January Update: Happy New Year!

by Ariella Rogge on January 01

Happy New Year! Welcome to 2025! We love the new year as it means we are six months away from welcoming another group of enthusiastic campers and staff members to Sanborn Western Camps.

We love this time of year as it allows us to look forward to the future, while celebrating the year gone by. Recently, we all sat down and shared challenges and triumphs from 2024–and had a pretty funny gift exchange.* (*The Sanborn Western Camps holiday gift exchange involves bringing something in your house that you don’t use/want anymore…this did have to be lightly clarified to include, “that someone else may enjoy” after an exceptionally funny gift of ant spray and a ball of yarn was received in 2023.)

We used some of these questions as prompts for our discussion:

  1. What did I change my mind on this year?
  2. What created energy in my life this year? (Activities, projects, people)
  3. What drained energy from my life this year?(Activities, projects, people)
  4. What were the boat anchors in my life this year? (Dragged me down/held me back)
  5. What did I not do because of fear? (Downside of upside of taking action?)
  6. What were my greatest hits and worst misses of this year? (Be balanced)
  7. What did I learn this year?

We had conversations about communication, the importance of family, how we can be risk takers and risk averse, heard funny stories about mountain climbs and realized how much we appreciate having a community of friends who are like family and who take care of each other both in and out of the workplace. Camp connects us–in so many ways–to our individual pasts, to the present and to our shared future. It also reminds us that human connection: sharing food, listening to stories, laughing together–is the foundation of every great community.

We hope you have had time to connect with all of your communities over the holiday–and we hope you have a great start to 2025!

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Ariella Rogge
About Ariella Rogge

Ariella started her career at Sanborn when she was twelve. After five years of camper and five years of Sanborn staff experience, she continued her work with kids in the high school classroom. Ariella and her family returned to Sanborn in 2001 to take on the Program Director role which she held til 2012. She and Elizabeth Marable became co-directors of High Trails in 2013 and then Ariella became the High Trails Director in 2020. In the fall of 2022 she became the Director of Sanborn Western Camps, overseeing the director teams of both Big Spring and High Trails. She lists mountain golf, Gymkhana, climbing mountains and making Pad Thai in the backcountry as some of her favorite activities at camp. Ariella received a B.A. in English from Colorado College and is a certified secondary English educator,an ACCT Level 2 Ropes Course Technician, an ARC lifeguard and NREMT and WEMT. She lives in Florissant in the summer and in Green Mountain Falls during the school year so she can stay involved with the busy lives of her husband, Matt, and two sons, Lairden and Karsten.