool.

 My sweet county van I drove all week-the kids wrote "We love you Emily" and "Emily is the bomb.com" on the back-haha.

 The group that rode with me in my car when we went to Yellowstone at Upper Falls.

 We started getting more creative with our pictures.

 The kids were getting restless waiting for Old Faithful to erupt (which was so cool to see) so I made them plank while I took pictures-it was fantastic :)

 My self, the other leader from Utah County, and some of the kids we brought...who knows where the rest are at this point haha.

 I along with a couple other leaders, convinced a bunch of teens that cabin 13 was haunted (which may or may not be true after talking with the camp directer and being called in the middle of the night last year multiple times from the campers in there)-and we got them to try to stay there one night while we had other leaders creating noises and such-it was great!