Summer Camp 2025 Highlights

Summer 2025 was a beautiful whirlwind. 6 weeks, 17 programs, 22 staff, 250 campers, and countless friendships formed, memories made, and relationships with God deepened. Here are just some of our favorite highlights:

• Celebrating 20 years of our partnership with Warren County Cornell Cooperative Extension, which has sent thousands of local kids to camp on full scholarships over the past two decades

• Revitalizing our off-site trip programs, getting kids back into more adventures in the Adirondack wilderness

• Welcoming 3 new chaplains to join us for a week of bible study and faith formation with campers

• Watching our Voyagers leadership campers play and lead games with younger campers

• Celebrating Christmas in July with a live nativity play during Thursday worship

• Hearing the camper who was nervous to try canoeing proudly telling a staff member how much fun she had on the peace canoe

• Doubling the registration cap on our new Fun Size program, allowing even more young campers to try out a half week at camp for the first time

• Watching campers enthusiastically cheering for their cabinmates, kitchen staff, and even campers they haven’t even met yet during camp talent shows

• Handing out “pocket Jesus” tokens to campers during Thursday worship

• Seeing kids relax and connect without phones and technology, being themselves and feeling the love in this community

We’ll have more stories to share from this summer from campers and staff in the coming months. For now, if you haven’t already, check out more photos from each week of Summer 2025 on our Facebook page!

Late-Summer Retreat Season

Our busy summer season doesn’t end when the last summer campers go home at the end of Week 6! The second half of August is filled with retreats of all kinds, allowing a wide variety of people to enjoy the beauty of the Adirondacks in the summer, building community, trying new things, and encountering God. Here are some of the major retreat groups we hosted in August and September of 2025:

• Little Ones - Put on by volunteers as well as paid summer staff, this annual retreat is for kids ages 3-7 accompanied by an adult family member. This year’s retreat was our biggest in recent history, with over 30 people enjoying the fun!

• Preachers: Rest. Work. Play. - We were happy to host this one-day retreat for UMC pastors and their families led by UNY UMC’s Preachers Rest Work Play organization, giving time for rest, renewal, and fun at the lake!

• Guilderland High School Cross Country Retreat - For the better part of the last two decades, we’ve had the pleasure of hosting GXC’s pre-season running camp, with between 80-120 runners, coaches, and chaperones running our trails, doing cannonballs in the lake, bonding as a team while unplugging from technology, and eating lots and lots of yummy camp food!

• Skidmore College Outdoor Orientation Program - 2025 marks our second year hosting incoming 1st years from Skidmore College and their peer advisors over Labor Day Weekend. Filling just about every bed on main camp, these students get to make friends around the campfire and go off site on various Adirondack adventures. It’s a blessing to be able to help their transition into college as they build community and step out of their comfort zone, and we look forward to continuing to be a part of this program for years to come!

• Creating in Creation - This annual crafting retreat is our opportunity to offer a weekend on main camp full of crafting, meals in the dining hall, and fellowship. Crafters this year came from all over New York state, and were members of local churches, camper parents, camp alumni, and crafting retreat experts.

In addition to these major retreats, we also were happily busy hosting:

• Private family retreats & family reunions, both on main camp and at Ogden & Shippey lodges

• A wedding rehearsal dinner for some of our Sherman Lake neighbors

• A memorial service for some of our Sherman Lake neighbors

• And last but absolutely not least, several church retreats for congregations to step outside their daily routines and spend time in community at camp

As we move into our fall and winter seasons, with our seasonal dining hall, cabins, and other facilities shutting down for the winter, we continue to host retreat groups in our year-round spaces. Church groups, youth groups, quilters, families, and more will join us in Ogden, Shippey, and Bass lodges. If you’re interested in booking a retreat at Skye Farm this fall, winter, or spring, please reach out to Robyn or Hannah or fill out the Retreat Inquiry Form linked below. Year-round retreats are an important part of our ministry, allowing us to provide an environment for community-building and renewal for people of all ages as well as to bring in income that helps make our summer camp programs the best they can be.

