Kid’s Camp |

I had not been an employee since teaching for Yosemite Institute in 1978 …29 years prior. In 2007, Martha suggested that I go find something to do and so, having no interest in starting another business, I instead took a retirement job working for the City of Berkeley rebuilding the historic Echo Lake children’s camp at 7,300 ft elevation on Echo Ridge above Lake Tahoe.

For starters, the camp well didn’t produce enough water, so I designed and built a water treatment plant to use the water from Echo Lake, about a mile away. That took about a year as work was not possible under the typical 10-15 ft winter snow level.

During the winter of 2007-8, I would ski in and do the surveying and planning. Work commenced in Spring 2008 and was completed in the fall of that year. I was then offered the job of managing the kid’s camp.

The camp itself was largely autonomous from the City, in other words, they hardly ever saw me and had little idea of what I was doing up there. So I set about systematically mis-appropriating funds to essentially rebuild the entire camp without the permission of the City or the Forest Service while redesigning the children’s and specialty adult programs.

Finished water treatment plant in late fall snow —>

One of the best parts was that I was able to convince the City that that I needed a large skip loader for the entire season and late into the Fall post season. With it and a couple of late season staff, over the course of several years, in addition to continuous structure rebuilding, systematically took out about half of the vegetation to decrease the fuel load and wrote a fire plan.

Some of the long-time guests were beginning to remark that the camp was starting to look sparse, but the plan paid off in 2021, after I had left, when the massive Caldor fire destroyed most of the adjacent structures on Echo Ridge but burnt AROUND the camp. The fire, one of the largest in California history, destroyed 1300 structures and behaved, around the camp, exactly how I had predicted in my 2014 fire plan.

For the summer camp I had a staff of about 30 college kids and about 80-100 children per week. It was a lot of fun.

During the off season I’d find excuses to ski in for a few days and stay in my cabin overlooking the Tahoe basin and use it as a base camp to ski into the back country. In the evenings, I’d often ski the mile out to the road and go down to South Lake Tahoe and play music at various bars and restaurants.