Cabin Building and Ranch Work
A very popular camp activity at Elk Creek Ranch is our work program. We have always believed that a ranch experience without some ranch work is as unrewarding as it is artificial. All teens participate in the work although the extent of their participation varies according to their interests. For older teens seeking much exposure to ranch and building jobs we have a work crew, which offers those boys and girls refunds according to the amount of time devoted to the projects. For others we have two-hour work periods, four or five mornings a week.
The work itself ranges from the normal chores of a ranch operation to ambitious building projects and horse training. The common and continuing tasks include mending old and building new fences, maintaining tack, repairing corrals, irrigating the pastures, and feeding the horses.
Each summer, we also tackle at least one extensive building project. In recent years we have completed the construction of a new log cabin, a barn, several porches, and an extension on our Dining Hall. Indeed, our entire "Hoss Palace"- including barn, tack house, hay sheds, feeding racks, corrals, and stalls has been built by ranch groups over the past thirty years.
We also have an ongoing horse-training program that starts with new foals learning to lead and to trust the human hand, and ends with four-year-old horses graduating to the trail. In a very real sense, the ranch as it now exists has grown and taken shape through the work of all the past ranchers.
In addition to introducing the ranchers to manual skills and to challenging them with extensive projects, the ranch work is designed to foster an appreciation of our primitive surroundings. Instead of buying treated fence posts, we cut and treat our own. Instead of using planks for the construction of our corrals, we cut and notch our own poles and posts. Instead of contracting a cement company to lay foundations and floors, we make our own forms and mix our own cement. Instead of ordering precut logs or prefabricated log siding, we do our own timbering, fitting, and notching of logs. Although this approach to the work projects is time-consuming, it does promote an awareness of our pioneering past and a concern for our environmental future.
