Sly Park

A sort of rite of passage here in the Sacramento area is for 6th grade classes to go to camp for either a weekend or a week, and often that camp is Sly Park.

The Sly Park center is run by the Sacramento County Office of Education, and is located in the Sierra foothills in Pollock Pines.  The boys stay in one of 4 cabins named after animals, the girls stay in one of 4 cabins named after trees.  There's also a gym, a cafeteria, and a "crafts" building, as well as a building for the on-site staff.  Students participate in many activities, including hikes through the hills.

I was fortunate to go to Sly Park for an entire week in 6th grade, staying in the Porcupine cabin.  We moved in February of 6th grade, and at my new school I got to go to camp for a week in Foresthill!  When I was in 12th grade, some friends from school and I went to Sly Park as counselors for the 6th graders, going with my former elementary school.  Again, I stayed in Porcupine.

The Office of Education also runs "themed" camps over the summer, and after graduating from West Point I applied to be a counselor while on "graduation leave".  I was hired ($50 for the week!) and for the third time spent a week in Porcupine, this time for Space Camp.  There were Civil Air Patrol cadets, JROTC cadets, and others at this camp.  One night some rather large telescopes were brought out and, for the first time in my life, I saw the rings of Saturn.  So cool!

It's been almost 36 years since I've been to Sly Park, but each time I went it was such a valuable experience for me.  It's disappointing, then, that for the foreseeable future, many students will not be able to yell "Pork Power!" in competition:

But just a couple of weeks before the scheduled trip, Sly Park officials called her school, Folsom Educational Academy, to cancel the trip. The Pollock Pines campground was short on staff...

In fact, Sly Park, had canceled trips for 21 schools since November 2022, affecting more than 1,200 students from several districts...

The campground typically serves about 7,500 students a year, according to the Sacramento Office of Education, and is nestled in between tall pine trees and along Jenkinson Lake. For more than 50 years, the staff has been offering educational field trips to Sacramento-area students...

But teacher and staffing shortages across the country and thousands of retirements affected programs like Sly Park, which is already facing competition from nearby campgrounds that can serve school districts in similar week-long trips...

About 40 schools are waitlisted for upcoming weeks at the park. That amounts to about 2,300 students are waiting anxiously to hear if they can visit the park with their classes.

Truly disappointing.