Squeals of excited junior high girls and guffaws of middle school guys filled the air as students gathered together in the Fresno Christian parking lot to carpool up to the mountains, Sept. 16. Both junior highers and their luggage were piled into the cars of a few brave drivers and after their final goodbyes to parents, the group hit the road. FC’s long-awaited eighth grade trip to Calvin Crest (CC) had officially begun.

This annual week-long outdoor education camp ran from Sept. 16-20 and hosted over 35 eighth grade students, led by three teachers, junior high science teacher Terry Richards, elementary P.E. teacher Darbee Whipple and alumna parent Pamela Powell. Accompanying the group of students, six FC upperclassmen went on the trip as cabin leaders: seniors Eric Cowin, Emily Shakeshaft and Jenna Weimer, and juniors Ivette Ibarra, Bailey Brogan and Jordan Castro.

According to Richards, the trip was started by FC’s former junior high Bible teacher George Freeman and was passed down to him years ago. Richards says that this trip is considered a science trip, but he knows that it serves more than one purpose, as the junior high students generally bond with each other and get to know each other better through the activities the camp provides.

“I’ve been doing this for 14 years, so I inherited it from Mr. Freeman, who started it,” Richards said. “I always wanted to do that when I taught public school, but the school never had enough money to do it and they didn’t have a camp for themselves. When I heard about this I was delighted. I enjoy watching the students get acquainted with each other and bond together, and also to see how their personalities come out, because sometimes they’re a whole different person than what I know in school.”

As soon as the students arrived at the camp, the cabin groups were announced, and after lunch, the rest of the afternoon was devoted to initiatives and team-building activities intended to unite each group and teach the students about teamwork. Challenges that students were required to complete included transporting the group across a pit of wood chips via a swinging rope, moving the whole group from one platform to another using one long and one short board and reordering themselves atop a log. Often a disability was assigned to a group member, and the students had to work together to figure out how to overcome these difficulties and complete the task.

Once afternoon classes were finished for the day, students were released for an hour of free time. During this period they could choose from a variety of activities including rock climbing, zip-lining, archery, playing pingpong and foosball, snacking on food from the general store and hanging out on the back patio with each other.

While most of the students enjoyed the free time activities or the night games, many of the students’ favorite part of the trip was hanging out with friends from school and getting to know kids that they would not normally spend time with. Although she enjoyed the classes and the free time games, Isabel Kim-Feng, ’18, says that her favorite part was getting to know her friends and others while she was up there.

“I really enjoyed going on the Sequoia trail and learning about trees and the Miwok,” Kim-Feng said. “That was really interesting. My favorite part of Calvin Crest, though, was hanging out with my best friends and getting to know them a little bit better. I’m really going to miss bonding with my friends because we had a really good bonding night and we got to know each other really well.”

Christina Melahn, Assistant Director of the Calvin Crest Outdoor School, enjoyed having FC up at their camp because of the freedom they have to link the nature they teach to the creator of it all. Even though their staff and the foundation of the program is Christian, they do not often have a chance to talk about nature and God’s role because the majority of Calvin Crest’s attendees are public schools.

“This week is really fun for us because Fresno Christian is a Christian school,” Melahn said. “Our staff is all Christian, but our program doesn’t ordinarily talk about God. It’s really fun for us to add that element to it, to be able to sing worship songs and do that sort of thing which we can’t really do with the public schools that come up.”

Of all the activities the staff led with the students, Melahn says that her favorite this week was the song section of the nighttime chapels simply because of how involved and excited the FC students got about it. Each night, the staff worship team opened the evening with Calvin Crest camp songs such as “Black Oak, Black Oak” (to the tune of “Pharoah, Pharoah”), “Dirt Made My Lunch”, “Scat”, and “La Bamba”, and then played a couple of worship songs before Richards or Powell came up and gave a message for the students.

“I really enjoyed the evening time with this group because they really got into the songs and singing ‘Black Oak, Black Oak’,” Melahn said. “Kids get into it with most schools, but this week they were stoked to sing which was really really fun for us to have them really excited.”

Cabin leader Jordan Castro served as a camp counselor for last year’s eighth graders, and when Richards approached him about being a leader again this year, he readily agreed because of the positive experience he had with the boys in his cabin last year.

“My favorite part of Calvin Crest was probably getting to know my cabin and bonding with a bunch of eighth grade dudes that I don’t know,” Castro said. “On Wednesday of last year, me and the guys in my cabin had a bonding experience and it was really emotional to see guys in that light. So I said, hey, this is something I want to get more involved in, and that’s what brought me back.”

While the trip was technically at a camp, this event was nowhere near a relaxing vacation as the students arrived at meals on time, were given a lights-out time, went to evening chapels, had scheduled free time and attended class each day, outdoor hikes on which they learned from both FC teachers and CC staff. The main focus was education and not recreation, though, Richards added a little excitement to the week by creating a contest between the eighth graders within the classes and activities.

The students were divided into four groups on the trails: the Black Bears, the Kingfishers, the Mountain Lions and the Chickarees. These same teams competed throughout the week for the privilege of writing their names on the legendary FC Calvin Crest trophy. Points were awarded based on behavior, participation, teamwork, wisdom out on the trails and a final day of competition used games like relay races and Pictionary to wrap up the contest.

Josh Villa, ’18, enjoyed not only the free time activities and outdoor classes the camp had to offer but also the night events of Calvin Crest. Each night featured a different educational or fun activity for the kids to participate in, including a night hike, an astronomy night, a skit competition and a quiz show based on what the students had learned throughout the week.

“My favorite part of Calvin Crest was doing archery during free time, and my favorite class was survival because I learned certain stuff that I don’t normally learn every day,” Villa said. “I didn’t even know that there are certain plants you can just eat off of. I liked astronomy night too. I thought it was kind of funny how it was really cold and we were under the constellation, the summer triangle.”

As most of the day was jam-packed with activities, classes, meals and chapels students returned to their cabins exhausted, but not so tired that they were not able to talk and bond as a cabin. In fact, this time proved to be a trip favorite for most of the students this year. Although the week was especially tiring for cabin leaders, Ivette Ibarra loved the quality time she was able to spend with her girls at the end of the day.

“My favorite part of Calvin Crest this year was definitely just the cabin nights that we had with all the girls just talking about girl stuff,” Ibarra said. “That was fun and I really got close to all the girls too. I’m going to miss them when we leave, because I’m not going to be spending as much time with them anymore.”

Richards enjoyed the week, especially Thursday’s afternoon event, the Logger’s Jamboree, in which students participated in a variety of physical challenges having to do with logging. Even more than the fun he hopes that, through this week, his students have learned more about God and grown closer to him.

“I would hope that they were listening to the evening messages, that they were taking that in and putting it in their hearts to make themselves better Christians,” Richards said. “I think I saw some of that with some of the students. It was also fun watching the Logger’s Jamboree, seeing the students do some strange things that they thought they couldn’t do but all of a sudden they were doing great.”

In addition to growth in their relationships with God, he also hopes that the students have grown closer to each other and that the relationships that were built and strengthened at Calvin Crest will last for years to come.

“I do this every year because I love it,” Richards said. “I love the mountains, I love camping, I love these junior high kids and I know that if they work together they will bond together and be friends for life. That’s what I’m up to, that they would be friends for life and that they would love the Lord for their whole life.”

This writer can be reached on Twitter at @JennaWeimer42. Follow The Feather via Twitter: @thefeather.

For more features, see the Sept. 30 article, Original teacher retires after 36 years (UPDATE, VIDEO).