Camp Sloane YMCA Overnight Camp

Overnight camp runs as four two-week sessions and one one-week session for rising 4th to 10th graders, with a two-week Riding Camp as a specialty experience and the LEAD programme for rising 11th graders. Campers choose their activity preferences before arrival: three elective periods each morning and one each afternoon, each elective running five days, four electives across a two-week session. LEAD campers take two electives in the first week of their programme.

The camp fee covers a bed in a platform tent, three meals a day and the general activity programme. Waterskiing and horseback riding sit outside it and are paid for separately; the school does not publish their price.

Campers sleep in platform tents. Each tent holds five to seven tent-mates with one or two counsellors, and tents stand in villages of four to seven. The site has two sides: Hill Camp, where female-identifying and non-binary campers and staff live, and Valley Camp, for male-identifying and non-binary campers and staff. Each side has four villages — Pioneers, Juniors, Seniors and Students — grouped by school year, with Pioneers and Juniors for rising 4th to 7th graders and Seniors and Students for rising 8th to 10th graders.

Campers eat three meals a day, mostly family-style with their tent-mates in the dining hall, with cookouts outdoors for the whole camp. Food is all-you-can-eat and the kitchen always offers a second or third option alongside the main meal, such as pasta, a salad bar, make-your-own wraps and soup. The site is nut-free, and dairy-free, gluten-free, vegetarian and vegan diets are catered for.

More than twenty activities run each week, on the lake and in the pool, on the athletics fields and in the arts huts. Afternoons bring either Odyssey — an hour of free choice between the pool, the Oval, the Slip 'n' Slide and the upper athletics field for soccer, frisbee, basketball and tennis — or a scheduled activity: village beach parties at the swim beach, high ropes and the zip line for older campers, birdhouse and treasure-box building for the juniors, BB rifles for the pioneers. Mountain biking is open from 6th grade. Every camper takes a Swim Quest at the start of the session that sets where in the pool and the lake they may swim; campers at the first two swim levels take swim lessons as a morning elective.

The camp owns its site: a lake with a swim beach and a dock, a swimming pool, a fifty-foot climbing tower, a high ropes course with a zip line, a vertical playpen and a giant swing, riding stables and paddocks, athletics fields, arts and crafts huts, a dining hall and a health lodge staffed by medical professionals.

Camp Sloane YMCA has been running since 1928. It is licensed by the State of Connecticut and accredited by the American Camp Association, which reviews more than three hundred standards from staff qualifications to emergency management. Counsellors live in the tents with their campers, and the staff team is drawn from around the world.