Incident at Tuckerman's Ravine

This is my friend Sara Lee. I met her at Camp Trebor. That's Robert spelled backwards. We were twelve years old when we met. These pictures are from the summer of '69, when we were almost fourteen.

At Camp Trebor, we did a lot of canoeing. Sometimes we went on a three day canoe trip. That was fun. We had wooden canoes. That meant you had to carry them a lot, so they wouldn't get damaged. Everything at Camp Trebor was very"back to nature". Hey, you're looking good Sara Lee!

We slept in sleeping bags in little huts and made our own dinner over a campfire. Sara Lee was from Newton and I was from Miami. Everybody else in our group was from New York. This was a definite bonding element.

We were relatively new campers. On Friday night, when we had Indian Council Fire, Sara Lee and I did not have as many feathers in our headresses as the New Yorkers. They had been attending Camp Trebor, it seemed, since they were toddlers. They had good attitudes.

This is Tuckerman's Ravine on Mt. Washington. It is a commercial mountain, one not usually visited by Camp Trebor. We are climbing there because I have never seen snow. However, I am more interested in the hamburger guys in the restaurant on the way up the mountain. Sara Lee and I hang out in there way past the acceptable limit. This is an all girls camp--with a vengeance.

When we got to the Ravine, we were supposed to play in the snow. My hands got cold--we had no gloves. This snow business was overrated as far as I was concerned. Sara Lee played, she's up there in the right hand corner. I took some pictures and sunned myself on a rock.

We were in big trouble when we got back. We had to go see Frank, the camp director. My crimes: being ungrateful for the sacrifice others had made in order for me to see snow, and being more interested in the guys in the restaurant than the snow. (Typical Trebor trips were to mountains with very few people and definitely no restaurants.) Sara Lee's crime was hanging out with me.

Our punishment: we were not allowed to go on the 3-day sailing trip, the pinnacle of the Camp Trebor experience, reserved for only the oldest campers. We were left home alone, so to speak, and we were bad. Sara Lee suggested mixing together shampoo, toothpaste and mouthwash, that belonged to the other campers in our bunk, then refilling the bottles. We did it and it was fun, but I'm not sure they ever noticed.

Now we can go out to any restaurant and talk to as many guys as we want. Of course, we're middle-aged married mothers, but we don't care. We still have attitude. We survived the stigma of shame from the "Tuckerman Ravine" incident. I mean, it was embarrassing enough to have to be wearing that dorky Trebor uniform in public. What was so horrible about talking to boys? If we hadn't been at camp, maybe we would have been looking really cool at Woodstock....