Camp Casey but for High School Students! For grades 9-12th even teachers are able to come and join in on the fun as well, The Tahoma High School Bear Den Retreat is a longstanding, 30+ year tradition and life-changing weekend experience held at Maple Valley Church, hosted and led by the Leadership classes and the Leadership Teachers, Ryan Simpson, Amy O’Leary, also including volunteer helper around Tahoma High School, Steve Bodwell. For any student, Each year the theme focuses on personal growth:
- 2024-2025: “Breaking Bear-iers”
- 2025-2026: “Stumbling blocks to stepping stones”
- 2026-2027: “Be the roots so the tree can grow”
WEEKEND OVER VIEW
Friday: After dinner, a speaker came to us named Barry to share his story of overcoming a wheelchair-bound injury to hike, bungee‑jump, and pursue his passions. Saturday: Ryan Simpson steps in after a scheduled guest cancels, recounting a student who reported a gun, preventing a tragedy—a moment that still inspires him. Both days include council rotations, icebreakers, a scavenger hunt, skit planning, and a “Gold Starring” activity where council members write supportive notes for each other. Each participant receives a lanyard‑attached notebook and a pom‑pom of yarn to tie onto others’ lanyards when meeting new people, that you go around and tie onto other people’s lanyards as you meet new people. On the lanyard the notebook includes a schedule for both days, a saturday council rotations, skit rules, a scavenger hunt list to complete on the first day, Friday reflection for the speaker, four pages to write on for notes, and even a reflection about what you learned and how you will bring all this back to school.
WHY DOES THIS MATTER?
On friday i interviewed simpson about why bear den is important to him and why he likes it so much. “Bear Den is for students to make new friends and I love seeing how they change and how they come back from this weekend. To see them with new friends and experiences that brings them closer to their pers makes me so happy.” He replied as he was tying a fuzzy string onto my lanyard.
After meeting with your council group for the weekend, you have around an around 2hrs to spend time with your council in the designated area, playing games, icebreakers to get to know each other better, getting and designing white shirts that can have anything on them, and you even get to plan and practice the skit that each group has to present on the center stage on Saturday.
FRIDAY SPEAKER: BARRY
This year we had a speaker whose name is Barry, he spoke to us about how life is too short and to go out and do things that you’ve always wanted to do for around an hour or so. “Life threw a curve at me a few years ago, i got into a bike accident and i thought that i would be stuck to my wheel chair for the rest of my life, but did i let that stop me? No! I continued to go hiking with my friend even though I was in a wheelchair. He was even the one that convinced me to be the first person to go bungee jumping in a wheelchair.” he stated as he rolled around on his chair on the stage showing us things he could do on his chair as well as some photos and a slide deck of the before and after when he did these amazing things. But the main thing to take away from his speech was the fact that even though he was strapped to a wheelchair he didn’t let that stop him from getting out there and doing those things that he wanted to do.
SATURDAY SPEAKER: MR.SIMPSON
During Saturday morning after breakfast and the morning meeting, we had gotten informed that the original speaker that was going to be flying in for the weekend from Florida would not be able to fly in so Ryan Simpson got on stage and did a speech that he has only given to a few of his classes every few years, I was not able to catch a quote from this speech due to the fact that the topic hit a little to close to home for comfort but i got the gist of what he talked about in his speech. “During my first year of teaching there was an incident at the school i was teaching in, at the time i was a English, Science and History teacher, during one of my lessons of the law of motion one of my students came up to me and asked if he could go to the office, at first i said no and then when he explained why i immediately let him go, soon after around an hour later the principal comes up to me and explains that a kid was carrying around a gun and all thanks to that one kid they would not have known. Even today I think about how this one 13 year old decided out of about 500 people who knew the kid was carrying a gun, this one boy was the only one who said anything about it. And even though that young man is no longer with us, he is still my hero to this day.” This was one of the only quotes that I was able to put into this article due to the fact that I was not in the room for most of it but this was the part that stood out to me the most. How a teacher even 13 years later still looks up to a kid that could have stayed silent but didn’t and stood up for his school’s safety when no one else would.
After all the rotations and things that Simpson had shared with us we had another council break that was around 2 hrs long, and that consisted of something called Gold Starring where you sit in a circle with everyone from your council and go around and write something meaningful or something that you really liked about someone over the course of the two days in a little book that is handed around, one for each person. This is probably my favorite part of the weekend, just writing things down into the book for each person and then seeing their face light up when they read what was written on each page. It brings joy to myself and hopefully others.
Sometimes while I do wish that Bear Den was longer it’s important to recognize all the hard work that others put into us having a wonderful weekend and making new memories that will last a lifetime. I like that this year the topic of “Be the roots so the tree can grow” was a lot more vague then how the others were in the previous years but each one has its own meaning as to why it was chosen to be the topic of that year’s Bear Den.
