Director Jud's Blog

Topics: Mountain Biking, mountain biking summer camp, camp fair, PA Camp Fair, Campsource Fair

SMA Teen Community Service Summer Camp to attend the Tysons Corner Summer Camp & Activity FAIR on Saturday 2/8/2014!

Topics: Tyson's Corner Camp Fair, Service Projects, Teen Community Service Summer Camp, Community Service

Topics: Summer camp, Teen summer camp, music jam, Rock Band Teen Summer Camp

Topics: Summer camp, Teen summer camp, Pete Seeger

Topics: Wakeboarding, Teen Wakeboarding Summer Camp, Wakeboarding Summer Camp, Greenwich High School Camp Fair

Topics: Teen Horseback Riding Summer Camp, riding summer camp, Teen summer camp, Riding Camp, camp fair, Chester County, PA Camp Fair

 

Topics: Rock Climbing Summer Camp, Teen Rock Climbing Camp, camp fair, Montgomery County Camp Fair

Stone Mountain Adventures, a 2 Week Teen Summer Camp located in central PA will be attending a camp fair in the Philadelphia area on Saturday, 1/18 from Noon to 3pm.  Here are the details:

 

Topics: Teen summer camp, 2 Week Summer Camp, camp fair, ACA Bucks County Camp Fair

Winter is upon us and as the northeast is blanketed in snow many families start to think about summer plans including summer camps for kids. A great resource to help families sort through all the available options are to visit a camp fair.  A camp fair is similar to a job or college fair but is for summer camps and travel programs.  Representatives from 50 to 100 camps and travel programs gather at a school, mall or hotel and families stop by and learn about the programs.

Topics: Summer camp, Teen summer camp, camp fair

Winter and now the holiday season is already here... it seems like just a few weeks ago we were planning the Session 3 Crew Olympics and playing "Jud Games" on the front lawn. It’s hard to believe that the Stone Mountain Adventures Teen Summer of 2013  ended about four months ago. Since then the leaves on the trees have changed color and fallen off and, as I write this, the temperature outside is a chilly 16 degrees. More snow is expected this weekend!

The rhythm of the seasons brings familiar change and now that the first snow fall and inaugural sled riding on Pam and Biff’s hill have come and gone, in general, we spend more time inside stoking the wood stove than outside “playing.” With shorter days and longer nights it’s a little harder to get outside and easier to curl up with a book. But the winter world is beautiful and peaceful and gives new perspective on a familiar landscape.  Stone Mountain Adventures Teen Summer camp in now blanketed by snow.

Topics: Teen Camp, Stone Mountain Adventures, SMA Summer Camp, Winter at SMA Teen Summer Camp, Family Update

Sara Finn (aka Sara Feldstein-Nixon) attended SMA Teen Summer Camp from 2008 to 2011 and wrote this as she was applying to transfer from Brookline High School in her sophmore year...

Topics: Teen Camp, Teen summer camp, 2 Week Summer Camp, what I learned at SMA

Outside Magazine has name Dirt Rag's Dirt Fest as one of the nations top Mountain Biking Festivals in the USA!

Dirtfest is a fantastic event that is weekend long mountain bike festival promoting a hearty spirit for adventure, festivity and camaraderie. DirtFest features clinics on sustainable trail building, entry level mountain biking, sustainable trail maintenance; and includes organized events such as a womens skills series, kids mountain bike rides, unicycle course and an epic all day group ride that departs on a houseboat shuttle. Hosted by the Raystown Mountain Bike Association (RMBA).

Topics: Teen summer camp, teenage summer camp, Mountain Biking, mountain biking summer camp, SMA Teen Camp, Outside Magazine, Dirtfest

Topics: Teen Horseback Riding Summer Camp, Horseback riding camp northeast, riding summer camp

It has finally happened... the 2013 SMA Teen Summer Camp Video Slide Show is live on our web site!

Topics: Teen summer camp, slideshows 2013, Tween Summer Camp

Last week there was a buzz at SMA Rock Climbing Summer Camp's Donation Rock Climbing Area because of North Face athlete Mark Synnott.  Mark is an elite North Face climber based in Jackson, New Hampshire and was in town to give a talk at Appalachian Outdoors.  He and a group of local central PA climbers were at Donation Rocks last Wednesday, 10/9 and were blessed with sunshine and 70+ degree weather.    

Topics: Donation Rocks, Rock Climbing Summer Camp, Teen Rock Climbing Camp, Mark Synnott, The North Face, Stone Mountain Adventures

Topics: Teen Camp, Donation Rocks, Rock Climbing Summer Camp, SMA Teen Camp, Liberty Mountain

Stone Mountain Adventures Teen Summer Camp is excited to announce our 2014 dates and prices!

• SMA now offers four 2 week sessions
• Campers are encouraged to combine sessions and stay longer

2 Week Sessions	Begins	Ends	Duration
Session 1    (SMA1)	Sunday 6/22	Saturday 7/5	2 Weeks
Session 2    (SMA2)	Sunday 7/6	Saturday 7/19	2 Weeks
Session 3    (SMA3)	Monday 7/21	Sunday 8/3	2 Weeks
Session 4    (SMA3)	Tuesday 8/5	Monday 8/18	2 Weeks

4 Week Sessions	Begins	Ends	Duration
Session 1 & 2	Sunday 6/22	Saturday 7/19	4 Weeks
Session 2 & 3	Sunday 7/6	Sunday 8/3	4 Weeks
Session 3 & 4	Monday 7/21	Monday 8/18	4 Weeks

6 Week Sessions	Begins	Ends	Duration
Session 1 & 2 & 3	Sunday 6/22	Sunday 8/3	6 Weeks
Session 2 & 3 & 4	Sunday 7/6	Monday 8/18	6 Weeks
8 Week Sessions	Begins	Ends	Duration
Session 1 & 2 & 3 & 4	Sunday 6/22	Monday 8/18	8 Weeks

Tuition

$2250 for One Sessions (2 Weeks)

$4980 for Two Sessions (4 Weeks)

$7350 for Three Sessions (6 Weeks)

$8880 for Four Sessions (8 Weeks)

Ready to sign up? Here is our 2014 Camper Application.

