Camporee volunteers deal with shortage of housing options

GILLETTE (WNE) — Volunteers for the International Pathfinder Camporee have had to do some creative thinking to work around high hotel prices.

The Camporee will be in Gillette from Aug. 5-11. While all of the Pathfinders, most of them between 10 and 15 years old, will be camping out at Cam-plex, there are hundreds of volunteers coming along, and most of them won’t be staying on-site.

Jessica Seders, executive director of the Campbell County Convention and Visitors Bureau, said that many hotels wouldn’t take reservations more than a year out from the event. So when August came, the reservations started rolling in.

Seders said that in August 2023, the average rate for a room was $103 a night, and as time went on, those room rates began going up. The highest she saw was $750 a night, and it wasn’t uncommon to see a motel room go for a few hundred dollars a night or more.

Pastor Ron Whitehead, the director of the International Pathfinder Camporee, said the thought was that Gillette would have enough hotel rooms to accommodate everyone, but “we didn’t expect this many older people to come to Camporee.”

Many volunteers had planned on stepping away after the last Camporee in 2019, but when they heard it was going to Wyoming in 2024, they changed their minds.

Seders said the visitors center and elected officials have been thinking outside the box to figure out ways to help the Camporee volunteers. She encouraged residents to put their homes on AirBNB and VRBO. They can rent out single rooms, floors or entire houses, and even tents can be rented out.

And the city of Gillette passed a resolution suspending the rules regarding occupancy in campers and RVs within city limits from July 31 to Aug. 13.

This story was published on March 16, 2024.