Week Six 7/23-7/27

Hello Friends! We hope you've been enjoying the Olympics this week because we sure have! We had our own very special Galactic Olympics on Friday and had all kinds of great Olympic fun all week. At We've done the long jump, the shot-put, marathon running, hurdles, you name it and our campers did it!

It was so fun to see everyone working hard and loving every minute of it, it's possible we have a few young Olympiads on our hands! Just a reminder, we have had a lot of campers attending in flip flops which has been limiting a lot of our fun. Please send your camper to HPR with tennis shoes or sandals with straps.

We've done plenty of outdoor cooking this week as our traditional campers made popcorn over the fire at Nature Camp craft and packed and planned out meals for a imaginary Boundary Waters trip at canoeing. Our oldest campers all participated in an overnight this week, the middle school campers went to William O'Brien State Park and our LITs went to Interstate Park near Taylors Falls. Both trips were a huge success and I'm sure our campers will be talking about their experiences for years to come. Congratulations to everyone for all your hard work and preparation, we're so glad you had fun!

Our Traditional campers have another overnight this week on Thursday August 2nd to Friday August 3rd. This will be for everyone in Jake, Kirsten, Jeff, Joseph, Cady B, and Carolyn's groups, as well as the members of Cody, Rachel F, Joe B, Eric, Tori, and Elaine's groups that started camp on 7/16. If you do not normally attend camp on Thursdays you are still welcome to participate by arriving after 4:45pm on Thursday. If you do not attend on Fridays you are welcome to participate as well by leaving at 8am on Friday. It is going to be a lot of fun and we hope to see you there!

We only have two more weeks of camp, but they're going to be the best ones yet! We're starting the Penny wars for the American Cancer Society next week (Aug 6). We do our best to raise at least $1,000 each year by bringing in all our loose change. So save your pennies and dollars for positive points towards a party for the winning group and save those silver coins for negative points to slow down all the other groups. All the proceeds of our camp fun will go towards cancer research, let's have fun and work hard to help a lot of people!

HPR's production of Snow White will be on August 9th at 3pm. Everyone is invited to attend and support our talented campers. If your child is involved in the play and you'd like to help out we would love to talk to you. The biggest place to help is always costumes and props. If you have anything you'd like to donate or loan towards this production please address an email to Nick Lande, one of our camp managers and the director of Snow White, at camp@hiddenpinesranch.com Other questions are always welcome too!

It has been a terrific summer so far and it is only going up! We can't wait to start again on Monday! See you soon!

Cast List for HPR's Snow White

We're so excited to announce the cast of HPR musical! Practices will take place in the afternoons and the big show is on Thursday August 9th. All campers involved in the play are welcome to attend on this Thursday regardless of their normal schedules, we need all our friends for a big day of practice! Keep checking the blog and Facebook for more announcements! 

Snow White

Cast List

Sister 1: Jorja Goudreau

Sister 2: Lily Olson

Little Boy: Jack Distad

Mom: Katie Grannis

Snow White: Addie Smittkamp

Evil Queen: Lexi Oeltjen

Mirror: Amy Longtin

Queen’s Servants: Rachel Colwell, Kacey Kroeck, Ella Netland, Maddie Oeltjen, Emma Dornseif, Hannah Bruentrup, Abbie Garness

Huntsman: Jack Denton

Doc: Nathan Dirkes

Sleepy: Frankie Franta

Sneezy: Kelly Grannis

Grumpy: Marley McGuire

Bashful: Julia Enright

Happy: Ella Runyon

Dopey: Daniel Lapadat

DNR Representative: Leif Olson

Prince Charming: Dan Stone

Soldiers/Prince’s Men: Sam Elletson, John Lillie, Ethan Citsay, Thomas Meyers

Young Queen: Delaney McDowell

King: Charlie Vick

Doctor: Catherine Moore

Huntsman’s Angel: Sam Stone

Huntsman’s Devil: Mari Arndt

Warning Bird: Dani Lillie

Head Villager: Lily Olson

Evil Peddlers: Lizzie Bregel, Nate Averbeck, Sydney Stone

Young Snow White: Tara Martin

Magic Trees/Flowers:

Sydney Rodd, Gabby Olson, Grace Kleppe, Amanda Oyen, Annika Citsay, Leah Staruck, Zoe Colombo, Grace Colwell

Dwarf Villagers:

Noah Denton, Gwen Wegleitner, Hallie Vick, Emily Elletson, Cooper Olson, Wyatt Herrick, Meghan Remely, Sophia Arndt

Woodland Creatures: Axel Colombo, Sydney Rogness, Amya Davis, Nick Grannis, Nick Nelson

Week Five 7/16-7/20

It's already the second half of our summer and we were so pleased to see some new faces join us at camp for these next four weeks! We've been off to a great start, filling the next part of our summer with tons of fun and even a little bit of learning! In Science our campers studied frogs and learned to write their observations down in a organized format, they made journal entries just like real scientists! Our area leader, Rachel Fosse, has been doing an amazing job getting campers excited about science. Way to go Rachel!

