Camp Nebagamon

By Joe Crain

With this summer’s weather trend I had such high hopes for getting some outdoor projects done this September as family camp was winding down. I hope you all recall this summer season at camp was marked by particularly stellar weather. Hardly any rain fell from the first day of camp right through family camp. It was so dry this summer that the docks all had to be lowered mid-season, to keep campers from walking straight out to the diving platform! But with a day of hard work shared by the caretakers and the waterfront staff, things were put right and it was safe to dive again. We continued to get little rain for a week or so after the dock move day and were starting to wonder if it was going to be a season with two dock-lowerings. But alas, a few late summer storms seemed to stabilize the lake level and the dock height remained good through family camp. And although we had to wake up to some, by southerner standards, chilly mornings in the month of August, all and all it was a very warm summer by northerner standards. Frankly, on those mornings when I was seeing campers in wool caps and jackets, I was happy to get into some long pants and my beefy-t shirt for a spell of coolness because my northland-seasoned body doesn’t do well when the summer temps soar above the lower-80’s. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t let the temp get above 80 degrees all summer long! Well, as I alluded to above, things stayed warm and dry right through Family Camp. But not long after the last of the Family campers and seasonal staff had headed to their respective home bases things took a major turn in the opposite direction in the weather department here in the Northwoods of Wisconsin! The daily temps skipped right over the usual early September offerings of mid-70 highs and mid-50 lows, and instead we were punished with temps 10 degrees below both of those norms… And so much for the nice dry weather. By mid-month we had enough rainfall to make up the whole summer’s deficit! The rain wasn’t satisfied with getting things back to average though and with this morning’s four inches that all fell in about 4 hours, the month is nearing a 12-inch total rain fall! I must add that we did have a few warm days but with only about 6 days of full sun all month, they really didn’t stand out.

Now to get back to that sentence about “high hopes” that I left dangling at the top of this article; I had been hoping that this would be the fall that I could get back to replacing more of the old, tired, and rusty screens found on a few of the cabins, and most exciting of all I was hoping to get the last of the bike trails in the CNBT system cut through the woods and a reroute of ‘Maureen’s Crossing’ to the backside of the Axman village cabins. But the continually rainy weather stopped those hopes from ever getting off the ground, though I did get to walk and plan the Maureen’s reroute on one of our few dry days.

Instead of being out and about, we ended up working under the cover of the rec-hall for most of the month. We got all of the rec hall furniture re-footed and stored and did the post season floor cleanings. We had so many rain days this month that we were able to replace a substantial amount of cracked and worn out tile of the kitchen floor. It rained so much that I personally was able to pull up and replace 60 square feet of tile. Unfortunately, we also exposed some major subfloor rot in another section of the kitchen, and are still in the process of addressing the issues we exposed. Personally, I’m hoping we have run out of rainy days and we can put finishing the indoor projects off for a while.

Looking forward to getting dry and outside, it’s Caretaker Joe At Camp.