AMC Outdoors, March 2003

By Katharine Wroth

The month of March holds promise for everyone who's slogged through winter, but it is especially meaningful to whitewater paddlers, who rejoice when ice becomes water once more. This month, Charlie Camp will haul out his Old Town Tripper canoe and join the ranks of those trekking back to the banks. The chair of the Berkshire Chapter's Canoe and Kayak Committee has been an avid paddler — of whitewater and flat — since he first dipped in as a junior-high camper in western Massachusetts.

Carrying vivid memories from that time of a summer voyage on Lake George, N.Y., Camp organized a return trip in 1969, as a young physics teacher and Outing Club leader at Amherst Regional High School. Heading to the lake "has become an annual tradition the school can't seem to stomp out," muses Camp, 61, who retired from teaching three years ago but still helps with trip logistics. He also consults for two programs he created during 36 years at the school — an outdoor leadership training and a wilderness survival course — and teaches astronomy each spring.

"I like helping kids stretch and think about things," says Camp. That leaning also led him to serve as a Boy Scout leader, which brought him to AMC to rent canoes more than 30 years ago. "They were beat-up boats," he remembers, "but at a reasonable price. The next year I tried some easy whitewater trips with AMC and discovered the wonderful things the club was doing."

Camp, who lives in Sunderland, Mass., has explored with AMC ever since, from the riffles of the local Deerfield to the sweep of the Dumoine in Quebec. Relishing both the excitement of whitewater and the peacefulness of canoe camping, he is a frequent leader who helped the chapter build storage racks for its fleet.

Camp has two grown daughters with wife Carole Ann, a minister, and says he is "proud that they are respectable whitewater canoeists." He is equally proud of creating outdoor opportunities for hundreds of students — a group he refers to, with a laugh, as "happy Campers."

—Katharine Wroth is Senior Editor of AMC Outdoors.