By Garrett Ruhmann, Wood-Mizer
July 31, 2026
Thirty years ago, Sister Krista von Borstel of Saint Mary’s of Oregon took on a new job: Executive Director at the Catholic Youth Organization’s (CYO) Camp Howard.
Today, the camp is thriving. Nestled away in the picturesque Oregon woodlands just south of the Washington border, the area is notable as one of Lewis and Clark’s destinations in their journey through the American West.
A summer camp for children up to eighth grade, Camp Howard has all the fun summer camp staples: paintball, laser tag, giant swings, archery, and more. There’s an outdoor school that teaches about plants, animals, soil, and agriculture. They host weddings, search and rescue training sessions, and basketball camps. To say the camp is lively would be to sell it short.
But when Sister Krista stepped on campus as the new Executive Director, the camp had seen better days. Krista’s sister Karen, who joined the camp’s staff a few years later, puts it nicely: “The camp had been through an extended period of deterred maintenance.”
Sister Krista, determined to make Camp Howard somewhere children wanted to be, rolled up her sleeves and went to work.
She cleaned the dirt from the cabins, had cabin roofing replaced, and gave everything a fresh coat of paint. The work continued for weeks, then months, then years.
Camp Howard began to grow. The buildings that Krista had painstakingly cared for, designed to hold 125 people, were hosting twice that number every week. Without spending the money to bring them up to code, the buildings were unable to be renovated or added on to. So, Sister Krista did what she does best: she attacked the problem head-on.
Krista and Karen, despite the challenges, knew they had something special; something worth fighting for. Krista found donors willing to give enough funds to build a new dining hall, and then a welcome center, and then finally, the St. Michael the Archangel Youth Center, a beautiful multipurpose chapel building.
If it sounds like a lot, well, it is. But the sisters were able to do so much because they put in the work themselves. “When we started building those buildings, they were putting in these beams and posts and beautiful wood. We got to thinking that we could do that”, recalls Karen. “We could make those. We decided to buy a sawmill, and that’s what we did. Then we were able to use our own logs for the youth center.”
The sawmill changed everything. With Karen at the helm, the camp was able to make purlins for the roofing, wooden panels, and storage sheds with their LT40WIDE Hydraulic. They’ve replaced bunk beds and built buildings. “Everything we do now is off the sawmill,” Karen says. “There’s so much we can do here. What a tool to have, to be able to just need something and go cut it.”
The camp teaches the kids how to steward the land. All the dining hall food gets composted, and the children help take the temperature of the compost pile each day. They learn what it takes for the animals and the plants to survive in nature. They grow vegetables in the garden. It’s a way for students to connect with nature in a way they aren’t often able to do in their own homes.
Part of that teaching is how to minimize waste. What does Karen love most about their sawmill? It allows them to be the stewards they want to be. “We use every aspect of the wood,” she says, “compared to when we log, when there’s lots of waste. But when we do our own sawmilling, we cut the tree down and limb it. That either gets chipped or it goes to the burn pile. The top gets cut into firewood and the usable logs we cut into usable lumber. We’ve got goats and chicken sheds where we use sawdust for bedding. That tree really gets utilized with us cutting it ourselves. I’m happy about that.”
So, what does the future hold for Camp Howard? At the age of 70 and with self-described bad knees, Karen encountered some health issues that allowed doubt to creep in. Could she still manage the 250 acres of land the camp covered?
As it turns out, it barely slowed her down. “I wondered if I was going to be able to keep doing it,” she says. “But as soon as things straightened up a little bit, I went down and fired it up and away we went again.”