ERBC Through the Decades: the 2010s
As our recounting of Echo Ranch history draws closer and closer to the present, we find ourselves with more and more sources that we could draw on to retell events, and more and more events and innovations seem to rise to the surface by virtue of being fresher in everyone’s memories – similar to how the information in history textbooks gets thicker and richer with detail as the chapters progress toward modern history. As we turn now to the 2010s, no doubt many of you reading this were at Echo Ranch at some point during this decade!
The 2010s started out with another change in leadership for ERBC. Randy and Allyson Alderfer grew up in Mt. Pleasant Mills, Pennsylvania, and for Randy, Echo Ranch was a household name, as former camp director Don Callison regularly visited his church to share about ERBC. Randy’s older brother Ken even went to Echo Ranch as a counselor one summer. But Randy had no intentions of following in his brother’s footsteps, either as a child or after marrying Allyson and starting a logging business. Randy decided early in his career to start logging with draft horses, a practice unheard of in his area at the time (not so today, however). He found success with it, and found a way to fill in the gaps of time in which he couldn’t work his horses by putting in a sawmill – which eventually proved to be enough work itself that Randy’s brother ended up coming into the business to oversee the sawmill.
All this was a decade before Randy and Allyson ever thought of visiting Alaska, but it was an important precursor. In 2007, one of Randy’s former customers in Pennsylvania was now on staff at ERBC in the facilities department, and called on Randy to come help get a recently acquired sawmill running and teach the staff how to use it. So Randy and Allyson flew to Juneau that spring for eight days – a very wet eight days. They will attest to this day that when they left Alaska after that trip, they were pretty sure they would never return.
But the next fall, the Alderfers participated in the very same Bible study curriculum that Rick and Pat Shaner had gone through prior to their decision to come work at Echo Ranch. Randy and Allyson were impacted by the study as well, prompted to be open to saying yes to whatever God had for them. And so when Randy was asked about helping fill a staff vacancy at ERBC for the summer of 2009, they took the plunge and said yes. Randy jokes, “We only had a mortgage, a business, a family, and no money, but other than that we were free to go!” But they saw God provide for them in unexpected and arguably miraculous ways, and so one summer at camp turned into two, and it wasn’t long before they were following the same path of many past staff at Echo Ranch, finding themselves committing to full-time ministry in Alaska practically to their own surprise. After joining Avant Ministries in early 2011, they raised their needed financial support in just a few months, enabling them to move up to Juneau that spring.
Randy leading a group of kayakers as part of wilderness camp in 2011.
While Allyson managed the camp kitchen and finances, Randy served as the wilderness camp program for a year before being asked to take on the role of camp director in 2012. One of his priorities was having the staff collectively draft a mission statement for Echo Ranch, and the statement they created is still our guiding philosophy today: Echo Ranch Bible Camp exists to echo God’s glory by building the body of Christ through Christian camping and in partnership with the church. They also identified our four core values: God Matters, People Matter, Team Matters, and Ministry Matters. To this day, these principles shape countless big and small decisions that are made by our staff as we do ministry day after day, year after year.
If you’re good at math, you may have already noted that 2014 marked the 50th anniversary of ERBC, and the camp staff planned a celebration to mark God’s faithfulness over half a century. Alumni from throughout camp history traveled to Juneau to take part in the commemoration and share stories of the ways that God used their work to help share the ministry of Echo Ranch.
Some snapshots from the 50th anniversary celebration. Second photo: Randy Beaverson speaking in the Chapel Barn. Third photo: Then-president of Avant Ministries Scott Holbrook presenting Randy Alderfer with a commemorative engraved canoe paddle. Fourth photo: Dellene Love sharing a story from Echo Ranch history.
Camps and retreats marched on year after year into the second half of Echo Ranch’s first century. In 2016, Randy received a phone call that ended up expanding the ministry of ERBC beyond the shores of Berners Bay. The long story short is that a former summer camp about 35 miles north of Berners Bay was given to ERBC and became Echo Ranch Haines, and tireless work to refurbish it ensued throughout the subsequent years – a story that really deserves its own full article, as its whole history can’t be captured in a paragraph!
But one of the biggest milestones of the decade was the realization of a vision from many decades prior: the construction of a new Chapel. The Hoffman Chapel, a.k.a. the Chapel Barn, was in its fifth decade of service as the twice-daily meeting place for camp services. Its old wooden frame was saturated with a lot of memories and stories of God’s power, but it had its share of problems: the stuffiness, the lack of insulation, and most importantly, as Echo Ranch grew, the increasing difficulty of fitting everyone inside. Back in the 1960s, the founders of ERBC had shared a dream of building a new chapel building overlooking the bay toward Lionshead, but for decades, that vision was put on the back burner as more pressing construction needs were addressed.
Finally, in the mid-2010s, the time was right to start working to make that nearly-fifty-year-old dream a reality. A site near the Dining Hall was cleared and the foundation was begun in fall of 2016, and ERBC’s sawmill operators got to work milling lumber for the “New Chapel.” Over the following two years, work teams and volunteers from across the country came to pitch in on camp’s biggest construction project in years. The New Chapel (as it was known for a handful of years while everyone got used to the transition) was completed and dedicated in 2018, and 2019 was the first year that it was used for all chapel services. While the Chapel Barn will always be nostalgic and remembered as a place of God’s faithfulness for decades, the new Chapel’s bigger space and modern equipment have had an incredible impact in increasing Echo Ranch’s capabilities to host more campers and retreaters, to utilize musically talented staff’s gifts in worship, and to create a space for people to hear about the Gospel and commune with the Lord.
Stages of construction on the New Chapel, from foundational work to putting on the finishing exterior touches in summer of 2018.
Worship in the present-day Chapel.
This new space for daily chapels and weekly church services was a needed next step for Echo Ranch to facilitate further growth. As the 2010s progressed, summer camps were increasingly growing, with registrations rising to the point of regularly having full camps. Senior High camp, which for a number of years had the lowest registration numbers, experienced a resurgence, with camps regularly being “maxed out” as teenagers persuaded more and more friends to join them at camp. Among other age groups, too, it became not uncommon to fill up every single bed in every cabin, as the stories of awesome weeks of camp spread throughout the communities of southeast Alaska. By the end of the 2010s, over 800 campers on average attended summer camps in Juneau, with dozens more attending summer day camps at Echo Ranch Haines, pushing total registrations close to 1,000 each year! It was the start of a new chapter of growth for ERBC, one that would continue into the next decade… after a little, um, obstacle that popped up in March of 2020. But that’s a story for next time.