RBC has got to be the most fun and rewarding summer experience a girl could have! Thanks to all the staff for their energy and talents, and willingness to work so hard to make Rockbrook such a wonderful place. We could write a book describing the positive aspects of RBC!
Read more testimonials.
The years drifted away during the recent Rockbrook Reunion weekend as old friends reconnected in the heart of a wooded mountain. For some women it was their first trip back to Rockbrook in more than 40 years but it did not take a moment to find a friend and jump right back to where they left off. The joy on everyone’s faces as they saw their old friends was magical!
We will post more stories and memories from the reunion soon. It was a spectacular weekend filled with fun!
This time of year, as we head back to school and the memories of our time at camp can seem far away, it’s a good idea to reflect upon some of the important habits and skills we learned during our stay at Rockbrook, and to realize how important they can be throughout the rest of the year. But what are some of those values? What are some of the surprising things camp taught us that can still serve us well at school?
At Rockbrook this summer we learned:
—things are more fun when we include everyone
—you can be creative with just about anything
—making friends is easy when we respect and care for each other
—everything is better in a costume 🙂
Of course there are a lot of other ways camp helps kids grow too.
Peg Smith, the CEO of the American Camp Association, also wants kids to remember what they learned at camp, in particular the “Three Cs” — Confidence, Curiosity, and Character. Pack all these great things in your school backpack. You know camp is awesome; now make that true for school too!
What an amazing weekend! It was 3 days bathed in absolutely perfect weather, decorated with fond memories relived, and filled to the brim with laughter and conversation among friends… a camp reunion to remember. Rick and his crew took great care of us by serving wonderful meals, including several fresh yummy desserts baked by Alison. Everyone stayed busy on Saturday hiking to Kilroy’s Cabin, climbing the Alpine Tower, making pottery, shooting archery, and zipping down the water slide at the lake, but perhaps most enjoyably, spending a lot of time relaxing amid the beauty of Rockbrook.
Here is a group photo we took after lunch on Saturday (click the photo for a larger version). We also took lots of photos all weekend long and have published them here: 2011 Alumnae Reunion Photos. Take a look!
Stay tuned to our Alumnae Blog for more updates about the reunion. There are many wonderful moments to recount.
Thanks to everyone who attended the reunion. We always enjoy welcoming former campers back to the “Heart of a Wooded Mountain.” It won’t be long before we do it again!
Each summer we are always thrilled to have campers in attendance whose family members are also former campers. This year we were especially excited as we had three campers during our Third Session who are the great-great granddaughters of Nancy Carrier, Rockbrook’s founder! It was so great seeing their enthusiasm about camp and knowing how proud their great great grandmother would be to see them as campers!
The Spirit of Rockbrook is with you always!
Today we closed Rockbrook’s 90th season and said farewell to our Third session and August Mini session campers. After these weeks together, it’s astounding how close we’ve all become, girls of all ages and staff members sharing experiences and growing together as a family. We’ve laughed together and cheered for each other. We’ve learned together and helped each other. All this proving once again a remarkable thing about Rockbrook: everyone here is part of a loving community, supported, encouraged and appreciated. Being a part of it is a marvelous feeling.
That’s one of best reasons girls develop such a deep love for camp. They not only get to do so many amazingly fun things and live with so many great people, they cherish the feeling of freedom and the regular moments of excitement every day brings. Life at camp is different from the rest of the year. It’s of course missing modern comforts (and technology), but also, strangely, feels more real.
Thank you everyone! Rockbrook is magical because everyone— our great girls, counselors, directors, support staff and families —makes it that way. Thank you for your efforts and support this summer. It’s truly been fantastic!
This, the last full day of camp, is always a strange day of wrapping things up, cherishing moments with friends, and feeling a little melancholy knowing that we’ll all be heading home tomorrow. As we pack and move luggage, there is a certain reluctance to let camp end, even as there are last minute activities and time to be together.
