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July 22, 2026July 22, 2026 • Summer Camp • Grace Wallace

A Long Thread

Camp is like an ogre. Or an onion. Or a chicken coop. Or my outfit on any given January day in Michigan.

What I’m trying to say is: camp has layers.

Not to overcomplicate things, but there are, I think, three distinct but interlocking ways to enjoy camp— each one deeper and more profound than the last.

The first level of enjoyment is available to every camper, counselor, and staff member the moment they drive up the hill on opening day. This level is made up of joy and fun and adventure and laughter and silliness and excitement and whimsy and surprise. It’s the thrill of stepping out of your regular life of sleep-eat-school-sports-eat-homework-sleep, and finding yourself in a world where no two days are alike.

The second level of enjoyment finds you gradually, and sometimes isn’t even noticed until later. It is made up of the personal growth that campers experience here at camp.

This level of enjoyment, oddly enough, doesn’t always feel that enjoyable. Sometimes it feels like butterflies in your stomach as you stand at the edge of the dock and prepare to do your swim demo. Other times like looking up from the bottom of the Alpine Tower, and thinking I can’t possibly do this. Or like taking a bite of that unfamiliar food on the dinner table, even if you really don’t want to. Or like squaring your shoulders and telling the girl in your cabin that she hurt your feelings. Or like swallowing your pride and apologizing when you learn you’ve hurt someone else’s.

While the first level of enjoyment is fleeting, this deeper level accumulates over time. It is a list of risks, failures, and triumphs that every Rockbrooker builds for herself, here in a place where she knows it’s okay to be scared, to be brave, to fail, and to try again. We hope every camper reaches this level of enjoyment, but that’s not entirely within our control. Camp provides the venue, the support, the encouragement, the challenges—but the campers find this growth for themselves.

The third, and deepest, level of enjoyment isn’t talked about as often as these others—in part because it can be hard to describe. But I’ll try.

This level of enjoyment comes from embracing the sacred traditions of camp. The stories, the songs, and the gatherings that connect us to the 105 years of Rockbrook campers who came before us. These things are sacred not in any religious sense, but in the way that they make us feel like a small, but important part of something that is bigger and older than we are. Sometimes this can feel odd for campers raised in a society that shies away from the sacred, that says traditions are tired and stale, and only the new and exciting are worth our attention. That says approaching something with solemnity, respect, and reflection is “cringe” and embarrassing.

I get it. Looked at one way, it’s silly to dress in uniforms and sing around a campfire. Walking silently down the path to chapel from the hill on Sunday mornings serves no practical purpose. And songs like “The Streams and the Mountains” and “How Did We Come to Meet Pal” aren’t nearly as fun to sing as those Dining Hall songs that let us bang on the tables.

But when our campers allow themselves to embrace these sacred, quiet, reflective parts of camp, they find something that can be found in precious few other places in their lives.

When camp asks us all to be quiet together, we can find a thread within ourselves that we are often too busy and too noisy to notice. It’s a thread that connects us to all the other Rockbrookers sitting around us, winding through us and drawing us closer to one another.

But the thread does far more than that. Because it is a long thread, and an old one. It winds back through the years, the decades, and the eras—back to that first summer in 1921, when Nancy Carrier gathered forty or so girls on her family’s wooded mountain and began to craft this community that we all now belong to.

It reminds you that when you put on your red tie, you’re tying it in the same friendship knot that Mrs. Carrier taught her campers to tie that first summer. When you sing “Boom-De-A-Da” around the Spirit Fire, you’re singing the same “mellow harmonies” that campers sang in the days of the Great Depression. When you walk the Path of Silence to chapel, you’re tracing the steps of the thousands of girls who walked it before you. And when you take a quiet moment to breathe in the view from the Junior Lodge porch, your head resting on the shoulder of a best friend you didn’t know existed two weeks ago, you’re joining a love and appreciation for a piece of nature that has been loved by many thousands of women who now remain only in the faint etchings of their names on cabin walls.

When you embrace this part of camp, you become a part of its story. You recognize that one day, long after you are gone, there will be another girl who sits around the Spirit Fire in a red tie like yours, singing the songs that you are singing now. And when she does, though she won’t know your name or where you came from, she will feel a connection to you that is, in that moment, as important as the connection she feels to the girls around her.

