By Tom Grace
Cooperstown News Bureau
CHERRY VALLEY — On 200 acres in Cherry Valley and Roseboom,
Ricardo Sierra is living his dream.
As a boy growing up in the Hudson River valley, Sierra, 42, loved
the wilderness.
"I read wilderness stories and I liked nothing better than to be
out in the woods," he said Thursday morning, sitting at a desk
inside the lodge at Hawk Circle, his wilderness camp.
"When I was growing up, we didn’t have iPods and instant
messaging, and I was always drawn to the outdoors. I liked hiking
and fishing."
As Sierra grew up, his love for nature didn’t diminish. As a
young man, he studied with trackers and teachers of traditional
skills, including Tom Brown Jr. and Jake Swamp.
In the mid-1980s, he was a nature counselor at a summer camp, and
by the end of the decade, he launched his own camp, Hawk Circle, on
a farm in the town of Chatham.
"When I was counselor, I found that the kids really responded to
the program, and that I liked teaching them," he said. "After a
while, I had a little reputation, and I thought I’d try my own
camp."
Sierra started with just 11 campers for one week in 1989. But by
1994, Hawk Circle had expanded to a full summer with programs with
young children, teenagers and adults.
Three years later, Sierra and his wife, Trista, who is from the
Cooperstown area, purchased a 200-acre hillside that straddles
Roseboom and Cherry Valley, and the camp moved to Otsego County.
"This is such a beautiful area without any major commercial
development, and it seemed just right for what we had in mind," he
said.
Hawk Circle now draws campers from Pennsylvania and New Jersey as
well as from the area.
"We have about 60 to 70 campers a summer, and we offer other
programs, too," he said.
The staff of Hawk Circle works in local schools, teaching about
nature, about surviving in the wilderness and subtly imparting a
sense of self-esteem, he said.
"We’ve found that when you’re talking about survival, that really
gets the kids’ attention. They may not care about the Pythagorean
theorem, but they want to know how to survive when it’s 28 degrees
out and they don’t have shelter, or how to start a fire without
matches," he said.
Youths who master survival skills gain confidence in themselves
and find that some of their worries are not so important, he said.
Hawk Circle also
has programs for adults, including one that Leadership Otsego, a
group based at the State University College at Oneonta, will soon
take advantage of, he said.
Sierra said the fee for attending Hawk Circle is $650 a week.
"That puts the experience beyond the means of many people, and
we’re trying to do something about that," he said.
Organizations that help defray the cost of other activities for
youths may help send kids to wilderness camp, he said.
