With snow on the ground and frilly hearts filling storefront windows, it might seem a bit early to be thinking about summer vacation, but for many Hudson Valley camp programs, enrollment season is fast approaching. In fact, for Wild Earth, a nature and exploration camp based in New Paltz, it has already begun. “Last year,” says Associate Director Simon Abramson, “we opened enrollment at noon on February 1, and by one o’ clock, we were fully booked.”
According to Abramson, Wild Earth’s camp program is about giving kids and adolescents the chance to “connect in nature”—both with the physical environment and with one another. Campers spend the day exploring natural habitats, learning basic survival skills, playing outdoor games, and getting gleefully dirty, ending with a discussion circle and stories of that day’s adventures. “Our instructors always set out in the morning with a plan,” explains Abramson, “but our best ones will throw it out in order to follow a fox” or indulge campers’ curiosities.
But if analyzing bear scat isn’t your youngster’s idea of a good time, there are dozens (and dozens!) of other options—from swimming, singing, and practicing archery at traditional camps like Green Chimneys (locations in Carmel and Brewster) to writing fiction, exploring 3-D printing, playing jazz, or learning computer coding at Poughkeepsie Day School.
For a blending of the arts and exploration, Manitoga Summer Nature & Design Camp (Garrison) turns the outdoors into a laboratory for design and creativity. Further north, Hawthorne Valley Farm (Ghent) introduces campers to life on an organic farm, where they learn about everything from animal husbandry to field-fresh cooking. Your kiddos could even join Tivoli Sailing Co. (Saugerties) for a week on the Hudson, during which they’d receive nautical instruction from Captain Jerome Hollick, design their own pirate flags, and fight in a staged naval battle.
Helping Kids Find Their Way
There are also programs like the Wayfinder Experience that focus on facilitating social adventures rather than physical ones. Wayfinder is themed around roleplaying, or theatrical gaming, wherein campers practice improvisation, spar with foam weaponry, develop characters for themselves, and act out fictional scenarios.
According to Co-director Corrine McDonald, Wayfinder creates a supportive environment for adolescents to practice navigating social situations: “Awkward, nervous, or shy kids get to find their footing and try on different hats. Here, it isn’t strange for them to be someone else.” The program actively works to help campers strengthen their communication skills and often guides them in discussions about respecting others despite their differences.
For arts enthusiasts, there is always Mill Street Loft’s Dutchess Arts Camp, which has been touted as “the most comprehensive arts experience offered in the Hudson Valley.” With campuses in Poughkeepsie, Beacon, Millbrook, and Red Hook, Dutchess Arts Camp provides professional-level instruction to budding artists of all ages. The program offers classes in a range of visual arts, including paper marbling, silkscreening, thrown pottery, weaving, stained glass, and photography as well as performing arts like African drumming, dance, and circus acts. “No craft kits, no prefab materials, no halfway measures,” Program Director Pat Sexton says, regarding Dutchess Arts Camp’s education standards. “Nothing but the real art process in making and performance.” With this kind of dedication to quality, it is no surprise that Dutchess Arts Camp has found success in building campers’ self-esteem through creativity and artistic expression.
A World Beyond the Classroom
For those interested in a more classic camp experience, the Hudson Valley is home to three thriving YMCA camp programs. Camp Wiltmeet (New Paltz) and Camp Seewackamano (Shokan) together host over 1,000 campers each summer and feature an array of traditional activities: daily swimming, crafts, sports, games, and music, with the addition of fishing, archery, skateboarding, dances, and rope climbing at Seekwackamano’s outdoor campus.
The area’s most recent YMCA program, Camp Starfish (Kingston), is an innovative camp/summer school hybrid designed to prevent summer learning loss. “The program is only in its third year,” says YMCA Child Care Director Lee Anne Albritton, “but has had such success that even kids who don’t need summer school want to join.”
More than 50 percent of Camp Starfish enrollees attend the six-week program on a full scholarship, which has granted dozens of economically disadvantaged youths access to academic instruction, daily swimming lessons, farming classes, cooking classes, community reading circles, and fitness counseling.
Perhaps the greatest testament to Hudson Valley summer camps’ legacy is that campers keep coming back year after year. Kayleigh Buboltz became a YMCA camper at age five and will be back again this summer—this time, as the director of Camp Starfish.
Camp, as a place for social and intellectual expansion, acts as a gateway through which children may begin to take their first tentative steps into a world beyond the classroom. Young people across the Valley have come to think of camp as “a home away from home,” and of their counselors and fellow campers as “a second family.” Sam Nye, age five, said this of his first camp experience, spent at Manitoga: “I want to live here.
This article appears in February 2014.