She won’t know you, any more than I know Ann Dudley Glenn, a camper from 1924. Or Doris Perryman, who walked these trails in 1939. Or Katie Platter, a Junior in 1955, who wrote in her Carrier Pigeon about the excitement of going down Sliding Rock. But because of these sacred, beautiful, hard-to-describe traditions of camp, she will know, as I do, and as all those other campers did, that we belong to one another, because we belong to Rockbrook.

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July 20, 2026July 19, 2026 • Summer Camp • Jeff Carter

The Voice Does the Work

Here’s a small puzzle. What is something that happens at Rockbrook every single day, more than once, that almost never happens back home? It happens before she’s even fully awake, at breakfast, when a table of bleary-eyed campers gives thanks with “We Have Been Given a New Day.” It happens again at lunch, and again at dinner, in a different key each time. It happens riding the bus to Sliding Rock. It happens at morning assembly, at birthdays, and when a girl swims her way into becoming a “mermaid.” Sometimes it’s sweet and lovely; other times it’s explosively enthusiastic. It can happen while hiking, often while doing skits, and always at our Sunday Chapels. And it happens last thing each night, when the whole camp goes quiet enough to hear “Day Is Done” before lights out. The answer, if you haven’t guessed it, is singing.

At Rockbrook, we sing every day, and throughout the day. Over the 105-year history of the camp, singing has become one of the core traditions of this place, central to its culture. Our printed songbook now holds more than 120 different songs, new and old, silly and serious. You can hear a good number of them for yourself on our website. They are sorted into categories like pep songs, silly songs, traditional songs, and so forth. Here’s one of my favorites.

For some campers, the lyrics are a big part of why they love certain songs. Of course, many of the tunes are also simply catchy, but certain phrases take on an extra meaning of their own. “‘Twas fate we came to Rockbrook, and you became my friend” and “Like a fairyland of beauty, where friendships so true are born” are good examples. One alum told me she hums the canoeing song under her breath when she’s feeling nervous about something. It goes, “Hold fast, don’t lose your nerve, keep your paddle in your hand going around the curve.” Long after her time at camp, and in moments that have nothing to do with canoeing at all, this Rockbrook song retains its power. These are songs that stick with you.

Why do we sing so much at Rockbrook? The easy answer is that it’s good for you, good for our overall wellbeing, and plenty of research points to that. Likewise, I think we can say more than just “singing is fun,” though it’s that too. A more interesting question is to ask what singing does at camp. Three things come to mind.

The first is that singing synchronizes a group, out loud, in a way you can literally hear happening. Watch a table of campers start “Way Up in the Sky” and it’s obvious. In the dining hall, the Hi-Up campers ring their tiny bell that signals to everyone a song is starting, and within a few bars we have almost 300 people, campers and counselors alike, waving their hands the same way at the same moment, raising the pitch of their voices for the high parts and dropping their voices to a rumble for others. It’s phenomenal to see a room full of individual people briefly becoming one thing. Seemingly without any rehearsal, singing creates this mysterious synchrony like a flock of birds turning in the sky. Every chorus tightens that bond. Every harmony deepens it.

The second reason singing matters so much at Rockbrook is that it makes every camper a participant in the camp’s culture, a member of the community here. Singing builds that community through doing— in this case, by willingly joining in with your voice. When a song begins in the dining hall, every camper is helping make Rockbrook happen in that moment, rather than simply sitting back to receive something already finished. Just as the song depends on their voices, camp depends on their genuine, active, embodied, participation. The voice does the work.

This shared participation matters, by the way, because it contrasts so starkly with what Jonathan Haidt calls the “screen-based childhood” he’s identified as common these days. That life asks very little of kids: watch, scroll, like, skip, repeat, all of it steered by whatever an algorithm decides to serve next. What’s left is a subtle loneliness, each kid alone in a private stream of content shaped just for her. Camp singing works in the opposite direction. It asks a girl to be active, to contribute something— her voice, her timing, her courage to join. Singing at camp teaches a girl that she helps create community by leaning in, rather than simply receiving it.

That’s the third thing singing does at camp. It pulls you in. Singing together is an immediate invitation to the group, an open avenue to belong, to be one of “us.” Camp songs are meant for exactly that, for including everyone, for creating something together. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know all the words, or sing off-key— the goofier the better. The point was always a collective sound, one with room in it for absolutely everyone— not the best singer chasing perfection or mastery. And it works. New campers, protected by the form itself (loud and silly, no solos, no critiques), simply open their mouths to sing, and instantly they’ve joined the group. To sing is almost an instinct at Rockbrook, and as soon as you do, you know you belong.

