The camp describes itself as a partnership between the Oregon-Idaho Conference of The United Methodist Church and the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon, set on more than sixty acres at the base of the Eagle Cap Mountains. Its own pages welcome adults, families, youth and children, and say it serves individuals and families as well as many nonprofit groups, with lodging in cabins and rustic rooms, meals in the lodge, and a season that runs May through September.
The camp is directed by Peggy and David Lovegren. It is listed here from the camp’s published description, which gives an approximate beginning rather than a founding year.
The camp’s own short history says that “in the early 1920’s, a group of Methodist ministers leased the land in the area of the current camp in order to hold the first Wallowa Lake Epworth League Institute,” and that within two years the organizers raised $1,800 and bought 110 acres for a permanent camp. Ten acres east of the river were later sold, lots west of the river were leased to individuals and churches to pay for a water system and a bridge, and a circus tent served as program space. In 1928 the holdings passed to the Western District and the camp “officially became the Methodist Camp Association”; by 1932 a first assembly hall stood and churches in western Idaho and eastern Oregon had built cabins. The camp was transferred to the Idaho Conference in 1952, and timber sold from the property funded the Lesley Bailey Lodge, dedicated in 1959. In the early 1990s, with facilities aging and income lagging, a master plan and a major fundraising drive began what the camp calls a transformation over the following twenty-plus years. The same page acknowledges the Wallowa Valley as “the ancestral home of Chief Joseph and the Wallowa band of Nimiipoo (Nez Perce) people,” in the camp’s spelling. No state registration for the camp appears in the atlas’s snapshot.
Through time
Methodist ministers leased land for the first Wallowa Lake Epworth League Institute; 110 acres were bought within two years, according to the camp.
The camp became the Methodist Camp Association under the Western District, by its own account.
