“It all makes a difference in every girl’s life,” said Mosey Wood camp director Jodi Saul. “It always changes them in some way or another.”
Camp Mosey Wood, a Greater Valley Girl Scout camp located near Jack Frost Ski Area and Split Rock Lodge near Blakeslee, has been operating on a 425-acre site enclosing a 13-acre lake since 1939 when the council’s first full time director, Florence Lemkau, discovered and fell in love with the site, and purchased it from the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company.
Bunny, Lemkau’s camping nickname, brought in a young architect, John Heyl, who was willing to work for practically nothing to both develop his portfolio and to spend time with Bunny, was tasked with designing the first buildings. Shortly afterwards, when the chestnut forest was destroyed by blight, John and Bunny replanted it with pines, typically panting two pine close together.
When they married, Bunny left her Director’s job to raise four children, making sure that her two girls would become Girl Scouts. Camp Mosey Wood named a tent unit in her honor, Bunny Hollow.
Today, Bunny Hollow is one of six tent units where the campers reside at Mosey Woods. Each unit is composed of ten canvass tents on wooden platforms surrounding a fire circle. Each tent sleeps four campers and two tents are for counselors.
The recent deluge of rain scuttled a session of camp at Mosey Woods. The grounds flooded and the lake overflowed, breaking a retaining wall. A newly arrived trip of campers had to be sent home after only one day of camp. A week later, all is repaired and the current session of Wave Makers, Brownie Girl Scouts that love water activities, is going strong.
The waterfront offers a wide variety of boating: kayaks, canoes, rowboats, sailboats, and paddleboats. Beginners can swim in an enclosed section of the lake, while those that pass the highest level tests are permitted to swim across the lake.
New for 2006, is the Blob, as they call it at camp, or the Aqua Tower, according to its manufacturer. This water activity consists of two giant-sized inflated plastic tubes lashed together—one vertical and the other horizontal. It takes two to use the Blob. The first sits on the topside of the horizontal tube – on the far side from the vertical tube. The second person jumps from the vertical onto the horizontal tube, ejecting the first person into the air and splashing her into the water.
Camp Mosey Wood has just about everything that a camp should have: archery, a climbing wall, arts & crafts, and loads of hiking trails. A recent Capital Campaign has helped raised funds for an 18-person shower building, fishing dock, and a modernization of the kitchen. They now even have flush toilets—in the dining area, not in the remote individual campsites.
The new dining area can feed 250 people. Mealtime is a time to learn to work as a team at Mosey Wood. Everyone has an assignment. This begins with the first bells in the morning that called the hoppers to set the tables. Each day, a different unit serves as hoppers.
Depending where you sit at the table for a given meal, you may pick-up the food, serve the meal, clean-up work with the recyclables and so on. On Wednesday evenings, the kitchen staff get the night off and each unit has a cookout. The girls plan their menus and have selected anything from macaroni and cheese to quesadillas. To complete the meal, the specialty of the house is the Girl Scouts’ signature chocolate marshmallow sandwich melted over an open fire, S’Mores.
Around the campfires, campers sing camp songs. Sometimes, you hear plaintive songs like Land of the Silver Birch, Boom-didi-ada—to the current hit that goes like this: “There was a moose,
He drank a lot of juice, The moose’s name was Fred, And he drank his juice in bed.”
“This is my 18th summer.” Saul said. “If it wasn’t for camp, I wouldn’t know what I would be doing today. I knew from the first time I came to camp, I wanted to be a counselor. I definitely wanted to be a Camp Director. It has definitely directed my path in life.”
All girls from age 6 through 17 are welcome to come to Camp Moseywood. There is still space for this summer. For more information, call the Great Valley Girl Scout Council at 888-664-9770.