None of this depends on the songs being polished, sophisticated, or especially impressive in the ordinary sense. It’s the process, not the product, that we care about. The benefits arise simply from the singing. And those benefits— synchronizing a room, encoding a culture, including absolutely everyone— are happening whether or not anyone in the dining hall is thinking about it in those terms. After all, we’re just singing.

An alum once told me about her mother, who had spent years suffering from dementia— names, faces, whole decades fading away. But when prompted with a Rockbrook song, one her mother hadn’t heard in fifty years, she could sing every word. I think about that sometimes, how a song, sung enough times as a girl, gathered around a table with people she loved, can survive underneath all of it. More than just a nice tradition, we sing at Rockbrook because some things are too important to risk forgetting. Things like knowing you belong, knowing you are part of something, knowing you are a valuable friend to someone. A song, sung enough times, is one of the surest ways we know to remember.

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July 18, 2026July 18, 2026 • News • Jeff Carter

More Than it Shows

If you take the time to scroll through the whole photo gallery each day, rather than relying only on the facial recognition feature to find your daughter, you will eventually come across a photo that’s puzzling. Girls tangled together in some contorted pose. A swimming spot you don’t recognize. A kid in unfamiliar gear, or standing next to a pony, or grinning in front of a rock face that’s clearly nowhere near her cabin. “What is going on?” is the natural question. A photo catches a single second, and most of these snapshots belong to a longer story you can’t easily see. So let me take a handful of this week’s photos and fill in what’s around them.

Start with the featured photo at the top of this post: five girls, ice cream cones in hand, all smiles, with the Dolly’s trolley parked behind them and the hillside lodge farther in the background. Nobody saw that one coming. After lunch on Friday, the trolley from Dolly’s, the beloved ice cream stand at the entrance to the Pisgah Forest, rolled into camp as a surprise for everyone. It was a welcome sweet treat on a warm afternoon, and a happy jolt of surprise on an ordinary Friday.

Then there’s the circle of senior girls holding hands on the Landsports field, one of them halfway through a hula hoop. That was cabin day, when each cabin group dreams up its own adventure for the afternoon, and the Seniors settled on a slate of relay games. In this one, the girls hold hands in a circle and race a hula hoop all the way around it, which means each girl has to step, wiggle, and fold her whole body through the hoop without ever grasping it. The contortions this requires are hilarious, and the photo catches one mid-wiggle. They ran a three-legged race too, plus a sponge-and-bucket water relay and an egg and spoon relay. The photo shows the twist. The laughing you’ll have to imagine.

The unfamiliar swimming spot is a place we call Mermaid Cove, and the girls wading in it are a junior cabin that hiked out to it for their cabin day adventure. It sits along Dunn’s Creek below Rockbrook Falls, and offers a little waterfall dropping into a sandy-bottomed pool, a giant rock face with an overhang rising on one side and the deep forest leading back to camp on the other. Dappled sunlight comes through the trees in the midafternoon, and the water stays cool enough to feel perfect on a warm summer day. The girls can wade right in and play. Some spots at camp feel found rather than built, almost magical really, and this cove is one of them.

Other photos come from farther afield, so it’s worth explaining how trips work at Rockbrook. Beyond the in-camp activities each camper has as part of her regular day, the outdoor adventure staff announces special optional trips most days at breakfast and lunch, trips like rock climbing, kayaking, rafting, hiking, backpacking, and canoeing. One might be a half-day hike or a full day of rock climbing. It could mean hiking to a view, romping through a creek, visiting a nearby swimming hole, or a trip up to the cave under Dunn’s Rock (the “Nest”) for some hammock time. You just never know what will be announced. And because these trips are extra, they present each girl with a real choice: is she willing to skip riflery and tennis tomorrow morning to go rock climbing instead? There always seem to be girls ready to say yes, especially this session.

That’s how a group of senior girls ended up canoeing the French Broad on a two-day, fifteen-mile paddle from Mills River to Asheville. This section is quite wide, and a long stretch runs through the Biltmore Estate, with no houses or development visible from the river. You can even spy the mansion itself from the water in a couple of places. We have accounts of Rockbrook campers paddling this stretch of river back in the 1930s! The girls reported perfect sunny weather the whole way, and the trip ended with a celebration late lunch at a food truck in Asheville. Fifteen miles of paddling earns a good lunch.

