As the cold air begins to seep in, the horse’s coats are getting thicker and their bellies are getting a little bit bigger. In order to stay warm, we have started to feed them more hay and grain each morning and night so that when the temperatures are in the single digits and the snow comes, we won’t have an cold ponies! We are getting ready for our Holiday Camp which will run from December 26th to January 1st. This is usually our biggest off-season gathering, besides October Weekend, and we have fun taking care of the ponies, cooking warm and delicious food, kitting or doing arts & crafts, and hopefully some sledding if we are lucky with early snow. We are looking forward to all of the wonderful ladies coming back and spending a week with us during their school vacation.
Tag Archives | horse camp
When we have big jobs on the farm to complete, we rely heavily on our campers to help us complete these projects. We got some new stones for in between the dorms (a full dump truck!) and we needed to even them out across the path between the dorms. We taught our campers how to kneel down and look across the gravel to see the low spots and the high spots. Using the metal rakes, our campers leveled out the stones and filled in the lower areas by taking stones from the higher areas. We are proud of our campers for taking such great care of the farm and for working to keep it beautiful.
Finally, our favorite time of year. The air at Road’s End Farm is filled with laughter and the horses are getting brushed, scratched, and loved by campers. The beginning of camp is always an exciting time for our horses, our staff, and our campers. Our 12 summer staff members are doing a wonderful job teaching the new campers how the Road’s End Farm program operates. We have some qualified and talented counselors who will be instructing riding lessons for our campers on their favorite horses. Sometimes, when you ride your favorite horse, you can’t help but laugh. We have heard laughter throughout the trails and occasionally during the riding lessons in our rings. The horses are more than happy to be getting scratched and loved by girls who love them unconditionally.
Each year, we search far and wide for the best summer staff members for our summer camp 
program. Each aspect of our camp program is implemented by the residential counselors who live in the dorms with the girls. The youngest dorms have two counselors each, while the dorms with the oldest campers only have one. In the middle-ages, we usually have one counselor and one CIT. The complete staff will usually have a breakdown of half American and half International, with counselors traveling from overseas as well as traveling from different states. This year, we have staff members coming from all over the world to Road’s End Farm and we are very much looking forward to learning about different countries and cultures. So far, we have a one counselor from Austria, Australia, Finland, England, and two counselors from Wales. Each camper loves learning of the different cultures, not to mention accents, and the counselors enjoy sharing information about their home countries.
As our campers grow up, they each have the opportunity to become a CIT (Counselor In Training) and they will learn the responsibilities that the staff have each summer. This experience is valuable for each camper who wants to become a counselor. Some years we have more CIT’s than other years, and we welcome all of them for the learning experience. Some of our CIT’s are surprised at how much work it is to be a counselors, however, we have found that as our campers grow up they begin to want responsibility and love the ability to give younger campers the same experience that they had as a young camper.
Additionally, we believe that the experience of becoming a staff member as an individual who has never been a camper is also a powerful experience. Coming into the Farm and creating frindships with campers and counselors, an international counselor is able to give to the farm a unique and different set of viewpoints and skills that make our program more diverse. The campers in our riding and swimming program gain a great deal of valuable instruction and information from our international counselors. We value the different experiences of our campers, counselors, and full time staff because at the end of the day, Road’s End Farm operates as one big team and our members each give something unique and different to our program.
We are very much looking forward to our 2017 summer camp season with our horses, campers, counselors, cooks, and nurses. The team at Road’s End works as a big family which has many different people who come and contribute to maintaining the land and animals at the end of Jackson Hill Road. To all the individuals who make Road’s End Farm possible, from full time employees to families who send (or have sent) their daughters here, we would like to extend a huge thank you and hope to see you soon for a hug!
Road’s End Farm exists solely nowadays for the enjoyment of girls who come from far and wide to Chesterfield, New Hampshire. With the herd of horses for the girls to love and the friendships made with other campers, this New England horse camp for girls has become much more than just a place to ride horses. With life-long friendships to cherish and memories to make, we have opening day on June 4th and we are ready for summer 2017! 🙂
With about 75-80% of our campers returning year in and year out, we are incredibly grateful to get to know such wonderful young women over the course of their many years as campers here. The participants of our program, particularly the full-timers, love watching these girls grow into strong young women who call Road’s End Farm home. With our program placing and emphasis on English riding, farm chores, swimming, and freedom of choice for activities, we want our campers to have ample time to create lifelong friendships and explore personal interests. Friendships, laughter, 67 horses, and a short break from technology make for a joyful camp experience at the end of Jackson Hill Road.
