Hear from our instructors: we’re exited to see you soon!
We look forward to seeing you soon! Enrolled students, you can log in to access all of your travel information specific to your trip. You can also learn lots of tips and hints about flying or driving to Adventure Treks on our Traveling to Your Adventure Webpage, which features our latest video:
Dmac and Niki Coordinating the Summer
Adventure Treks Instructor Orientation 2011 starts today! We have just completed our 2011 Trip leader retreat and I wanted to tell you all how excited I am for these wonderful and capable folks to lead your children this summer. We have spent the past five days in a large cabin near Mt Hood in Oregon. This is an incredible group of leaders. Let me begin with our four regional Directors, Stephen Gardiner, Ben Mirkin, Niki Gaeta, and Liddell Shannon. In this group are three Masters degrees and a Doctorate! They are on average 33 years old and together they share 35 years of combined Adventure Treks experience (average tenure 8.5 years). Next are the wonderful trip leaders. Our 14 trip leaders average 27 years in age with an average tenure of 5.5 years each at Adventure Treks. Obviously there is a lot of collective Adventure Treks wisdom to be shared within this group!
During the retreat, we focused on how to both lead and manage a trip and how to use your personal style to best advantage. Several discussions focused on Read more
Greetings from 30,000 feet.
Though our first students won’t arrive until June 22 and despite the fact that we have been working with school programs since May, Adventure Treks officially begins today.
Today, our senior staff, consisting of our trip leaders and regional directors begin a five day retreat. This is an exceptional group of folks with years of Adventure Treks experience, several of our trip leaders began their AT career as students. Five years of Adventure Treks tenure is the norm here and several staff have spent more than seven years with us.
Here we get ourselves on the same page, share tips for success, revisit all the details that make an Adventure Treks program successful, examine trends in today’s youth and youth development, revisit policies and procedures and prepare for the massive job of staff orientation which begins on June 10.
It’s also a social time. This group of folks truly loves one another. We have been together for a long time. This is time they have together before they change their focus to training and leading new instructors and leading and role modeling our students.
Creating a strong community of our senior staff sets the basis for the rest of the summer. We can’t facilitate a strong and caring community, where students become their best selves; if their leaders aren’t doing the same. When our senior staff exudes genuine warmth, a culture of kindness, a culture of competence and strong communication, it’s picked up by our new instructors and ultimately our students.
We have been preparing for summer 2011 since last November. We have done all in our power to make it the best summer ever. It’s game time now… and we are very excited.
We can’t wait to meet your child in the days and months ahead.
Best regards,
John Dockendorf
As I fly to the west coast to begin the Adventure Treks summer, three of my own children begin their own camp experiences. Everyone is excited and it certainly gives me the opportunity to put myself in the shoes of the Adventure Treks parents whom I serve. My two oldest daughters, Audrey and Ella, ages 9 and 10 are headed off for three weeks to Camp Green Cove. My own camp experience began at the brother camp to Green Cove in 1972. My youngest daughter, Ava who is 7 begins an 8 day overnight at Gwynn Valley, a wonderful camp which specializes in younger children. Charlie my four-year old is bemoaning the fact that his is left at home with Mom… too young to qualify for even day camp.
We have had many conversations in the past week as they prepare for camp with nervous excitement. My advice to them is: Have a lot of fun, represent your family well, help out, be your best self, be kind to everyone, make the most of every minute of the experience, stay safe and embrace new challenges and people. I am excited to hear their many stories when we all get together again.
I also get the chance to reflect on what Jane and I want from their experiences. Camp certainly comes with a big financial sacrifice, but we also know it’s the best money we can spend on our kids. First we want our kids to be safe. And all we can do is hope that everyone will make good decisions. It’s out of our hands. We also hope they will have a lot of fun, they have worked hard at school this year and they need a fun break. . We are excited for them to have their own experience, away from our micro managing. It’s time for them to experience standing on their own, though we hope it will come with careful guidance from their counselors. We’d be delighted if they stepped up a little in self responsibility which might translate into helping out more at home. That might be too much wishful thinking!
We are ecstatic that we can temporarily suspend our constant battles with all that we find inappropriate with the Disney Channel and pop radio. (And these battles only get more intense as kids grow older) I can’t wait for my kids to experience three weeks without the internet, pop culture, computer games and TV! We are excited for our kids to be outside, challenge themselves, have constant adventures on their personal frontier and live simply and healthily. We are eager for them to meet great role models, folks a lot “hipper” than we are, but folks we desperately hope will communicate our values. And we hope they will make a lot of new friends, friends from all over the country and friends whose parents have raised them with similar values.
As you look forward to your child’s Adventure Treks experience, I’m certain you share many of the same goals for your kids. At Adventure Treks, we want to be your partner. Parents can’t raise children by themselves. We promise to use the Adventure Treks’ opportunity to help your kids grow. We want your experience with us to be as successful for you and your kids as I hope camp will be for my kids.
We look forward to being of service this summer.
Best regards,
John Dockendorf
The research on the benefits of camp is finally coming into its own. For many years, and family generations, it has been presumed that an activities-oriented camp has a positive – and long lasting – effect on youth. The American Camping Association recently concluded a multi-year study to quantify these subjective impressions.
Here is a synopsis of their findings:
- Youth who attend summer camps naturally experience psychological curative factors that provide healthy developmental growth (Durall).
