"It was literally hailing. We were freezing. Everyone wanted to go home."
That's an Evergreen alum, eleven summers in and now on staff, describing her Juniper trip up Mount Washington. Hailing…in the middle of summer. They were near the top of a mountain whose actual official slogan is "Home of the World's Worst Weather."
The wind was ripping, the temperature dropping, "waterproofing" was now optional. Kids were complaining a little (nah, a lot).
Sounds like a kid describing a scarring moment about camp, right?
Nope.
She was answering a question about her favorite camp memory.
Read that again. This was freaking miserable. And when we were talking about the most memorable moments from a decade-plus at camp, this was it. She was smiling the whole time telling the story.
"It wasn't fun in the moment. But it made for a good story, and it was really cool to still do it even in those conditions."
Oh, and nobody went home. They made the summit.
Nobody Asked About The Mountain
Some context. This summer we sat down with a bunch of former campers who are now on staff, and asked about their favorite camp memories.
If predicting the answers ahead of time, you'd probably guess the awesome spectacle-y stuff. Color War breakouts. All-camp events. That kind of thing.
But Mount Washington kept coming up. Over and over.
It’s about two hours from camp, is the tallest mountain in the Northeast, and every year our First Year Seniors hike it. It's not easy. Plenty of people drive to the top instead (you've probably seen the bumper stickers where the car accomplished the task).
In all of their versions of the story, it was never the perfect trip. It wasn’t even really about making it to the top. One group had to stop and turn around partway up. The retellings usually had something a little bit or a lotta bit wrong.
A Kenwood-er told us about his trip at 13. His group wasn't looking forward to it. They were staying on the mountain in lean-tos, and after the first night they marched over to the counselors' lean-tos, stomping and chanting that they did not want to climb more. They were cooked.
The next day severe weather hit the top and the trip got called. They hiked down celebrating, convinced their protest did it.
(For the record, weather calls belong to camp. The kids celebrated anyway.)
Registration, staffing, reports, the awesome new dashboards, all of it.
And Campanion crushes it for pics all summer, which makes it the parents’ favorite part too.
Type Two Fun
We’ve been through this before, but there’s a name for this.
Type two fun.
Kinda not-so-amazing while it's happening, freaking awesome memory once it's over.
For kids, this is what sticks. For adults too. Funny how that works.
Camp websites, ours included, are full of super sunny photos and smiling kids. And most days really do look like that. But the memories that came up unprompted were from the days that didn't go to plan.
Our Camps, Our Fun, Our Memories
None of this is really about Mount Washington. You don't need the tallest mountain. For us, it just happens to be down the road.
This can be when the power goes out in the dining hall, the bus breaks down on the way to the local amusement park, or honestly sometimes its having a bad counselor…
YMCA Camp Seymour sends kids canoeing in the San Juan Islands
Camp Gray has the Cassidy Games
Deer Crossing has the walk back from campfire (with no flashlights!)
******All of these aren’t trying to make kids life hard, it’s hard enough, they are showing kids what’s possible even when it can be hard or maybe just tougher than usual.
Every camp already has chances for this. The conditions of camp are the conditions for this fun. Overnights where it poured. Canoe trips that missed the pickup point. Power outage that turned into the epic campfire.
It's hard to market these because they all sound like the shit hit the fan. But the reality is, this is a camp moat. And we all know it.
I love love love camp for a lot of reasons (obviously). But one of the biggest for all of us is camp is one of the only places left that gets to hand kids type two fun on purpose, with real weather and real plans that fall apart safely.
We are the Type Two Fun people.
Somewhere next summer, a kid is going to have a miserable, freezing afternoon with her best friends.
And when you ask her about her favorite memory, she’ll smile, telling that story for the next decade.
That one's ours.
You Got This
Jack
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