What is the Malibu Club?

You used to live where?

This is not the official Young Life's Malibu Club page by any means. Please check out their official page The Malibu Club for anything "official".

The Malibu Club was originally built in the 1940's by a business man, Tom Hamilton, of HamiltonBeech appliances and the Hamilton Standard Propeller fame. He built it as a resort for the Hollywood rich and famous. Things went relatively smoothly for him. And then things didn't. He had some difficulties with the IRS, the resort was not booking up with guests the way he had hoped, and then there was a polio quarantine put on the property for 2 weeks. When the quarantine was lifted, Mr. Hamilton told everyone to pack up and leave. And so they did. Pots were left on the stove, tables were still set, beds were still made from that morning...and then it sat, vacant, for two years.

New paragraph! During this time Young Life was being established in America. Young Life is a Christian organization where volunteer and staff leaders are involved in the daily lives of local High School and Junior High students. The point is to build positive mentoring relationships and to share with the kids the good news that they are in fact valued by the God of this universe and that He wants to put things right again between man and God through the sacrifice of His Son, Jesus.

Young Life also has "camping" properties around the world, most of which are in North America, where the kids spend a week having the best time of their young lives and we get to share that God does indeed value them. I hesitate to call them "camps", as it is so much more than that. It's not your usual tents, sleeping bags and leech infested bogs that your camp counsellor tries to tell you is a lake that so many of us remember as kids. It's more like a resort for High School students. The facilities are great, there's MOST EXCELLENT food, and lots of fun stuff to do (no cheesy craft time with paste and feathers).

So back to the story. The founder of Young Life, Jim Rayburn, had some ranches out in Colorado to take kids to for camp, but he was looking for more. He was at a gathering (dare I say a party!) of many Young Life supporters in Seattle Washington. Jim R starting talking to this man, Jim Campbell and mentioned that he was looking for another property. Something out of this world. Well, Jim C used to fly guests up to this place in Canada called the Malibu Club and it was vacant, the owner was looking for a buyer and they should all go up and take a look at it. To keep this long story from getting any longer...Young Life purchased the Malibu Club in 1953, camps started the next summer in 1954 and we've been going strong ever since.

That's the Malibu Club's story.

Now about the camp today...this is some of the fun stuff there.

The pool was originally sand blasted out of the rock. Over the years it's been re-done a couple of times. The last time, my brother was there helping. They increased the size, increased the area of the shallow end so more kids could be in the pool safely, increased the deck area around it and put a very pretty new wide railing around it.

The kids ski and wakeboard the inlet behind brand new Malibu ski boats. There's a giant thing called the Blob that you jump onto from a big tower. It's an exercise in physics (go weight displacement!) as the person jumps on, the person sitting on the other end gets tossed off and lands in the water.

There's also kayaking and canoeing, sailing, zip line and a crazy thing we call the caribe that dumps kids into the ocean at high velocity. We like dumping kids into the ocean at high velocity. It's a good time. There's all sorts of fabulousness like sand volleyball, a coffee shop, an ice cream parlour, great shopping for cool threads.

We do cool stuff all week that keeps all the little kiddies, well okay, not so little, usually much taller than me, kiddies, all happy. I would tell you more, but most of what we do through out the week is top secret so if I were to tell you then you would feel really bad when something bad happened to me mysteriously in the dead of night.

This is pretty much the view from the female guests' deck. The little island is Forbidden Island. Can you go there? No, it is forbidden.

Presently, Malibu is getting a serious facelift that is well over do. There's a new hydro electric plant, a new ice cream parlour/snack bar, a new gym complex complete with an indoor climbing wall. It's constant construction during the off-season so that this beautiful piece of heaven on earth will be there for a long time to come. Currently, the Dining Room and Kitchen facilities are being completely re-done. I can't wait for the grand unveiling in June. Not that we can keep it under a veil, it's a really big building, that would be a really big veil. Want to see pictures? Check out this site with a webcam at Sitka 2.

This is just a quick snapshot of the property. There is so much more to it and so many stories I could fill a book. Maybe someday I will!

Now for my story.

So what was I doing there you ask?
Well, after graduating University and going through some other personal trials, I decided to give a summer of my time to serve up at the place that had meant so much to me as a High School student. Little did I know that it would keep me there until September of 2003. I just kind of stayed. I was in charge of the Camp Office. They were long days, but I wouldn't have changed it for anything in the world. The office is the hubbub of all goings-on.

If something was going wrong, we knew about it
If a kid was bored, we got to chat with them
If there was a bear in camp, we were the ones who holed up in the back with our radios making sure that everyone else knew about it.
I helped with running the office which includes transportation scheduling, the first step of book keeping, communication between offices and between departments in camp. I also helped with retail stuff, mostly the money side of things. I like simple accounting.

This is Haida on the left and Tilikum / Tyvek on the right....hiding in the trees. They are staff housing buildings. I lived in Tilikum, which is the top of the building on the right, for usually about 5 months of the year. The Interns are there in the back two room for 4-5 months and the Summer Staff girls are there for about a month and then they switch. The rest of the time I was moved around to different buildings, sometimes Tyvek, sometimes Treehouse (yes that's the name of the house).

I lived there pretty much from March till the beginning of October every year and then I would move somewhere else. It was different every year, Europe, the States, Victoria, Egmont. It was good. I made amazing friends and I worked hard and I loved my God through doing what I think he wanted me to do.

So that's what I was doing there.

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