Camp Blog

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.

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.

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.

Sunday mornings at Rockbrook move at a gentler pace, with time to sleep in a little, enjoy a relaxed breakfast, and then gather as a whole community in the woods for Chapel. This week the Middlers led it, and the theme they chose was “Sunshine.” One by one, girls who had volunteered stood up to say what sunshine means to them. Some talked about the actual sun, the warmth and light that makes everything grow. Others talked about a different kind of sunshine, the feeling certain people give you just by being around. One girl shared a line from Winnie-the-Pooh: “If you’re lucky, you’ll find a few who make the world feel like sunshine, even on an ordinary day.” Sarah read a story about a girl named Elsa who tried again and again to carry sunbeams indoors to her grandmother, whose room never caught the light, only to learn that she had been her grandmother’s sunshine all along. It was a sweet, thoughtful morning. The girls sang “Here Comes the Sun,” and we all walked out of the woods a little warmer.

By the afternoon, things were considerably less contemplative. When we rang the bell after rest hour, the girls came pouring down to the landsports field in their swimsuits, and we handed out about 150 cans of plain white shaving cream. This was our special all-camp event for the day, a Rockbrook tradition I’ve written about many times: the shaving cream fight. Within five minutes the field was a tangle of shrieking, slipping, foam-covered girls. Foam mohawks, foam beards, foam handprints planted squarely between shoulder blades, the occasional “six pack” drawn on bellies. The slip-n-slide added its own layer of mayhem. The laughter out there is what erupts from unmistakable joy.

Thinking about it later, I realized part of its exuberant power may be that it gives girls a brief vacation from perfectionism. Commonly today, children feel a very real pressure to get things right— the right grades, the right performance, the right look, the right response to whatever the group seems to expect. You can sometimes sense that pressure humming underneath how they move through the world.

A girl who feels she must get everything right is always performing, even in ordinary moments. A simple conversation can become something to avoid because it might be “awkward,” or because she might think, “I won’t know what to say.” Studies of perfectionism in young people often point to the same worry underneath it: the fear of making mistakes and the dread of being judged. Sadly, the usual escape, more time online, only makes things worse— another audience, another review. Living under the bright light of perfectionism is exhausting for a kid.

Here is what a shaving cream fight offers that otherwise seems rare in a child’s life: there is no way to do it well. There are no teams, no score, no technique, no judges, and no outcome to measure or worry over. The whole point is to end up as ridiculous as possible. The writer G.K. Chesterton once quipped that anything worth doing is worth doing badly, meaning it’s better to jump in imperfectly than to wait for conditions you can’t control. A shaving cream fight goes even further… it can only be done badly. There’s really nothing to get right, so there’s actually nothing to get wrong either. You might be covered in foam, but all that watchful, self-critical machinery suddenly has nothing to grab. Come to a shaving cream fight and you can see it slip right off.

So if self-monitoring, that constant internal commentary of “how am I doing and what do they think of me?”, feeds a subtle anxiety, then a shaving cream fight provides relief because it makes self-monitoring impossible. Your attention is pulled entirely outward, toward the friend you’re stalking with a fat handful of foam, toward the ambush forming behind you, toward the counselor who somehow ended up with a full white wig. And because every single person on that field looks equally crazy, the fear of being judged collapses on the spot. There’s no time to work up any worry, either. The fight starts the instant the first can spurts, before anyone can stand at the edge wondering whether she’s ready. Anxiety feeds on delay and evaluation, and a shaving cream fight starves it of both. What rushes in to fill that space is joy.

That Sunday morning in Chapel, the Middlers reminded us that some people make the world feel like sunshine, even on an ordinary day. By evening, rinsed off with the water hoses and heading back up the hill for dinner, these Rockbrook girls had done exactly that for each other. Every girl was good enough— gloriously, drippingly good.