Today we picked up our finished pottery projects. All of the pieces the girls made and glazed during the session have been fired, their shiny colors now leaping up at you from each dish, cup and piggy bank. This is the first time the campers have seen how the kiln has magically transformed their work into these amazing creations, so it’s very exciting for them. Katie and Will, the lead ceramics instructors, take great care to fire everyone’s work and have it available in time to take home. It’s so cool to see how everything turned out!
Down and over at Rockbrook’s Equestrian Center, Audrey and her crew of horseback riding instructors invited everyone down for their “Barn Party.” This is an event with riding demonstrations, mounted games, and decorated horses. Everyone who took horseback riding was invited to participate and plenty of other campers came down to the main lower riding ring just to watch the festivities. The funniest game was “Herding Cows” where three staff members, dressed as cows in white t-shirts and black spots wandered randomly while riders tried to guide them to a pen. It was pretty funny to see and hear (moo!). It was a fun, cheerful event for everyone, complete with chilly popsicles as a surprise treat at the end.
Lunch was a classic camp favorite: grilled cheese sandwiches and Rick’s homemade tomato soup. They also served an awesome fruit salad that included the sweetest pineapple. After lunch, we all assembled in he gym for this session’s production of Schoolhouse Rock, our camp-wide musical. This is a play written just for kids and is based on the popular TV series with its well-known songs: “The Great American Melting Pot,” “Conjunction Junction,” and “A Noun is a Person, Place or Thing.” All three age groups had roles to sing with a couple of solos mixed in with choral numbers. These girls have talent!
Rockbrook’s traditional “Spirit Fire” brought our day to a close just beautifully. As dusk approached, the whole camp, all of the campers and counselors dressed in their uniforms, gathered around a campfire circle by the lake to spend some time reflecting on everything camp has meant to us over these last few weeks. We remembered all the fun events, and those moments where things couldn’t be funnier. We expressed our thanks to one another, recognizing that Rockbrook is wonderful chiefly because it encourages all of us to be our best. It inspires us to help each other enjoy camp together. I suspect that’s one of the main reasons it’s such a friendly place. The Spirit Fire can sometimes be a little emotional too as the girls realize the close friends they’ve made at camp are going home in the morning. Tonight too, there were a few tears, but also plenty of smiles.
 |  |
Following a long tradition, we ended the Spirit Fire by each camper and counselor lighting a small white candle from the central campfire. Sarah and the other Directors first lit their larger candles and everyone else filed by to light their candle. We then spread out around the lake singing a couple of last songs. Standing around the lake, shoulder to shoulder gazing at the candlelight and softly singing with chirping crickets in the background, this is a scene generations of Rockbrook girls have experienced. It’s a truly beautiful moment they will remember for a very long time.
Today Rockbrook welcomed Mark Ardagna and Tara McCarthy from the Leave No Trace organization. They are currently traveling around the country on an e-tour, providing educational programs for young people that use the Leave No Trace principles to promote responsible enjoyment of the outdoors. Rockbrook was very fortunate to have Mark and Tara spend the day with us and present several workshops to our campers. Leave No Trace (LNT) is a nonprofit, educational organization dedicated to “responsible enjoyment and active stewardship of the outdoors by all people.” It advocates seven principles (not so much rules) to minimize negative impact on the environment from outdoor activity weather it be a camping trip in the woods or simply walking your dog in a city park.
Addressing these principles, Mark and Tara discussed with the campers what it means to plan and prepare for outdoor activity, the importance of traveling and camping on durable surfaces, disposing of waste properly, preserving what we find outdoors, safely minimizing campfire impacts, how to respect wildlife, and being considerate to other people when out. They led an observation activity where the girls broke into small groups and studied a small area of the forest enclosed by a circle of string. The girls were surprised just how many different organisms were in such a small area of the forest, and how the more they looked, the more they noticed. Imagining the entire forest, something many, many times larger than their small circle of string, the girls really understood how following the LNT principles can have such a huge impact. Everyone really enjoyed meeting Mark and Tara and we all appreciated learning so much from them.