The girls in another photo are Middlers who were on a backpacking trip this week. They carried everything themselves, tents and food and water, and hiked about a mile and a half into the forest to set up their campsite not far from the Davidson River. Then they packed a dinner and kept climbing, up to the top of John Rock to eat it while the sun went down. The light gets better and better as it sets up there, shining across the valley onto Looking Glass Rock. It’s easily one of the best hiking views in the Pisgah National Forest.

And the pony carrying that young rider is Zoey. All of our horses have names, of course, and each has a distinct personality, but Zoey is something of a princess at the barn and one of the most popular animals at camp. She’s a Welsh cross pony who has been part of Rockbrook, and of Free Rein, the therapeutic riding program we host during the school year, since about 2018. She loves working with kids and teaching them how to ride, and when a skilled higher-level rider is small enough to ride her, she can even do a little jumping. Zoey has been teaching girls to ride for more summers than many of our campers have been coming to Rockbrook.

Every one of these photos holds more than it shows. Behind the silly pose is a cabin adventure, behind the unfamiliar river is a choice a girl made at lunch, behind the ice cream cones is a surprise the whole camp shared, and behind the pony is eight years of patient teaching. I wish we could somehow capture even more. So when a photo in the gallery leaves you wondering what’s going on, take it as a good sign. It means your Rockbrook girl is in the middle of something that only happens thanks to the richness of camp life. Tonight the girls who paddled past the Biltmore and the girls who wiggled through hula hoops are back on their cabin porches, trading these stories while the creek runs by in the dark. The photos give you a glimpse. The stories are coming home with her.

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July 17, 2026July 17, 2026 • Videos • Jeff Carter

Second Session Video Snapshot – Part Three

We have another fun highlights video to share from Second Session— the third so far, but the first to include our newly arrived July Mini 2 campers.

Once again, Robbie Francis of FrancisFilmworks has captured the feeling of life at Rockbrook. It’s wonderful to see camp friends laughing together, girls throwing themselves into new activities, quiet smiles, and all the colorful energy moving through camp each day.

This video is pure delight. Take a look, and enjoy seeing Rockbrook in motion!

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July 15, 2026July 15, 2026 • Girls Camps • Jeff Carter

Three Letters

One of the best places to sit at camp is on the dining hall porch. The red rocking chairs on one side are arranged to take in the whole view, there’s usually a little breeze moving through, and enough people wander past that a conversation is never far away. That’s where I found two of our Hi-Ups this morning, just after muffin break, enjoying a pocket of free time. One is spending her ninth summer at Rockbrook, the other her tenth. One was sitting with a book, the other was knotting a friendship bracelet tied to her water bottle. I sat down in the chair beside them and asked a question I already knew the answer to, but I wanted to hear how they would put it. I asked, “What is RBA?”

They had a lot to say.

If you spend even a day at Rockbrook, you’ll hear it. A counselor gathering her cabin for a skit rehearsal might say, “let’s keep it RBA.” A camper weighing a joke might pause and admit, “that sounds a little RBI.” RBA stands for “Rockbrook Appropriate,” and its opposite, RBI, for “Rockbrook Inappropriate.” Nobody seems to know who coined the terms, and you won’t find them well defined in any handbook. Yet everyone here understands them, and they carry real weight. Three letters, invoked on the fly, and a whole shared ethic snaps into focus.

The first Hi-Up put it this way: “RBA is all about community. It’s anything that keeps our community together.” Her friend looked up from her bracelet and added the definition that seems both spot-on and insightful: “RBI is something that happens out in the real world. RBI is a lot more selfish, while RBA takes into account other people all the time. The difference is in how we treat each other.”

I love these responses! These two sixteen-year-old girls, with nearly a decade of Rockbrook experience, were drawing the boundary of camp along a moral line. Out there, in their experience, selfishness is the default setting, the thing you can expect. Most people in the “real” world are positioning themselves, in their heads comparing themselves to others, likely taking the last cookie. In here, at camp by contrast, what’s normal is first considering other people, being supportive, offering to share the last cookie. They drew this contrast the way you’d state a fact about the weather. Obvious if you’re there experiencing it. They have lived in both places long enough to notice the difference.

