It has been a tough couple of years because of the pandemic but 2022 is more of a normal year at Turtle Mountain Bible Camp (TMBC).

The camp started back in the late 1940’s and has made many transitions over the decades to the point where hundreds of people use the camp every year.

Kathy Weir is co-director at TMBC and she calls it a wonderful summer. “We just finished our family camp on the long weekend and now we have 85 junior campers arriving this week and that’s 8 to 10 year olds. We’ve already had our junior teen and some intermediate camps and we have two more weeks to follow after this one.”

Weir adds it has been great to see the kids coming out and enjoying the activities.

“Our biggest need right now is still our life guards. Other than that cabin cooks and leader positions are being filled and we are so grateful.”

Kathy Weir says the challenge of finding life guards hasn’t kept youth out of the water. “It hinders us in the sense that we aren’t able to have all campers swimming together and we have to break it into groups. Two of our programmers did get their certification but it just means a lot of extra work because their trying to do skills and then cover water activities so we can open it up for boating and tubing and kayaks and canoes.”

Weir says it puts a lot of pressure on those people and they're still trying to find someone to fill the gap.

The weather summer has really cooperated for camp enthusiasts and hasn’t done much to disrupt camp activities.

While the camp continues to rebound registrations are down slightly. “I think we’ll host around 450 campers this summer. We’ve already had over 1,200 people through the camp in this fiscal year already and that was before our summer camps started. It’s been exciting and we’re encouraged to see the facilities being used and campers back again at TMBC” said Kathy Weir.