Wilderness

Next is Camp Wilderness. So you’ll notice that this camp shares the name with wilderness hill in Blackhawk. Oftentimes, people say that the hills on Blackhawk are named that because thats where the camps were located. But this isn’t quite true. The hills are simply NAMED after the old camps, not where they're from. And in this case, Blackhawk was actually built on top of Camp Wilderness. Wilderness more or less used all of the land that the modern day Blackhawk uses. Much of what we know about Camp Wilderness comes from Paul E. Meyers’ book, which has a section on Wilderness. The camp began in 1933, on the north end of Lake Big Blue. The exact location isn’t clear, but we know that in 1937 it was relocated to the current site of Camp Blackhawk. This was likely due to the fact that the Checagau Dining Hall burned down the year before, and after it became apparent that the camp wasn’t going to reopen, the decided to move the camp at a new site where Blackhawk once was. Interestingly, they didn’t choose the site at Checagau. I suspect this was because they wanted to reopen Checagau at some point, and they wanted a stop-gap camp until attendance improved. For this new location, the camp constructed patrol-sized Adirondack cabins. These had 3 walls with an open face and a roof and would have 4 double stacked beds. Oftentimes, troops camped at Wilderness would either get unprepared food from the Blackhawk commissary, or they would receive hotpacks. They would also use the Old Camp Blackhawk waterfront. Bob Kurth told me about an Icehouse that existed, but burned down in the mid 1950s.  According to a newspaper retrospective from the 1980s, the cabins were torn down in 1962. By 1967 the camp was still operating, though the sites just had tents, arranged in a ring around the Camp Wilderness lodge. From what I understand, there wasn’t really a program to speak of by 1967, and by this time, the camp was heavily reliant on neighboring camps to make up for it by this. G-Dawg, one of Owasippe’s resident elders, actually went there in the 1950s, and he’ll tell you all about it if you ever see him.