At Sportsfield we've been working on our football skills, specifically passing and kicking, and the campers were challenged to see how far they could move a football. We laid a tape measure down and were amazed at how far some of our campers could punt and pass! The throwing record was 81 feet and the kicking record was a whopping 94 feet! Way to go HPR!

This week at our Nature Campcraft, our resident expert Deb Lyons has been impressing everyone even more than usual! Campers made hundreds of pancakes on homemade outdoor stoves for Lumberjack Day Friday, they have been working in their own saw yard like real lumberjacks, and learning to identify all the different trees at camp just by their leaves! It is so much fun to watch all our camper's confidence grow as they learn to appreciate the great outdoors!

Arts and Crafts had a lot of fun as well this week with some creative driveway painting. We listened to different styles of music like jazz, musicals, even some current songs while we let it inspire us to paint the driveway with a cool blend of cornstarch, water, and dyes for a homemade paint!

We had a big announcement this week that has been keeping the kids extremely excited, we announced that this summer's musical production will be Snow White! We've been holding auditions all this week and everyone who participated will have a role in the play! The cast list will go up first thing on Monday at camp and on the blog!

Lumberjack Friday was "Tree-rific!" We had a great time flying down our log chute.  We were able to test the strength of camp's little lumberjacks with a log dragging race.  Our log stacking skills were put to the test with jungle Jenga and we fueled all this fun with plenty of Flapjacks and maple syrup!  After all of our fun morning activities, we gathered together to put on our own Lumberjack Day Parade.  All of the groups made their own floats and marched in our parade. Everyone put in so much time and creativity, it was so much fun! Check out the pictures below and on our Facebook! to see all the campers in their floats.

Next week we will be holding the Galactic Olympics!  The activities are going to be out of this world!  Dress as an alien athlete and get excited to participate.

Week Four

Wow! It's hard to believe we're already halfway through this summer! Time flies when you're having fun, and we have been having a lot of it! Our middle school campers have been having lots of fun cooling off at the beach. When we were back at camp our middle school camp spent their mornings painting on canvas, playing football, and learning about chanting in their morning music lesson. Awesome!

Our LITs went to Feed My Starving Children this week and worked really hard to give back to the world, we are so proud!

This week was especially exciting as our Traditional Camp was buzzing with excitement all week about Friday's Variety Show and special Hunger Games afternoon activity. Afternoon activities were offered every day after lunch for campers to practice their variety show talents which included lots of music, gymnastics and even some ventriloquism! It was an amazing show with amazing camper helpers. A big thanks to Lexi Oeltjen, Amy Longtin, and Evan Hakamaki for all their help leading the show!

Our Middle school director, Matt Fosse, took on an ambitious project and created a real life version of the popular book and movie, The Hunger Games. Campers had a blast getting their faces painted and participating in all sorts of challenges that were based off of the book. What an awesome opportunity to act out one of your favorite books! Thanks Matt!

This Friday's theme was Ice Age and we tried to play it cool all day by making ice cube necklaces, dressing up in funny winter gear and dancing around the driveway circle for a candy walk! Debbie puts in so much work planning these Fridays and everyone has a lot of fun, we can't wait for next Friday, it's Lumberjack Days! Remember to dress in your best flannel and beards!

Thanks for checking the blog and keep spreading the word about all the fun we're having and remember to check out even more of our photos on Facebook

Week Three

It has been a short and hot week at HPR, but we've been filling the week with all the fun we can think of! We filled our canoes with water and paddled across the pond in a wet and wild relay race. We used the skills we've developed so far at archery to compete head to head in a game of tic-tac-toe, it's really fun to see our camper's accuracy improving! We built slingshots, learned about string instruments, played some excited games of handball! Our morning lessons have been a ton of fun!

On Thursday we had our first traditional camp sleepover of the summer and it was a blast! The kids really enjoyed cooking over a fire for dinner and had plenty of beans and hot dogs. We spent most of the evening with our groups and played plenty of water games to keep cool. The water slide and sponge wars were two favorites!

Every week in Faith Building the Middleschool campers and the LITs have been comparing a different religion to Christianity to see what we can learn about our own faith. This week was about Native American religions and every camper chose a spirit animal and learned to appreciate the wisdom animals have. We talked about how we can honor God's creations and spread love for all that God gave us. Ask your camper what their animal is and what it means!

The LITs had a really special trip on Tuesday. They all went on an environmental sustainability tour of Target Field. Did you know that Target Field has it's own water filtering system in the baseball field? They had a lot of fun and learned a whole lot. Ask your camper about it!

This week our themed Friday was The Great Race and it was amazing! We started the day in our sports attire blasting some fun songs and then we spent all morning in a camp wide race. Groups ran around trying complete lots of fun and silly tasks. We had a scavenger hunt, relay tasks, and we all tried to make the longest line of people we could by laying head to toe. If that was enough we played the first round of everyone's favorite camp game: BONKERS! Fridays are always so much fun and this week was no different.

We hope everyone had a fantastic 4th of July and we can't wait to see all of our friends who are resting in some AC or went away on family vacations this week. Have a fantastic weekend and we'll see everyone on Monday!

Don't forget to see more photos at Hidden Pines Ranch's Facebook page!