The time since the summer of ‘81 is as vivid to us as if it were yesterday. That first season, Longacre Expeditions gave 34 teenagers the best summer of their lives. Our “Base Camp” was a horse barn in Markelsville, PA. Merry Schuler led a group of teenagers on our very first Blue Ridge expedition. Matt Schuler spent most of his summer as a van driver. Roger Smith was busy launching a participatory science center in Harrisburg.

That first season we had a pretty good idea what we were trying to accomplish. We wanted each kid who was with us to grow by successfully confronting a series of physical and interpersonal challenges. This philosophy was already well honed at Longacre Farm, a program that Roger and his wife, Susan, had started 7 years earlier. At Expeditions, The Farm was replaced by the wilderness as the place where all this growth would occur. Since that time, our mission has remained unchanged.

Along the way, however, we learned some very valuable lessons and have fine-tuned (or overhauled) just about everything else. Issues like physical and emotional safety; wilderness ethics; effective staff hiring, training, and evaluation; and continuity among trips and from year to year are ingrained into our systems and are now part of our collective memory.

We’ve learned some new stuff along the way. One of the wonderful things about summer programming is that each year there is an influx of new staff with new tricks and new ideas. Many of the finest aspects of The Longacre Experience were originally just something that an enthusiastic staffer chose to do because it seemed appropriate: benchmarks, the Trip Journal, the Letter to Myself, and the written Camper Evaluation all were done first at the individual trip level. We latched on to these good ideas. Even though they mean a lot of extra effort we feel that they help to determine the character of our organization!

A quarter century is a long time to work at anything. We have kept our jobs interesting by growing and incorporating new course areas when it seemed appropriate and when there was passion to embark on a new adventure. Each season provided a new challenge and each success brought us closer to goals and philosophy. After 29 years, it is amazing to see what has been accomplished, but it is even more astonishing to realize that the best is yet to come.