The San Jose Mercury news did an article on us back in '02. I think it was the beginning of the end. After that the camp was more crowded and the prices went up. Tom Borup pointed me out the the reporter because, not only had my family been going for 50 years before I came along but, I had gone to camp every year, non stop, since I was 10 months old in 1975. From working there in 1989 to the month before I got married in 1994. I even have a picture of my mom at camp, 7 months pregnant with me. I only missed the years I lived out of state. Then I returned w/ my husband to bring my girls from '00 to '03. My son was born the next year, we call him J.T. and joke that the T stands for Toulumne, where he was concieved. lol

So here is the article if you want to read about my family and our long history with the camp.

Dawn LaPonte Ahlenslager
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CAMPGROUND OF MEMORIES

By Julia Prodis Sulek

Mercury News


GROVELAND - Dawn Ahlenslager, her husband and their two little girls hike along the wooded path from the edge of the Tuolumne River, past the clusters of tent cabins to the meadow, where hamburgers and Twin Pops are being served for lunch.

It's 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday at San Jose Family Camp. And for as long as she can remember -- since she was a toddler, a camp counselor and now a mother -- that means hamburgers and Twin Pops in the meadow.

The camp's menu is such a constant, Ahlenslager says, ``I know I'll never disappoint the kids if I tell them they'll have Popsicles for dessert.''

Little has changed here, in the 34 years the city of San Jose has operated the summer camp eight miles shy of the western gate at Yosemite National Park, or, for that matter, since 1921 when the camp was first opened by the city of Oakland as part of an avant garde movement to expand city recreation facilities.

Ahlenslager should know. Her family has been coming up almost every year since 1925, when her great aunt Tudy and great uncle Frank, on their honeymoon in a Model T Ford, got lost on their way to Yosemite.

As they have for decades, campers still sleep on old metal cots in canvas tents built on platforms, float on inner tubes down the middle fork of the Tuolumne, jump off Chicken Rock next to the waterfall at Rainbow Pool and eat hotcakes after the bell rings for breakfast in the old lodge.

It's the kind of place that looks today like it might have looked on a postcard from the '40s, except instead of Woodies parked in the dirt lots, there are SUVs.

No TVs or cell phones

There are no TVs here. Cell phones don't work. And if you're caught with your elbows on the table in the dining hall, a rousing crowd might single you out, singing you a teasing ditty until your face turns red.

The 40-acre camp with 65 tents is so popular, in fact, that families reserving more than one tent cabin often must sleep overnight in line at the registration office in San Jose's Kelley Park each April. Single tents are easier to get with mail-in registration.

Other cities have similar family camps spread around the Sierra -- Berkeley, San Francisco, Stockton, Oakland, Concord. Most, including San Jose, accept reservations from non-residents for an extra fee. At the San Jose camp, a local family of four will pay about $120 a day, including meals.

Full-fare campers are indistinguishable from lower-income families, who can stay for half-price -- they all wear wrinkled T-shirts, muddy sandals and wet bathing suits all day long.

About 1,200 families spend as long as a week at camp each summer, but only Ahlenslager's extended family -- which numbers between 40 and 60 each year and reserves as many as 20 tents -- is known to camp staff as ``The Family.''

Assigned seating

Three long tables are reserved for ``The Family'' each night in the dining hall, as are tables for other families that ask to be seated together. But for the most part, families are seated randomly with other campers, finding their assigned tables on a posted seating chart. On a recent Wednesday night, after the softball game in the meadow and before the campfire singalong, the Johnsons and Horiguchis sat with the Blacks, and the Roths dined with the Jaramillos.

Marion Durbin, the only child of matriarch Tudy LaPonte Ferreira, said family camp is part of their family lore.

``My mother made me promise we would hold the family together, and this is the way we hold the family together,'' Durbin, 63, of Half Moon Bay, said. ``You have to have a good reason not to come, like, `I'm having a baby tomorrow.' ''

The camp is filled with memories for ``The Family,'' which also includes the Peterses, Davises, LaPontes, Biebers, Shippelhoutes, Halls and Silvas.

After all, this is the place where Norma Peters was crowned Queen Tuolumne as a teenager, where her brother Jim Davis put on a dress and sang ``Tiptoe Through The Tulips'' at the amphitheater on skit night, and where his son, Mike, proposed to the woman who became his wife in the afternoon and was chided for being late for dinner. A rattlesnake slithered into Frank Ferreira's tent one year, and the family had to dig a moat around Grandma Dolly's tent when it was flooded by a rainstorm.

Growing up here

Most of the children in ``The Family'' ate their first ice cream cone here, and nearly everyone has learned to play pinochle under a battery-operated light. The parents look forward to the year their youngest children turn 3 and can spend a few hours a day at a staffed Fort Tuolumne playground and craft center. The kids can't wait to hit age 7, when they are old enough to roll out their sleeping bags in the Sierra Lodge on Fridays for the ``kids overnight.''

Camp is the place for other family rituals too, like screening boyfriends and girlfriends who come along for the week.

``Generally, if they can make it this week, they can make it forever,'' Durbin said.

Although the fundamentals of the camp have remained -- you can count on movie night on Monday, a dance on Tuesday, campfire on Wednesday and skit night on Thursday -- some things have changed.

The tents have been moved back several yards from the banks of the river, the dining hall staff now serves dinner family style on platters, and campers can wear their swimsuits to the table. And, perhaps most shocking, an espresso bar was added at Mirror pool last year. Campers can get a double latte by 7 a.m.

Some regulars complain about the changes, but for most of ``The Family,'' the basics are what counts.

To Durbin, ``It's like you just keep coming home.''


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This is so awesome, Dawn. Thanks for sharing. I have photos of me at camp at around age 7.