Picture this: it’s 88 degrees and you're hanging by the pool with your new camp bestie. You’re eating some chips since you’ve been swimming for over an hour. The pool provided some sweet relief from the blazing sun. You don’t have a single worry because it's summer! At summer camp! Then you start to wonder, what camp does after the summer ends. Perhaps the camp is ghosted and nothing is to be seen. Perhaps it all just disappears  in thin air only reappearing June 1st.

Camp is truly a magical experience for everyone involved, however camp does exist in the timeline outside of summer. It might not be exactly what you expect. In summer the main goal is customer satisfaction. This is making sure campers are having the time of their lives and nobody is in danger. Counselors are doing their job correctly, and well. Everyone is fed and relatively happy. The summer job is making sure all activities go well, and if any traveling is involved everyone knows the rules and keeps safe. This takes a lot of people so many camps will hire a large amount of summer staff. 

Summer staff are what it sounds like, people who work at camps in the summer! This ranges from counselors in training (CIT), counselors and support staff. Support staff isn’t as well known but they do the dirty gritty jobs that aren’t always in front of scenes. They run the camp store, clean the bathrooms, and direct games. This a a more behind the scenes look at camp in the summer.

However, when it’s not summer it is just as busy. There’s just as much work in the off season as there is in the summer days. Summer camps biggest job is hiring staff for the upcoming summer. This means going to colleges and highschools. When going they recruit people to apply and work having the best summer ever. Hiring means advertising and putting up signs. Once people apply camp has to go through the applications, hold interviews, do background checks. So much goes into making sure the campers have the best counselors.

Some camps hold retreats at their camp. So a place can rent their cabins out and host a fun weekend getaway! This means you could even potentially be at camp in the off season. So much prep work is done in the off season of camp as well. Touching up paint on cabins, tweaking the camp food menu to be even better than the year before, and planning for new and more exciting things for the next summer. Camp makes new games, assigns cabins, and makes sure maximum fun will be had.

Even though it’s not summer, it is still camp. Just not in the way you think. Camp looks vastly different without its campers. It’s hollow and empty. There’s no laughter to bounce off the dining hall walls. The leaves are gone and sometimes it snows. Yet the summer depends on the off season. So you may wish camp lasted 24/7 this wouldn’t ensure the best week of your life. Camp is fun in every season, but we can all agree it’s most fun in the summer season!

Photography provided by : Elle Groff