This is why I think the notion of “RBA” has stuck at Rockbrook. It condenses everything we hope camp will be… the kindness, the caring, the generosity, the habit of noticing how your choices affect the people around you… into a three-letter shorthand quick enough to use in the middle of ordinary life. It gives girls a ready way to recognize the culture they are helping create and to protect it when something begins to pull in another direction. Instead of a complicated set of rules listing what is not allowed, a joke, a prank, or a comment made to a cabin mate can be measured by one familiar question: Is this RBA?

The girls told me one more thing worth passing along. “Sometimes people slip up and might say something that is RBI, like making a mean comment,” one of them said, “but everyone here, counselors and even campers, is quick to shut it down and remind people that we’re at camp.” We’re at camp. I love that the correction they described comes from everywhere at once, from campers as readily as from staff, and that it arrives as a reminder rather than a punishment. Everyone here has a hand in caring for the culture at Rockbrook. Slip-ups still happen, of course, because camp is full of real children exploring the complexities of the world. The difference is what happens next. Someone leans in, gently, and the community rights itself. RBA shows the direction to steer.

Their free period ended the way free periods do here, with the bell echoing from up in the tree. Both girls gathered their things without hurry, the book closed around a scrap of paper, the bracelet left for later. They thanked me for the conversation and headed off toward whatever came next. The rocking chairs kept moving a little while after they left, and I sat there thinking that I had asked a question I already knew the answer to, and just as I expected, they had answered it better than I could have.

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July 13, 2026July 13, 2026 • News • rbc

In Just One Day

The first cars were waiting at the gate before we even opened it this morning. Inside them sat smiling, excited girls who have been anticipating this day all summer long, some of them returning to a camp they already love, others arriving at Rockbrook for the very first time. Today was opening day for our July Mini 2 session, and because these campers are all Juniors and Middlers, things got started early, with check-in at the barn beginning around 8:30am. When each car finished with the office folks and the nurses and drove up into camp, a crowd of counselors met everyone jumping up and down, cheering wildly for whoever was inside. You could watch the nervousness on a new camper’s face dissolve into a grin before she even opened the car door.

Organizing the arrival by age works beautifully. In addition to minimizing waiting in line, cabin groups show up at very similar times, which means counselors can greet every camper personally and then gather the whole cabin to set up bunks together. Within minutes, each girl is making her bed next to the girls she’ll be living with, already chatting, already comparing hometowns and favorite activities. I know this quick drop-off can be a little frustrating for our alumnae moms, who would love to walk around camp and reminisce. After all, this place holds their memories too. But over the years we’ve found that a swift, cheerful goodbye is a real gift to the campers themselves, freeing them to fall in step with cabin life right away, while a lingering farewell tends to slow that settling down. The counselors know just what to do from there. By mid-morning, the new girls looked like they’d been here for days.

Meanwhile, an Ordinary Sunday

For the four-week full-session campers, this was a regular Rockbrook Sunday, which is to say a wonderfully slow one. They wandered into breakfast in their pajamas for the leisurely meal that Sunday mornings call for, complete with the donuts that have become a tradition around here. After some free time, the Hi-Ups led the flag raising ceremony, and then everyone walked down for Chapel, where this morning’s theme was Nature, a fitting subject for a camp so immersed in it. An assembly on the hill followed, and then came Rick’s famous mac and cheese lunch, gloriously cheesy and satisfying, always a favorite.

A little rainstorm brushed up against us during rest hour, cooling off the warm afternoon, and its timing could not have been better. The rain stopped right as we were ready to kick off the afternoon’s all-camp special event.

Jersey Day

The girls knew this one was coming, so many of them came prepared, having packed colorful team jerseys of every kind: basketball, soccer, football, you name it. We filled the landsports field with game stations and called the whole thing “Jersey Day.” With music playing and a yellow giraffe sprinkler spinning away, girls zoomed from station to station, trying a sack relay, joining a massive nine square in the air game, cornhole, several basketball games, a wiffle ball station, and a frisbee game. There was face painting and temporary tattoos, nachos and chips for snacking, and a craft table where girls could decorate foam fingers however they liked. The whole field looked like the happiest, most chaotic sporting event ever held.

Afterward we opened the lake, both for the arriving Middlers to take their swim demonstrations and for everyone else to cool off after all that running around. Lately it’s become a thing for girls to do tricks off the diving board, inventing poses mid-air before plunging into the water. Maybe it’s always been a thing. Either way, with a camera nearby, there seems to be no end to their creativity.

Dinner was hamburgers with all the fixins, seemingly unlimited pickles, assorted potato chips, salad, and fresh blackberries. Then the girls selected their next set of camp activities, the four-per-day schedule they’ll follow for the next three days before getting the chance to choose again.