Hidden in the woods along a short trail behind our gym is Rockbrook’s Alpine Climbing Tower. This is a 50ft-tall high ropes course with almost 100 different climbing challenges available for the girls. They receive their first introduction to rock climbing here by learning about the safety equipment (helmet, harness, shoes, carabiners, etc.), the belay commands to make sure their belayer (the person holding the belay rope) is ready and working, and the important climbing techniques needed to make progress up the tower or rock. Girls of every age group can sign up for climbing and try the tower, from the littlest Juniors to the tallest Seniors. In addition to climbing one of the routes up the Alpine Tower or tackling one of the challenge elements like the “Cargo Net,” the girls can try and climb blindfolded. This of course adds a degree of difficulty to the climbing, but it also tends to calm you down and slow you down, thereby allowing you to concentrate on the climbing instead of how high in the air you are. It’s a strange wonderful feeling and a great climbing exercise. There’s also a trick the girls often do after they climb and as their belayer lowers them on their belay rope. They pause mid-air and flip upside down, “Spiderman” style… in true Rockbrook fashion, “just for the fun of it.”
 |  |
The highlight of the evening, as you may be able to guess from these two photos, was our dance with Camp Carolina for Boys, our two dances I should say because we held two simultaneously: one here at Rockbrook for the younger set, and one over there for our older girls. We’ve found over the years that splitting the girls and boys up by age allows us to adjust the music and the feel of the dance to match the different interests of 13-year-old and an 8-year-old, for example. Some girls are happy to opt out of the dances altogether, so we always provide an easy way for them to do that, to team up for a “dance alternative” activity of some sort involving an art project and snack.
These dances are a lot of fun for the girls, even if they sometimes start out with a few jittery nerves as well. Fortunately, the counselors are there to help with this, to dress a little silly, not making a big deal about their looks, to be carefree about their dance moves (again, goofy is good!), and to encourage group dances. No pressure, just the fun of being together.
Everyone likes taking pictures, but at a place like Rockbrook where there is something wondrous or beautiful at every turn, it’s exciting to try and capture the experience in photography. The photography activity, or what we call “Photo Phun” around here, gives the girls a chance to explore and take— no make pictures all over camp. Jane, the lead instructor, starts them out by explaining how to use the digital cameras and when to select certain settings given what they’re shooting. She teaches them the basic notion of adjusting shutter speed and aperture relative to the amount of available light, for example, and how changing these settings affects the depth of field and motion effects. With this background, the girls will often head out to explore, looking for “cool photos.” To focus that sometimes, Jane will challenge them with a scavenger hunt where each photo has to have a different main color, or a represent a different letter in the alphabet. She’s taught them about stop motion photography and light painting as well. See why we call it “Photo Phun?”
You probably can also see why having a skilled, energetic and enthusiastic activity instructor is so important to the success of something like this. For Photo Phun to really be fun for the campers, Jane has to be both a skilled technician who really knows her stuff about photography, but also a creative teacher who enjoys working with kids. Rockbrook is full of great activity instructors like this. They instinctively know how to take something maybe a little technical, like archery, tennis, horseback riding, or rock climbing for example, and present it to the campers in a way that’s safe and informative, but also inherently fun. There are a few tricks to this that we present during our staff training week, but we also work hard to hire counselors who “get it” instinctively. Pull together a bunch of people like this, young women who love what they do, creatively and imaginatively, and who sincerely love being with kids, and you’ve got a sense of what makes the Rockbrook staff special.
