Summer Explosives Camp

Man, I’d love to go to this camp now, let alone as a child.

Camp Winnigootchee was never like this.

A group of high school students stood at the edge of a limestone quarry last month as three air horn blasts warned that something big was about to go boom. Across the quarry, with a roar and a cloud of dust and smoke, a 50-foot-high wall of rock sloughed away with a shudder and a long crashing fall, and 20,000 tons of rock was suddenly on the ground.

The campers laughed.

“That’s cool!” said Ian Dalton, a student from Camdenton, Mo.

Austin Shoemaker, a student from Macon, Mo., concurred. “It was baad!” he said. “Do it again!”