WELCOME!
Welcome to our new website!
And whether this is your first taste of Alpine or you attended in 1959, welcome to a small slice online of our little corner of God’s kingdom. You can’t replace being somewhere in person. The sights, the sounds, the people. This is especially true of Alpine. But we hope this site will allow you to pull back the proverbial hemlock branches and get a brief glimpse into our world.
If you are an alum now you might be thinking of that unique smell, a mixture of galax, pine, and cool earth, that harkens back to a simpler time in your life. Or the sight of the hydrangaes in full summer bloom gracing the front of the Dining Hall (and looming large as the “demerit bushes” from the Crafts shop)
If you’re a current camper I bet you are searching for a photo of the Gladiator pit for a visual reminder of competing with your friends. Or maybe your mouth is watering looking at the Food section photos of Mrs. Gail’s homemade biscuits (mine is!). I hope you might see a photo of some of your buddies from camp or that counselor that you loved.
Staff, maybe this new site will jog a memory of a great conversation you had with a camper after devotional one night. Or maybe even a life altering talk with the camp minister about calling or marriage that might have changed the trajectory of your life.
And I know many of you are finding us for the first time, perhaps considering a Father son weekend or sending your son to summer camp with us for the first time. A special welcome to each of you! We love welcoming new friends into our community. We believe in family. We are a family run business. We believe families are the most important part of raising a child. And we believe we are called to help families raise their boys, to partner in this most important job that any of us ever have. So welcome to the Alpine family.
Take a look around at the many pages on this site. Enjoy the new photos, videos, and reorganized content. We’ve tried to tell the story of Alpine in a captivating way. It’s a story that is 59 years in the making, with thousands of individual stories that make it up. When you come to Alpine (even if just for a weekend) you enter the Alpine story. And your life story becomes part of Alpine’s story. And we pray that Alpine shapes your life story in a positive way!
Frederick Buechner, mid 20th century author and minister, begins his memoir, A Sacred Journey, with the question of how does anyone tell the story of their life. He says that for a child time is endless. “What child while summer is happening, bothers to think much that summer will end? . . . It is by its content rather than its duration that a child knows time, by its quality rather than its quantity - happy times and sad times . . . Childhood’s time is Adam and Eve’s time before they left the garden for good and from that time on divided everything into before and after.”
It is our sincere hope that Alpine, though imperfect like the rest of the world, might provide a small glimpse into that garden of Adam and Eve. That it might be a respite from the pressures of the world around us. That boys might be able to look back one day and say that time spent at Alpine was a small slice of what we have to look forward to one day in heaven. And that it might give them courage to reclaim portions of the garden in whatever corners of the world they find themselves.