Settling In

As the evening arrived, camp split into two happy scenes. The new Mini 2 campers gathered in the lodges for get-to-know-you games, Middler cabins in one lodge and Juniors in another, learning names and laughing at the kind of silly games that turn strangers into cabinmates. Meanwhile, the full-session campers headed to the gym for movie night and a showing of High School Musical, a fitting cap to Jersey Day, since it tells the story of a basketball star who ends up singing in his school’s musical. It carries a nice message for kids, that things go better when you have the courage to be your true self.

Walking back in the dark after the movie, I could hear the clatter of the girls getting ready for bed along the cabin lines. It’s a distinctive and pleasing sound: girls chattering to each other, giggles as bedtime routines unfold, and the occasional scream from someone seeing a “giant bug” of some sort. Lights and sounds along the lines and quiet darkness everywhere else in camp. I thought about how quickly campers begin to feel at home here. Even for those girls who just arrived with a few butterflies this morning, somewhere between the dining hall songs, Jersey Day excitement, and time at the lake, they seemed to belong here. Easy, and in just one day.

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July 11, 2026July 11, 2026 • Arts • Jeff Carter

No Hurry in It

Looking through yesterday’s photos from Curosty, I kept noticing the same thing. Different girls, different projects, different corners of the cabin, but in picture after picture, the identical expression: head bent a bit, eyes focused, hands mid-motion, the whole face settled into a kind of calm attention you don’t see every day. Nobody was posing. Nobody even seemed aware of the camera. Whatever these girls were experiencing, it was clearly something worth paying attention to.

Curosty is our fiber arts cabin, a snug traditional log building where girls come to weave, knit, crochet, sew, and stitch. This week, the quiet stretch between our two July mini sessions when only our four-week campers are here, the pace of camp has relaxed, and Curosty may be where that slower rhythm shows itself best. Girls are working the round “nifty knitters,” looping yarn peg by peg until a long knitted cylinder grows down through the middle. Others are hemming stuffed pillows with a needle and thread, adding a decorative edge one small stitch at a time. There’s needlepoint lettering taking shape on hats and cloth, crochet hooks turning yarn into plump three-dimensional balls, potholder squares being joined into something bigger. And there’s the weaving, on the big floor looms and the table-top looms beside them, shuttles sliding back and forth as narrow straps and wide cloth slowly appear.

Notice how all of these crafts involve a form of repetition? Loop after loop, stitch after stitch, pass after pass of the shuttle. Watch the girls at work, though, and the repetition reveals itself as rhythm, the same motion returning again and again like the beat of a song, each repeated phrase carrying the piece somewhere. Every loop advances the knitted cylinder another fraction of an inch. Every pass of the shuttle lays down one more thread of cloth. There is something deeply calming about handwork like this, each small motion focusing and occupying the mind without straining it. Worries can’t get much of a foothold when your hands are building stitches. A row of knitting cannot be rushed, and the girls seem to sense that the process itself is what matters most. There’s no hurry in it.

Years ago I wrote about slowing down at camp, about camp as a haven from the hectic, a place where the whirlwind of an over-scheduled life loosens its grip and kids regain the freedom to meander, to catch beauty in a sideways glance. That’s still true, and this quieter week certainly proves it. What’s happening in Curosty, though, is slightly different. These girls are slowing down by paying closer attention: noticing the tension of the yarn, the size of a stitch, the pattern gathering row by row, all the nuance and detail you’ll miss by rushing about. The relaxed schedule lets the craft tell the time. Slowing down, it turns out, helps you bring more of yourself to the moment, to the process at hand.

This sounds an awful lot like mindfulness, something we adults might be hoping to find by taking a class or reading a book about it. The girls in Curosty at Rockbrook are getting it the old-fashioned way, through their fingers. A few summers ago, in fact, it was a camper working on an embroidery project who handed me the best description of this I’ve heard. Being at camp, she told me, made her more mindful of things. With more time to slow down and no phone in her pocket, she noticed more and appreciated more. She was describing the whole of camp life, and she was right. Needlecraft gathers that camp-wide invitation to notice and concentrates it, stitch by stitch, into hand-made colorful patterns.

