50 Stories for 50 Years: Cindi Myers

My connection with NatureBridge goes back decades. In late October 1973, as a senior in high school, I joined 27 of my classmates for a week at Yosemite Institute. It wasn’t my first time exploring the great outdoors, or Yosemite for that matter, but it was magical. I loved it so much that when the opportunity arose to return for another week the following May, I jumped at it.

What made Yosemite Institute so special? Lots of things — learning lessons that wouldn’t have made any sense if we hadn’t actually experienced them, forming bonds with classmates (and teachers!) that never would have happened at school, the unique environment of the Crane Flat campus and the educators, those wonderful people who taught us so much while we just thought we were having fun. And oh my gosh, we had so much fun!

The only pictures I have from Yosemite Institute are a couple of blurry old black and white photos in my high school yearbook, but the snapshots in my head are better than any photograph: 

• Spending the night at a nearby fire lookout. November, and it was cold. Fog rolled in, and we woke up to find our sleeping bags coated in ice crystals (which I now know as ‘pogonip.’ That’s what we call freezing fog in northern Nevada.) Then we danced silly folk dances to keep warm until the sun came up.
• Sitting around the campfire as one of our educators recited from memory The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service. I appropriated his idea when I went to work at a wilderness camp the following year, reading (not reciting!) that fun poem to our campers.
• Hiking the Mist Trail in May. I had hiked this trail with friends a few years previously, and we had actually swum in a pool near the top of one of the falls. Not this time! The river was raging, the falls were gushing and yes, the trail was very misty.
• Craft time where we dyed wool with natural dyes — acorns, lichen, mistletoe. Then we spun the wool roving into yarn. I still have that lumpy (but still colorful!) old yarn, waiting for the day I decide to use it in a piece of fiber art.
• And then there’s the memory I’m sure some would rather forget: the five-holer. This was the “girls restroom.” Four walls, a roof, and a wooden plank with five holes. No stalls, no partitions. We got comfortable with our fellow campers really fast! What a relief, when I returned in May, to find they’d installed privacy screens.