With summer campers come new summer animals as well. This summer, we have a Hungarian Vizsla joining us from Virginia. Alicia, who is helping out the full-time Alicia in the kitchen, has joined us for the entire summer with her horse, Ruby, and her dog, Laszlo. We could not be more excited to have new summer friends here, not to mention, the campers love having more farm dogs and horses!
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 morning, the full time staff members at Road’s End Farm wake up and love all of the animals that live at the end of Jackson Hill Road in New Hampshire. Daisy, our yellow lab, is the farm dog that the campers love year in and year out. We have created a short film, dedicated to Daisy Dolittle the Delinquent, and we find it to have a different tune than our horse movies. We are so delighted that each camper that comes can love horses, cats, and dogs and we believe that all of these animals create the full Farm experience. These animals contribute to our camp program and we have found the campers love our household pets as much as they love the herd of horses.
With the new year at Road’s End Farm brought us two new cats. Melvin and Momo have come and made themselves at home at Road’s End. Hopefully, we will make a video of the cats soon, but for now Daisy has the spotlight. Please enjoy this short, one minute film with pictures of our favorite pup!
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!
P.O. Box 197, Jackson Hill Road
Chesterfield, New Hampshire 03443-0197
Telephone: 603/363-4900
Email: director@roadsendfarm.com
