The girls of summer: Generations of Girl Scouts work toward future, while getting back to nature

On the bench, she carefully placed a half-finished macrame lanyard and a piece of redwood bark sprouted with bright green lichen.

It was a scene of childhood joy that could only exist at camp, and it is a scene that has played out innumerable times this summer in Huddart Park where the local Girl Scouts have been hosting their annual camps, encouraging girls of all ages to explore nature, enjoy the simple pleasures of arts and crafts, make new friends, and learn to become the leaders of tomorrow.

The Girl Scouts have been camping at Huddart Park for decades, which, incidentally, is beyond recorded history.

“This is my 37th year, so let me start the year before that at 38,” said Camp Director Genella Williamson, who goes by the nature name “Mockingbird” while on duty. “We don’t have any records before that because it actually used to be at Searsville Lake in the really old days. So I can say, very comfortably, it’s been going over 40 years.”

Each summer, two camp sessions — Peninsula and Diamond Crest — each serve certain cities on the Peninsula, ultimately covering most of San Mateo County. Diamond Crest Day Camp — the second, and larger, of the two sessions — came to a close Thursday, and hosted an estimated 900 scouts from first-grade and up, and any Scout that wants to participate is welcomed.

“We have been very cognizant of doing whatever we can to accommodate special needs children,” Williamson said. “We sometimes have special medical needs, we sometimes have special behavior needs, and we do anything we can to accommodate that. We’ve never turned a camper away for that.”

The younger campers spend their days working toward earning badges and enjoying camp activities like painting birdhouses, hiking, learning camping skills, singing and preparing cookouts. Older campers step up to activities like horseback riding at Webb Ranch and archery classes, and they eventually have the chance to become the camp leaders of the future.

“One of the things we have here is a progression,” Williamson said. “The girls who are going into seventh-grade are aides in training, then the eighth-, ninth- and 10th-graders are aides, and 10th-, 11th- and 12th-graders have the option of being junior unit leaders. They take on the full responsibility and all the planning for their unit.

“These are teenagers who are giving up two weeks of their summer to come and work. They pay, because they are campers, but they are literally here to be the helpers, and to me that’s somehow important. Every year I see over a hundred teenagers who give up their summer to be here at camp and they’re wonderful.”

One of the last big events of the camp is the graduation of the aides in training, at which the new aides are bequeathed with their coveted “nature names” which will become their exclusive handle during camp season. The nature name is so precious that real names will rarely be uttered at camp and even then, only in whispers at some distance from the uninitiated. The freshly minted leaders then spend the night under the stars, literally. There are no cabins or tents here, just tarps and sleeping bags on the ground.

“It’s in the outdoors,” said Junior Unit Leader Madison “Noodles” Hubbel. “It’s not at a school. There’s no cement. We’re surrounded by trees and bugs.”

This is not glamping. This is the real deal.

While Scout membership is no-boys-allowed, the camp is not run exclusively by girls or scouts.

“We do certainly take volunteers of any sex,” Williamson said. “We don’t often get a lot of fathers who want to volunteer, but when we do we are thrilled to have them.”

It’s not just fathers breaking the gender barrier, either. Ironically, one of the first sights to greet camp visitors is a group of rowdy boys — children of parents who take advantage of the camp’s day care service to volunteer.

“Meanwhile, down in civilization, we have an army of people back home doing things to keep the camp running,” on-site manager Jo “Shadow” Mitchell said of the huge amount of food prep, supply runs and organization that go on behind the scenes to make the camps run smoothly up on the hill.

“A lot of the people involved plan their lives around it,” Mitchell said. “Parents, grandparents, everyone, they wouldn’t miss a year.”

Junior Unit Leader Danielle “Peppermint” Hamer attributes this to the quirkiness of camp traditions.

“There’s a lot of unique traditions that you can’t tell people about without them thinking it’s outlandish,” Hamer said. “But to me they make sense because I’ve been at camp so long.”

When the flames went out on Thursday night’s campfire, the Girl Scouts ended another summer of sharing those unique traditions with girls from all over the Peninsula, giving them new experiences, new friends and new skills that they can take into the future, and likely give back in years to come.

“We have girls who are in college and come back to be our leaders,” Williamson said. “We have a grandmother — me — whose two daughters and grandchildren come. Many of our people who have been here at camp as children are coming back. Somehow that always makes my heart feel happy.”