Camp Search Committee, circa 1958, in the San Bernardino Mountains

Howard Bear was a member of the Search Committee. He always remembered his first trip to Lost Valley in the winter of 1958-59. They came in by Jeep over the Old Road – a rough trip at best. “The closer we got to it,” he recalled, “the more my mind was made up. ‘We don’t want this, we don’t want any part of it. You can’t get in here in winter.’ Everybody was very negative.

“The Old Road came in on the west side of camp, and all of a sudden we looked down a thousand feet or so, and there was Lost Valley, a beautiful valley with pine trees and oak trees. That was what sold me on the property, when we came on that brim and looked down. It was exactly what you’d want in a camp.”

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