- Camps provide a break from negative experiences and stressors that youth experience in their daily lives. The camp environment is one characterized by happiness and inclusion that promotes harmony, pride, hope and courage. As a result, campers experience emotional and social developmental growth (Durall).
- Camps provide the opportunity for participants to experience a sense of belonging, acceptance and generosity. This experience encourages campers to share these same feelings of cohesion with others when they return home (Durall)
- Campers learn to be altruistic at camp. By giving of themselves for the benefit of others, campers are able to develop a positive self-esteem (Durall).
- Good camps create an atmosphere where the struggles and hard-times of every participant are met with consolation, comfort and hope by positive role models that foster positive change in the participants (Mary Faeth Chenery).
- The outcomes of a good camp experience (positive attitudes and caring social behaviors) are the result of campers being removed from parents and technology, participating in community and living with positive role models (Mary Faeth Chenery).
- Parents, camp staff and children report significant growth in self-esteem, independence, leadership friendship skills, social comfort, peer relationships, adventure and exploration, environmental awareness, values and decisions, and spirituality (American Camp Association)
The study also cites that, “there are four dimensions that create a distinct supportive environment at camp”:
- The outdoor setting: has natural curative, comforting effects that encourage a sense of wonder and gratefulness for nature.
- Campers are accepted as individuals: praised and loved; bullying and put-downs are not allowed.
- Positive norms and expectations of behavior: create an environment that is psychologically safe for campers to take risks with new activities and feelings and learn from failure
- Stability and structure of camp: for campers who know that camp continues to exist while they are back home develop a sense of belonging and community where they can feel secure. (Mary Faeth Chenery)
And, as many parents who attended camp themselves would attest, camp has its own unique properties:
- [Camp is] a sustained experience which provides a creative, recreational, and educational opportunity in group living in the out-of-doors. It utilizes trained leadership and the resources of the natural surroundings to contribute to each camper’s mental, physical, social, and spiritual growth (American Camping Association, Inc.).
- Camp programs are child development experiences. The importance of experiencing the camp setting is more important than ever. Camps protect large areas of natural landscape and foster environmental awareness that cannot be appreciated through hundreds of television channels and video games (Miller).
- The intensity of 24-hour programming makes camp an inherently powerful experience (Mary Faeth Chenery).
- Camps nurture a powerful sense of self-worth in young people (Chenery).
Closer to home, our New England regional director, Ben Mirkin, is pursuing a PhD in Education at the University of New Hampshire. His dissertation is a multi-year study of the positive social outcomes of Adventure Treks. While his data is not yet ready to be published, we are excited to participate and further the growing academic information regarding the positive outcomes of attending camp. And so far the results are encouraging — Mirkin has already clearly demonstrated that there are huge positive social outcomes from attending Adventure Treks.
We are getting very excited to get to know your child and facilitate an incredible and indelible experience this summer.
Best regards,
Works Cited
American Camp Association. Directions: Youth Development Outcomes of the Camp Experience. Martinsville, Indiana: American Camp Association, 2005.
American Camping Association, Inc. 5 May 2008. American Camp Association Web site. 15 February 2010 .
—. Accreditation Process Guide. Monterey: Healthy Learning, 2010.
Chenery, Mary Faeth. I Am Somebody: The Messages and Methods of Organized Camping for Youth Development. Durham, North Carolina: Human Development Research Associates, 1991.
Durall, John K. “Curative Factors in the Camp Experience.” Camping Magazine January-February 1997: 25-27.
Mary Faeth Chenery, Ph.D. “Explaining the Value of Camp.” Camping Magazine May-June 1994: 20-25.
Miller, John A. “What is Camp?” Camping Magazine March-April 1997: 7-8.
While you’re getting ready for your trip, here are two videos that might help you pack.
You can also log in to access your trip-specific packing list on our Forms and Documents page
We’re looking forward to a great 2011, and that always involves lots of stories and memories of last summer! We hope you’ll enjoy a trip down memory lane on Flickr:
See your 2010 Trip Photo Album
*Want photos? Just right click on the photo and view the largest size. Save to your computer and print as many as you like.
As the director of Adventure Treks, one of my many jobs is to stay in touch with trends affecting teenagers, the environment, education and the outdoor industry.
I’d like to share some of the better books I have read (and am reading) this year, so you can see what is affecting my thinking as the Adventure treks staff facilitates the best possible learning and growing summer outdoor experience for your child.
The View from Lazy Point by Carl Safina
I would have missed this great book had not an AT parent so loved this read that she mailed our office a copy…
The countdown has begun, and we are eager for your arrival! New gear is arriving in our office on a daily basis: new hats and shirts, backpacks and sleeping bags, 100 new Big Agnes tents, a new trailer for the Blue Ridge trips, and much, much more.
Click for a larger image.
We can’t wait to see our many returning students (our return rate exceeded 60% again this year) and we are very excited to get to know our many, many new students. You’ll receive more information about your trip (and about your tripmates) as your arrival day gets closer. Find out where our 2011 students are coming from – see our map!
We have almost completed staff hiring and are delighted to once again have an 80% instructor return rate. We are excited about the superbly qualified new instructors who will be joining our outstanding team of veterans. This is an inspirational group of mentors, role models and friends. Many instructors will have been with Adventure Treks for over 5 years and several were former students themselves. We’ll announce all of the 2011 instructors in a future blog!
Please let us know how we can help you get ready for what promises to be an incredible summer together. See you soon!