Gould Lake 50th Anniversary

Jemma Dooreleyers | Sep 04, 2024

Gould Lake Conservation Area is famous for its extensive forest trails, soil teeming with Micah deposits and a breathtaking view of Gould Lake from a small sandy beach. On a sunny afternoon in mid-August, there is no shortage of glimmering water, swaying grasses and flitting butterflies to rest your eyes upon, and yet, while Maria and Robert McDougall were reminiscing about their time as Gould Lake Outreach camp counselors, they had eyes only for each other.

Maria McDougall, now an elementary school teacher with Limestone District School Board, started at Gould Lake, begrudgingly, as a camper when she was 13. As a self-professed girly-girl, Maria didn’t leave her house without her curling iron and “didn’t really like being dirty.”

“My family is first-generation Greek immigrants so outback camping was a really foreign thing. It’s such an amazing experience that while it’s happening, you’re saying, why am I doing this, I’ll never do this again and then you get home and all you remember is that amazing growth that you didn’t even know was happening at the time,” she said when asked if Gould Lake changed her life and how she thought it would unfold.

“And also, I probably would not have met Rob”

She did three years of the camp and in her junior year of high school, she started her first year on staff as a junior counselor.

That was Rob McDougall’s first year at camp. She has one memory of him sitting in the middle, three to a seat on a school bus. Rob, who stands over 6 feet tall, was apparently “really little” back then.

“For myself, when I first started here, I was super super shy and I laughed more than I spoke which was probably from nervousness but this place became a safe place,” Rob said. “The first year was super hard, I cried a couple of times from being away from home but then all of those relationships you make, you want to come back and you want to be there.”

Maria didn’t think about him again until a couple of summers later when she was called in as emergency staff the day before the first day of camp.

Bright and early the next morning, bleary-eyed Maria spotted someone greeting campers and asked the person next to her “who is that man?”

That man was none other than little Rob McDougall.

As luck would have it, they were assigned as trip leaders together.

“Well he was gorgeous and funny and I could see he was amazing with the kids.’

“Maria is youthful, energetic, obviously beautiful and when you’re on trips together, it’s such an intense environment where you have to rely on each other and get to know each other really well so we decided we made a pretty good team.”

This year they are celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary.

Rob became the director of the camp programming for Gould Lake between the years 2010 and 2017. Currently, Rob and Maria are both teachers with LDSB.

The McDougalls’ story was not the only love story floating around at the 50th Anniversary Reunion Fundraiser at Gould Lake Conservation area on August 24, 2024. Among the 150 attendees, there were countless stories of alumni not only falling in love with each other but falling in love with the wilderness, adventure and in many cases, outdoor education, which is exactly what Dennis Reed, the “mastermind” behind the Gould Lake outdoor education programs was after when he designed the program almost 60 years ago.

In 1967, the school board took Dennis Reed aside and said “we need you to go to Gould Lake and start an outdoor conservation and education program.”

Reed, who grew up in the “North of Northern Ontario”, hunting, fishing and canoeing has always had an interest in the great outdoors and experiencing the wilderness. So when the school board proposed this project, he hit the ground running.

The school program quickly evolved into year-round programming and in 1972, Reed convinced the school board to give him another grant for some staff and some canoes.

“It only began as a 3-4 week program but then they quickly decided it was such a fantastic spot with such a fantastic lake and we need some canoes and with a lot of hard luck and selling, we started our little canoeing program and it just evolved better,” he said as he looked out over the field of alumni of the program he created.

“We started going further and taking off on longer canoe trips and it has taken off to be something really big.”

So, for 50 years, Gould Lake, in partnership with LDSB has been offering some sort of canoe and wilderness skills programming every summer (except for the COVID summers). Currently, the camp offers 8 different programs serving more than 400 students per summer. The wilderness trips range from 5 days to 30 days and takes students around Frontenac Park, Algonquin Park and other locations.

While Reed sometimes wonders if bigger is better for the program, he reminds himself that as long as kids are learning about environmental impacts and finding an appreciation for wilderness, then he is “happy as heck”

“I think in the world right now it’s more important to have people become more involved with the environment”, he said. “The fact that climate change is here, if we can implement some real values into some of the youth right now and it spins off to their children,all the better. I’m just happy that this is happening not just on a small scale but on a large scale in the grand scheme of things.”

Jeff Sanderson, one of the organizers of the event, started as a trip leader for Gould Lake in 1987, became a director for the camp from 2000-2005 and has been a teacher for LDSB ever since. He reflects on the impact of the camp.

“You gotta take a step back and just imagine how many people have been influenced, you have 50 years directly of students coming here, tens of thousands, but then all of those people went off and did other things and introduced other people to it.”

“The ripple effect of what Dennis created is just amazing. It’s like throwing a rock into Gould Lake and watching that ripple go coast to coast, shore to shore.”

When he drives down the road to the barn, he feels a sense of homecoming.

“It feels like home, you just do so much growing up and understanding who you are out here,” he said. “ It boosts self-confidence and it develops your leadership style. You do so much growing in a place like this that it just feels like you’re coming home. “

He hopes that the 50th anniversary reunion will remind alumni of that feeling as well.

“I want this event, in my mind, to bring back all of those memories and get people thinking about their roots and rekindles a desire to keep programs like this running and do what we can to keep influencing students of the future for the next 50 years.”

As for the future of the program, Nate Zahn, the current director of the program wants to continue fostering confidence, resilience, an appreciation for the environment and ultimately, a break from screens and social media for students.

“Our program offers the life-changing switch where they realize that they are resilient and strong and that with teamwork and perseverance, they can overcome so many challenges,” he said. “I think that it is a really important thing to foster especially right now with the epidemic of technology addiction and social media, I think these lessons and skills are more important than ever.”

The event was held at Gould Lake Conservation area where there was merch for sale, a silent auction and a BBQ dinner, along with catching up and swimming in the lake.