Like so many things at camp, the benefit reveals itself in the doing. Nobody has to explain to a girl at a loom that this kind of attention feels good. The loom teaches her directly, in a hands-on, experiential way self-help books can’t match. She signs up for Needlecraft thinking she’s making a pillow. She leaves having practiced patience, sustained focus, and the settled feeling of being fully present with one thing. We might even call the pillow a bonus.

These are age-old crafts, after all. Girls at Rockbrook have been weaving and stitching since the camp’s earliest days, and the crafts themselves reach back generations further, to grandmothers and great-grandmothers who knew this same rhythm in their hands. When a camper threads a needle in Curosty, she joins that long line. At the same time, her own creativity guides the direction. She picks the yarn colors, chooses the pattern, decides what letters to stitch onto her hat. Each finished piece is tied to tradition yet entirely her own creation.

There’s something special about that. Unlike so many childhood activities, needlecraft doesn’t have to end when you grow up. A girl who learns to knit or crochet at camp holds a skill she can practice for the rest of her life, a way of slowing down that fits in a small bag and travels anywhere. Decades from now, some of these girls will pick up a crochet hook and find that same calm attention waiting for them, right where they left it. It will have started here, in a log cabin at Rockbrook, in the unhurried middle of a summer.

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July 10, 2026July 10, 2026 • News • Jeff Carter

A Mariachi Call to Gather

The first thing we heard was the trumpets. Two of them, bright and brassy, floating out through the camp just as the first free swim period was winding down, and for a few seconds nobody could quite tell what was happening. As the girls followed the sound, now clearly coming from the dining hall, they were excited and surprised to see four musicians standing on the porch, dressed head to toe in the ornate charro suits you picture when you imagine mariachi, dark jackets with rows of silver buttons down the sleeves and wide bow ties in a deep, fitting red. Two of them played trumpets. A third sang and also played an enormous round-backed bass guitar called a guitarrón, and the fourth strummed a vihuela, a small five-stringed cousin of the guitar. A real mariachi band, Mariachi International, had come to Rockbrook! We’ve done this only once before, years ago, and today the surprise turned out to be every bit as fun as we’d hoped. That sound of trumpets across the hill was a call to gather, and gather we did.

The reason we were all streaming toward the dining hall in the first place was already waiting inside, and it was worth every step. This was tamale day, and around here, tamale day is a big deal. Once each summer, and only once, Rick and his friends in the kitchen set aside several days to make authentic corn tamales completely from scratch. It takes time, care, and plenty of willing hands. They roast and shred the chicken, soak the dried corn husks until they soften, cook down a deep red Guajillo chili sauce, and mix the masa, a paste of finely ground corn, lime, oil, and stock, until it is just right. Then, one by one and entirely by hand, each tamale is spread and filled (some with cheese and some with chicken) and folded into its husk pocket before being layered into enormous pots and steamed. When you need a thousand of them to feed the whole camp, you begin to understand why it takes three days. Part of the fun of eating them is the unwrapping, peeling back the warm husk to find the savory middle, a small first for the many girls who had never tasted a true tamale before.

Then the band came inside, and lunch turned into something uniquely fun and festive. The girls were up out of their seats within minutes, clapping along and inventing dance moves, counselors spinning them in circles, and before long the entire dining hall had fallen into the goofy, synchronized joy of the Macarena, a few hundred hands turning and hips swiveling more or less together, grins as wide as they could go. The band played their classics, like “La Cucaracha,” and then they surprised us with a mariachi rendition of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” and a version of “Rocky Top” that had us singing along. You could see the delight on everyone’s faces as we danced and clapped to every song.

After lunch, one of our counselors found me to say that she’d been a camper here the last time a mariachi band came to Rockbrook. She still remembers that day, all these years later, one of the bright fixed points from her childhood. It’s not every day you enjoy a lunch of warm, fresh tamales with a mariachi band! I suspect some of the girls dancing this afternoon will remember today just the same, a trumpet floating up the hill and a whole camp eager to join the fun of a mariachi lunch.

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July 9, 2026July 10, 2026 • Videos • Jeff Carter

Second Session Video Snapshot – Part Two

We have another highlights video to share from Second Session, and once again Robbie Francis of FrancisFilmworks has given us a wonderful glimpse into life at Rockbrook. He seems to always find the best parts of camp: the laughter between friends, the bursts of activity, the quiet smiles, and the joyful little moments that fill the day.

It’s a quick look at the feeling of camp right now, showing the energy, the color, and all these girls trying new things together.

Take a look, and enjoy seeing Rockbrook in motion!

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