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Camp Blog

Ropes Course Adventure Youth
• Rock Climbing • rbc

Rockbrook Camp’s Ropes Course

Youth girls climbing adventure ropes course

“Does Rockbrook have a ropes course?”

Yes, we have an Alpine Tower. This is a special challenge course camp structure that combines both low ropes course elements and really cool high ropes course events. If you haven’t seen one of these, they are amazing. From this photo you can see a little that they are made of huge telephone poles bolted and lashed together in the shape of two inverted pyramids. This allows the youth girls to climb up three different sides, swing on ropes, balance on logs, scramble up cargo nets, and pull up on all sorts of climbing holds. There’s the “corporate ladder,” the “missing link,” the “swinging logs,” and the “bump out” to name just a few of the ropes course climbing elements on the Tower. You can imagine how popular climbing is at camp, and with all these different ways to climb, girls can come back all the time and have something new to try.

P.S. Did you know Rockbrook’s Alpine Tower is unique among youth camps because it is the only one with a roof?!

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cue camp kids
• Children • rbc

Kids Gotta Love S’mores!

Closeup Smores bite

Let’s talk s’mores… Don’t you just love ’em?  You know how to make them.  Take two graham crackers and a piece of plain milk chocolate, roast a marshmallow on a stick over a fire, and make a chocolate marshmallow sandwich with the graham crackers. Some people like their marshmallow golden brown and gooey, while others are fine burning the marshmallow a little bit to make a charred skin. Either way, they are an excellent sweet treat out around the campfire and one of every kid’s favorite outdoor activities.

Did you know that nobody knows for sure who invented s’mores? The first recorded recipe appears in a Girl Scout book called Tramping and Trailing published in 1927, but s’mores were certainly around before that. For example, Moon Pies, which are also made of a cracker, marshmallow and chocolate, were first produced in 1917.  It’s a bit of a mystery, but it’s fun to think that making s’mores has been an outdoor activity kids have enjoyed at Rockbrook since the very beginning.

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camp wheel ceramics
• Arts • rbc

How to Make Wheel-Thrown Ceramics

wheel-thrown ceramics at camp

“Can you learn how to use the potter’s wheel?”

Yes, you can! The Rockbrook ceramics camp activities let campers improve their pottery skills so they can learn to throw pots on the wheel.  After practicing other ceramics techniques, specifically hand-building methods like pinch, coil and slab pottery, it’s exciting to learn about the potter’s wheel. 

Like any skill, this takes practice, but to get started you’ll work on 4 key steps:

  1. Centering the clay on the wheel.
  2. Opening up the center of the clay.
  3. Pulling up the walls and shaping the piece.
  4. Trimming the base of the piece.

Of course there’s lots of detail to each of these steps, but this brief outline gives you a sense of what’s involved in learning to throw ceramics on the potter’s wheel. Real art! Over a few weeks at camp, you’ll be surprised how good you can get and be amazed at the cool things you can make.  Maybe next summer, you can finish a whole set of matching mugs!

P.S. If you want to read more about it, check out the book Wheel-Thrown Ceramics, by our friend Don Davis.  It’s the best one around.

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girl yoga with hurt ankle
• Summer Camp • rbc

Camp Nurse Jobs

Camp Nurse helping girl

Speaking of nurses and nursing, in particular camp nurses, we want to remind everyone that Rockbrook will be hiring nurses again for this summer’s camp season. We hire nurses for each of our sessions, for 2-, 3-, or 4-week terms. Accepting one of the nursing positions is one of the best ways to experience summer camp as an adult, work with happy engaged children, and get to know this area of North Carolina.

Benefits of Camp Nursing

Being a camp nurse is a wonderful way to experience camp life, to spend time outdoors, to work with amazing people, and to compliment so many of your nursing skills. It’s a chance to join the camp community, make lots of friends, and enjoy a special place for a few weeks of your summer. Just like the campers, odds are you’ll love camp and you’ll want to come back summer after summer.

How to Apply

If you, or someone you know, might be interested in one of our camp nurse jobs, please let us know. We’d love to tell you more about it.

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Youth Riflery Sport Camp
• Riflery • rbc

Shooting Guns at Camp? Yikes!

Youth Girls

Sometimes parents are a little surprised to learn that the girls at camp learn to shoot rifles. We’ll sometimes hear, “Are those real guns?” They sure are! While our youngest girls will use “youth” rifles, everyone shoots real .22 caliber guns. This means the bullets are small 22/100ths of an inch in diameter. We also use the lowest power .22 ammunition, the “short” rimfire version. These are the perfect choice for target shooting, particularly on our youth range (25 meters or about 82 feet to the target).

