A Summer Like No Other!

“A Summer Like No Other.” This is what we affectionately have called the summer of 2020 - nothing that we expected, nothing we were prepared for and yet everything that we never knew we needed at Camp Highlander.

Nothing like we expected, nothing we were prepared for

The life of a camp director looks basically like this… work incredibly hard for nine months so that you can enjoy three months of fun, friendship and memories. Preparation, planning and purposeful priorities are 95% of the success of each summer. It is often surprising to people that the hardest work we face as a team is the nine months preparing for summer, not the summer itself. Sure the summer is full of long days, little sleep and lots of responsibility, but there is so much joy, laughter and personal fulfillment that makes it worth the hard work.

So what about when the nine months of hiring, recruiting campers, planning programs, working on capital projects, investing in camp improvements is over, only to discover the summer you have been dreaming of can’t happen. Nothing could have prepared us for the financial, mental and emotional loss of 2020.

Everything we never knew we needed

After our traditional summer was cancelled, the silence on camp was deafening and our hearts were broken. The reality of not having campers on camp in 2020 was too much to bare, and we immediately started to brainstorm a safe and healthy solution to bringing the joy, love and laughter back to the mountain. This is how the Family Retreat was created.

Family is at the heart of all that we do at Camp Highlander, and this Family Retreat felt like the perfect opportunity for our families to escape the reality of our world to the magic of Old Forge Mountain. We spent weeks developing protocols, safety procedures, training staff and ensuring safety for our camp families. We expected the summer would look different having parents on camp, social distancing and wearing masks, but we were so excited to have life on the mountain.

While we knew WE needed camp like never before, we never realized how powerful the camp experience would be for our camp parents. We witnessed so many beautiful moments shared between parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters. The snuggles at campfire and family movie night seemed to melt away the stress of our world. The laughter at activites was the perfect cure to the loneliness we felt for so many months. The gift of camp was never more valued than this summer, when our hearts were aching for connection, freedom and outdoor adventure.

Highlander has hosted Family Camp since 2007 and this weekend quickly became a waiting list only, sold out camp every summer after. The fast-paced, jam-packed weekend on camp was a family favorite, but the Family Retreat proved to be even better than the Family Camp weekend. The retreat offered more activities with a longer class time for more play, more flexibility in schedule, a slower pace to the day and even more fun for our families.

We learned many valuable lessons about how to run a healthy, safe camp experience in a pandemic. We learned that social distancing gives us the gift of space, meal restrictions allowed us to provide amazing customer service by meeting dietary needs and that extra time was an unexpected blessing for rest and true rejuvenation for our families. We could never have imagined how special these four weeks would be at camp, and we are so grateful for the lessons learned this summer that will better prepare us for 2021 and summers to come! We can’t wait for Family Retreat 2021 and hope you and your family will join us!