Beyond the scheduled activities offered each day, it’s often the simplest things that mean the most to a girl when she’s here at Rockbrook. Playing tetherball on the hill at twilight, sitting in the sun on a huge rock by the lake, or racing your flip-flop down the creek— these can be the best memories of camp. Of course, the most important ingredient in everything at Rockbrook is the people, the incredible community of spirited folks who share camp together. They form the core of these memories. Certainly Rockbrook is a beautiful place and the activities are excellent, but it’s your cabin mates, your counselors and all the other support staff (Rick, Alison, Clyde, Elaine, Richie, Katie, Will, the many Directors and so many others) that truly make these little moments that add up to be “camp.” The magic of camp starts with people.
Tonight after dinner we sent word for everyone to dress up and come down to the gym for a surprise evening event. The girls must have been saving up costume elements because we saw amazing wacky wigs, goofy glasses, colorful dresses, boots and hats in any combination (There are some great photos of this in the gallery). When they arrived, they found the gym transformed into a game show, with our friend Bill Grimsley ready to host a trivia question and answer game using his podiums and scoring system. He randomly selected contestants from the audience, pitting girls from the same line against each other. Some of the questions were about Rockbrook, and others about pop music, TV and movies. Occasionally he would announce a “challenge round” where for extra points the contestants performed a task like hula hooping, or for the counselors, eating something “not so appetizing” like canned pig brains in gravy. Ugh! Of course, the audience thought this was hilarious. Prizes, like a giant cookie cake, went to cabin groups, and at times when the contestants were stumped and the audience knew an answer, the whole crowd won a little treat. Silly and oh so good!
Juniors dance! The dance activity, which meets in the Lakeview Lodge, is popular for every age group at camp. Partly this is because Lindsey has come up with different, age-appropriate, dances for the Juniors, Middlers and Seniors, but also because the girls are really learning some cool moves. One wall of the Lodge is lined with mirrors making it easy to watch as Lindsey demonstrates a certain dance sequence, and for the group to watch themselves as they try it as well. As they master each dance move and string them together, they’ve got a great show. In fact, during the intermission of the camp play performance, each age group will perform their dance for the rest of the camp.
Today was another day that included several tours of camp, families who visited Rockbrook to tour it so they could see the camp and meet some of the people here— the directors, the counselors and the campers. It’s always a delight for us to show folks around Rockbrook. Families are certainly impressed by the camp’s buildings (the stone lodges for example) and grounds, and they are excited to learn about the wide variety of activities we offer, but it’s particularly nice when they pick up on the feeling of life at Rockbrook. My favorite comment today was, “Everyone seems so happy and friendly.” It’s true; as you walk around camp, you can’t get far without someone greeting you and saying hello. It’s just easy to make friends here, so that makes Rockbrook stand out as being friendly too.
The equestrian staff organized a fun event for the campers that combined, like a lot of things around here, music, dancing, dressing up and a heap of imagination. It also, however, included some horses because it was a pop music “air band” and “lip sync” competition based on different horses playing the parts of pop stars like Katy Perry, Lady GaGa and Taylor Swift. The girls dressed the horses with paint, ribbons, beads, braided tails, glitter and even lipstick, and then came up with a dance for each. The campers then were the backup singers for each artist (horse!) as they performed for the “judges” (Audrey and Sarah). It was very fun for the girls and very cute to see.
After dinner tonight, we played a camp-wide game of “Clue.” Like the board game, there was a mystery to solve that involved the players, in this case all the cabin groups, moving from room to room collecting clues. For us, the cabin groups tromped all over the camp looking for clues. They went to the tennis courts, the gym, the store, the different lodges, and so forth. At each place a character from the game (a counselor dressed as Mrs. White, Professor Plum, Colonel Mustard, etc.) would first require the cabin group to accomplish a task like inventing an RBC cheer, or everyone telling a joke, or untangling a human knot. After successfully completing the challenge task, they were given the clue that would send them on to the next location. Ultimately, after performing all the tasks and solving all the clues/riddles, the groups were led back to the dining hall for prizes and treats. Wow, what a game! It required great cabin group cooperation and imagination, and got the whole camp moving. Big fun on a Saturday night.