Shooting is of course completely controlled and supervised at camp. The guns and ammunition are always locked and stored separately. The riflery sport instructors are trained and NRA certified to operate a rifle range, and all of the campers are taught the proper safety protocols when they choose riflery for one of their activities. So yes, the guns and bullets are real, but we do everything we can to make sure it’s very safe.

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Girls gymnastics group
• Gymnastics • rbc

Back Bends in Gymnastics

Gymnastic Camp Back Bend Exercise

There’s always something fun to learn at the gymnastics activity at Rockbrook Camp!

One important exercise we practice at Rockbrook is the “back bend.” Strength and flexibility are naturally the foundations of gymnastics, and here flexibility is the idea.

Work up to this exercise by first spending time warming up your muscles with stretching.  You’ll want to feel limber.  The next thing to try is to make a “bridge” where you lie down and press your hips up while extending your arms, arching your back into a bridge-like curve.  Practice this a lot to build up your strength.

What is a Back Bend?

A back bend is when you form a bridge from a standing position.  With someone spotting you (holding you up under your lower back), lean backwards with your hands extended ready to touch the floor over your head.  After developing the strength and flexibility to do this, you can move on to a “walkover” or, something even more advanced, a “back handspring.”  There is a definite gymnastics progression you can build upon.

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camp girls riding horse
• Horseback Riding • rbc

Girls Riding

girls riding horses at Rockbrook horseback summer camp

Girls riding horses— it’s a daily thing at Rockbrook. Our horseback riding program is easily one of the most popular, if not the most popular, activity at camp. It certainly is the most elaborate with all the horses (26 in all!), instructors (6 or more), facilities (two barns, 6 different pastures, miles of fence, jumps, rails, standards, etc.) and equipment (tack – saddles, pads, girths, stirrups, bridles, etc.). It’s a big operation! All of this allows us to have simultaneous classes and therefore a lot of riders participating at once. It lets Rockbrook offer riding at different skill levels with the right mount, class and instructor. No matter how much experience you have riding, you’ll be able to grow more comfortable and skilled in your riding.

Recognize this big guy?  It’s our 17.1 hand thoroughbred gelding, Gordon!

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Summer Camp Horse Barn
• History • rbc

Remembering Camp in the 1930s

  • Summer Camp Horse Barn
  • Summer Camp Horse Barn

Here’s something cool. Back in the early 1900s, the Albertype Company of Brooklyn, NY produced a number of postcards documenting scenes all around the country. Rockbrook Camp was apparently a favorite subject because we’ve found several cards from the 1930s highlighting scenes of camp. They are just excellent archival documents showing what camp was like in the early years.

Here we see a scene of the old horseback riding barn and paddling canoes on the French Broad River as it passes by camp.  Don’t you just love them?!

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camp lisa songs
• Summer Camp • rbc

Lisa Loeb’s Songs for Camp

Lisa Loeb Camp CD Cover

Lisa Loeb, singer and songwriter best known for her hit song “Stay,” has released a new CD of songs inspired by her time as a kid at summer camp. It’s a fun collection of original compositions and traditional songs all about going away to camp, the friends, the food, the fun, of just being at summer camp. She explains,

“The inspiration was the actual songs based in camp songs. In camp, we have gross-out songs, and ones like the peanut butter and jelly song. One of the things I loved most about camp is that you’re singing all the time. You did sports, and arts and crafts, ate a lot of fun food — you were singing everywhere.”

The CD has some cool guest artists helping out too, people like Steve Martin (who plays banjo) and Jill Sobule. We also like a lot of the great camp lyrics on songs like, “Are You Ready for the Summer?” “It’s not Goodbye,” and “Best Friend.”  If you’ve been to camp, you’ll really enjoy this CD.

You can hear the song “Best Friend” over at Lisa’s website. And then check out all of the great Rockbrook camp songs.

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Outdoor Tetherball Game
• Games • rbc

How to Play Tetherball

Outdoor Tetherball Games at Camp

Lately we’ve been getting a few questions about how to play the game tetherball.

So, how do you play tetherball?

The main goal is for each player (there are only two kids, one against the other) to hit the ball in a direction that will wrap the cord up around the center pole. Each opponent is hitting the ball in an opposite direction, so that’s the contest— you hit it one way and she hits it the other way. The trick is to hit the ball so that it’s hard for your opponent to reach the ball and hit it back. One strategy is to hit the ball downward so that it goes high (and hopefully out of reach) when it wraps around to your opponent’s side. You win when you wrap the cord completely around in your direction and the ball hits the pole.

After you play a while kids can add rules that make the game more challenging and fun. Maybe you can allow only certain kinds of hits, or require that the ball wrap around high on the pole, or create funny penalties for “carrying” the ball or grabbing the string.  Like all great games, there are loads of options!

Tetherball is one of those amazing outdoor games kids love to play at camp. Got a free minute? Let’s play!

P.S. Want to learn more about tetherball? Check out this article.

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