The camp is co-ed and takes boys and girls aged seven to sixteen. It runs three tracks: Kids Camp for the younger divisions, Teen Camp for the upper school grades, and a Leadership in Training programme for the oldest campers. Each track can be booked for the full season, for the first or second half of the season, or as a two-week option for first-time campers, with the flexibility to extend.
In wooden cabins of sturdy construction, raised on foundations above the ground, weather resistant, with ample screened windows and doors. Every cabin has electricity, sinks, private showers and toilets, pine bunk beds and night lights that stay on through the evening. Cabins are arranged in villages grouping campers of the same gender and roughly the same age. On average a cabin holds ten to twelve campers with three to four staff, and counsellors live in the cabin with the campers they supervise.
Campers build individual schedules from the camp’s daily activity schedule, taking part in both required and elective programmes with their bunk and their division. There are no A, B or C teams and no tryouts: the camp’s stated position is that anyone who wants to try something is encouraged to do so. Campers who want competition can find it through inter-camp tournaments against other camps in Maine and New Hampshire several times a season.
The camp runs a four-day A-B-C-D rotation with six activity periods a day. Campers wake in the morning, raise the flag and go to breakfast as a camp, clean the bunk, then take three activity periods before lunch and two more in the afternoon, separated by a rest hour. The sixth period is the Wekeela hour, an elective in which every programme area offers a choice activity. The day ends with dinner, an evening activity and bunk rituals, with lights out staggered by division.
The ratio is close to two campers to one counsellor. Counsellors are at least first-year college students; junior counsellors are high-school seniors and former campers. Staff come from the United States and from around the world through agencies that run criminal background checks and in-person interviews, and the camp interviews them as well. A two-week training period runs before the campers arrive.
An experienced team of chefs prepares all meals by hand. Meals are family style: each bunk eats together with its counsellors, with table service and a large salad bar at every meal with choices appropriate to the time of day, plus theme meals through the season. The campus is nut-free — no foods with a peanut base are served and snacks or sweets containing nuts are not allowed — and the camp caters for all allergies and offers specialty diet meals for campers and staff with dietary restrictions.
A full-service health centre operates through the season, staffed by nurses, EMTs and student health professionals, with a doctor on call around the clock. The camp is equipped with a defibrillator and has two Maine hospitals nearby.
Most campers fly for the first part of the journey. The camp runs chaperoned chartered coaches from Rye in New York and meets campers arriving at Boston Logan Airport and the Portland Jetport, taking them on to camp by chartered coach, van or camp vehicle. All campers are met by camp staff on arrival, and parents are also welcome to drive their child to camp and see the site. Coach and private transfers are offered as paid options; the camp asks that recommended flights be booked through its own travel agent.
All campers take part in nature excursions such as hiking, canoeing and fishing in Maine, and a trip day falls in each schedule rotation, usually to a festival, an amusement park or another point of interest. Teenagers add longer excursions of three to four days to the Maine coast and Bar Harbor, Boston and the North Shore, the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont and Montreal, with hotel accommodation, as well as white-water rafting on the Kennebec River and the hike up Mount Washington. The oldest campers take a longer volunteering and cultural-immersion trip.
Devices with internet access are not allowed; music players that do not need WiFi are. Parents get one call for every two weeks of their camper’s stay. Daily photographs are posted in a password-protected part of the camp website, and a daily letter service lets parents email their camper and have the camper’s handwritten reply scanned back to them. There is a visitors’ day in the season when parents share a traditional camp day with their child.
Yes — a College Weekend competition in the first half of the season and a Color War in the second, in both of which campers are split into teams for athletic, creative and deliberately silly events. There is also a weekly campfire with camper and staff performances, an optional lakeside candle service and a shuttle to the local church on Sundays.
The camp is not a uniform camp, but it asks that campers buy camp clothing from its store to wear on arrival days and whenever the group leaves the campus. A packing list with specifics is published on the camp website.
