The Fort Smith program is an outdoor, travel-camping adventure and leadership development experience for boys age 10– 17 who are actively interested in the outdoors. The trips originate and return from Georgetown, Texas, a suburb just north of Austin, Texas. Our camp is the Western US out-of-doors !

Our trips vary in destination from year to year but each trip contains the same leadership content. The longer the trip, the better we get to know your boy and the more we can emphasize and practice the leadership concepts that we introduce along the way.

The trips are unhurried in order to allow us to take advantage of the particular interests of the group daily. The magic of travel camping allows boys to see life in a different perspective than that of back home…

The program is designed for boys who wish to be active and experience nature in a camping format. We do everything out of doors….cooking, hiking, fishing, leadership discussions, sleeping, storytelling. In order to get the most out of the programs, boys participating need to be physically healthy as certified by a physician’s examination within six months time of the trip departure and interested in being active in the out of doors.

There is nothing we do that is overly strenuous however, we do spend a good amount of time at elevations in excess of 5000 feet and sometimes as high as 12,000 feet. We do lots of walking, hiking and exploring along the way so being fit is important in order to enjoy the activities.

The Fort Smith Mountain Men program and leadership team is committed to camper well-being. We prepare hearty, hot and nutritious meals for your boy every day. We drink lots of water each day to keep us well hydrated in the mountains.

We operate our trips with a low one-to-five staff-to-camper ratio in order to assure individual attention and safety at all times. Ron Smith, who attends every trip, is certified in First Aid, CPR and is Wilderness First Responder (WFR) trained, the industry standard of excellence for outdoor adventure guides.

Speaking of our staff, we hand select our counselor staff on the basis of maturity, sense of humor, outdoor camping experience, interest in leadership training and prior work with children. Our staff generally come from universities in the Central Texas area but we have interest from all over the US and abroad. All the counselor staff is college age or older and all are required and willing to submit to background investigations and to produce character references which are verified.

Our goal is to assemble a top-notch team for helping deliver the outdoor leadership camping experience to your boy and for providing close supervision and safety for everyone on the trips. Each member selected for the staff attends a staff training session prior to participating in each camp. This training helps prepare and hone the staff’s skills in group leadership and teambuilding, ensures that all travel itinerary information, leadership-development content, methodology and delivery materials, safety measures and jokes are in order prior to departure.

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