New Range & Griddle for the Dining Hall

Nancy generously donated the funds for the new equipment in honor of her grandmother, Helen Eva Grout, who worked in the Skye Farm kitchen in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, cooking on the same stove her granddaughter has now helped modernize. The food cooked by Helen and all the Skye Farm cooks who have come before and after her has helped nourish generations of campers, giving them the energy, comfort, and joy they need to flourish at camp. This year’s cooks were incredibly grateful for the new range and the safety and reliability it provided. Many pots of soup and oatmeal were boiled, countless pancakes were flipped, and not a single pilot light went out. We look forward to the delicious meals it will allow us to prepare for years to come, and we give our deep thanks to Nancy for making it happen!

Supporting Skye Farm with FreeWill

Since its first season in 1942, Skye Farm has always been a mission project to help build Christian disciples. And this summer Skye Farm welcomed more than 250 children and youth from a wide variety of backgrounds. While in the past they came mostly from church-related families, today about 40% of our campers have had little or no contact with any church at all. That’s 100 children every summer who may have never held a Bible, don’t really know who Jesus is, and may not know that Christmas is His birthday. Few of these children have heard of St. Nicholas or know that Jesus has anything to do with Easter.

So, Skye Farm’s mission has changed dramatically in recent years, and it will need continued support from all of us in the future. If you’d like to help share the message of God’s love for everyone would you consider making a bequest to the Skye Farm Foundation in your Will?

The Skye Farm Foundation has partnered with FreeWill, Inc. to make it very easy to write a Will that’s legal in all 50 states. Click here to learn more and get started.

Already have a will? You can help the Skye Farm Foundation as we manage and steward the gifts given to Skye Farm by sharing any intent to give included in your will. Just complete the online “Gift Intent” form on Skye Farm’s FreeWill landing page. Thank you for considering our work as a part of your legacy. We know that life circumstances can change and you may need to alter or reconsider your gift in the future. That’s all right — reporting your gift today does not obligate you now nor in the future.

Thank you for your consideration!

— Steve Butler, Skye Farm Foundation Board Member

Thursday Crew & Volunteer News

The Thursday Crew had a busy summer, and we’ve been glad to welcome several new regulars to the weekly line-up! Work is ongoing in Central Washhouse, and improvements to the Loon and Schroon staff cabins were completed in time for staff to enjoy them this summer. Other recent projects have included a major clean-out of the barn, repaired and re-stained porches on Bass and Shippey Lodges, expanded storage racks for the peace canoes, repairs and fresh paint and pine paneling in the Glens Falls camper cabins, and a special secret carpentry project to be revealed this spring. Additionally, the crew has helped with countless repairs, leaks, and seasonal maintenance projects all over camp, work that we are eternally grateful for.

In addition to the Thursday Crew, our summer was full of amazing volunteers in basically every aspect of camp. HUGE thanks to every volunteer cook, counselor, program leader, nurse, photographer, office helper, morale-booster, and toilet-scrubber. We couldn’t do it without you!

Upcoming Events & Dates to Know

• 10/19 - Fall Festival at Calvary Latham UMC, 2-4pm

• 10/25 - Camp Workshop at Albany & Adirondack District Day at Saratoga Springs UMC

• 10/25 - Trunk or Treat at Up Yonda Farm, 3-5pm

• 10/31 - Trunk or Treat at Cobleskill United Methodist Church, 4-7pm

• 12/2 - Giving Tuesday

• 12/13 - Registration for Summer 2026 Opens!

• 2/8 - Camp & Retreat Ministries Sunday

COMING SOON: More Trunk or Treat dates, online camp store info, staff application info, Skye Farm Cookbook project, winter & spring church visit sign-ups, and more!

Thank you for supporting Skye Farm, whether that means trusting us with your family, volunteering your time, spreading the word about what we do, helping get kids to camp, or making financial gifts. If you’d like to make a donation to the Skye Farm Foundation, click the link below.

Did you know? The Skye Farm Camp and Retreat Center Foundation, Inc is an independent not-for-profit corporation founded in 2021. The Foundation's mission is to promote and ensure the long-term future of Skye Farm Camp. The Foundation raises money to fund special projects, ongoing operations, and, most vitally, an endowment fund to ensure that Camp remains a vibrant and life-changing mission and refuge for generations of campers to come.