Tuition is all inclusive, and covers laundry, entrance fees to all out-of-camp trips, and white water rafting. "Masters Programs" are described below and require an extra fee.

Topics: Teen summer camp, 2 Week Summer Camp, Summer Camp PA, Dates and Prices, 2014 Summer Camp

It is hard to believe that 3rd Session at SMA Teen Summer Camp and August have already arrived and we are nearly half way through session three. This summer has gone by so unbelievably fast and before we know it all the campers will be on the road home. The weather this summer has been quite the roller coaster, ranging from scorching hot during session two to raining almost every day of session one. For 3rd Session it has finally leveled out with warm days and cool nights!

Topics: Summer camp, Teen summer camp, teenage summer camp, Summer Camp PA

Summer camp, then and now (via NewsWorks)

July 2, 2013 By Jonathan Zimmerman Download Audio File » Listen to the interview. (Reposted with permission from www.newsworks.org)

I  went to three different summer camps when I was a kid, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I swam, hiked, and played sports (badly). And sometimes, I did nothing at all. That's what summer — and camp — were all about.

My, how times have changed.

About 20 years ago, so-called "specialty camps" began to replace the general-interest kind that I attended. So now you can go to camps that stress particular activities, from cooking and computers to robotics and rocketry.

Even at general-interest camps, meanwhile, kids are much more likely to receive professional athletic coaching, top-of-the-line art and music instruction, or even SAT-prep classes. Camp isn't just for fun anymore. It's about building a resume, a skill-set, a profile, a future. Like school, camp now prepares young people to win the great Race of Life. And that's a big loss, for all of us.

Camps more like school now

Ironically, summer camps began as an antidote to school rather than an extension of it. According to Ernest Balch, who founded the country's first camp in 1881, formal educational institutions were making young men "soft." Boys needed a rugged outdoor experience to escape the "weakening feminine influences" of modern society.

Around the turn of the century, the YMCA and the Boy Scouts started summer camps. So did groups with names like the Woodcraft Indians and the Sons of Daniel Boone, all devoted to recovering the lost rustic masculinity of the old frontier.

In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner had famously described the frontier as the key to American identity. In the same essay, however, Turner announced that the frontier was gone! So summer camps would keep its spirit alive. With their simple tents and cabins, camps would give boys "the sturdier training of our forebears," as one camp advocate wrote.

Girls' camps arose, too, so that young women from the city could breathe fresh country air and grow into healthy mothers.

"The old-time education of girls kept them too much under cover," a Girl Scout magazine warned in 1917, "too much confined to books, too little free to engage in sports that might spoil their clothes."

Camp would free both sexes from the stifling effects of over-civilization, even as it reinforced their separate roles.

Naming roots

To do that, camps borrowed names and activities from the "primitives" who preceded whites on the frontier: Native Americans.

Indian-style ritual "gives the boy the much needed opportunity to express his inherent savagery," one camp brochure declared. "Just to be free, to run, to climb, to shout and yell like a wild Indian on a war-path!"

Girls, meanwhile, made Indian skirts and jewelry. And several camps boasted that they hired actual Indians, rendering the camps more "authentic" than their competitors.

Eventually, this same competition would lead many camps to forsake their simple facilities on behalf of modern amenities, especially electricity and indoor plumbing.

"Will they come back to your camp?" asked an advertisement for flush toilets in a 1931 camping magazine. "The parents — who pay the bills — must be satisfied that your camp is absolutely sanitary."

Many camps also began to show Hollywood movies at night, tapping into young people's growing appetite for commercial culture. But others balked at it, holding the line against "the tidal wave of jazz and crowded hall and movie and cabaret," as one director wrote.

Pop-culture restrictions

Into the present, some camps still try to insulate kids from popular culture by barring smartphones and blocking the Internet. But they're fighting a losing battle. Camps now offer film-making, Web design, and "field trips" to amusement parks and malls. And many of their activities — like cooking competitions — are ripped straight from reality TV.

Most of all, though, camps advertise skills that will allegedly help kids succeed in the so-called real world. By the 1990s, the rising cost of college — and the increased competition for admission — made families ever-more anxious about their children's future. Why waste a summer at a general-interest camp, when you could be gaining "aptitudes" and "experiences" that will separate you from the pack?

That seems like a great way to deny kids their childhood. There will be plenty of time, later in life, to plot and strategize about moving up in the world. Trust me, I'm an adult. I do that all the time.

But when I was a kid, I didn't.

The last camp I attended proclaimed itself "the camp with the pioneer spirit." That meant sleeping outside, running around barefoot, and, yes, participating in "Indian" ceremonies. You developed important life skills--including cooperation and compromise — but you didn't have to stand out from the tribe. It was about getting along, not getting ahead.

And I'll always be grateful for that.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at New York University. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (Yale University Press).

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Topics: Summer camp, Teen summer camp, Summer Camps