Our History and Approach
Nature Camps is a summer camp for children and youth aged 5-16. For over 45 years, Nature Camps (and its predecessor, Don Webb's Nature Camp) has focused on taking children and young people into the woods, fields, streams, and trails in a real and personal way.
Nature Camps specializes in environmental education and adventure education, mixed-age learning, and offering children the delight of picking activities of their choice each day. All activities take place in the attentive and engaging care of counselors trained in Nature Camps’ values and approach to educating children and youth.
This unique approach allows our programs and activities to be built on the strengths and joys that children and youth bring and discover. The results are an unhurried, relaxing, and adventuresome summer camp where children find success and joy while cultivating an understanding of and an appreciation for the natural world, themselves, and others in a joyful and healthy camp community.
Our values and philosophies are rooted in diverse influences including Quakerism, environmentalism in the spirit of John Muir and Rachel Carson, and the writings of an extraordinary six-year old girl named Opal Whiteley whose turn-of-the-century diary is dear to the heart of Nature Camps.
Nature Camps envisions and offers another kind of peace. When we contemplate the beauty of Earth, we find reserves of strength and peace that will endure forever. The endless woods, the meandering streams—with all their interesting sounds, and delightful places to explore—offer an enchanted place for everyone. Outdoors under blue skies and billowing white cumulus clouds or singing in the rain, everyone soaks up the beauty of nature and of one another.
We wish for each person an enduring sense of wonder and a lifelong instinct for the beauty and magic that is all about us in the natural world—bringing forth refreshing peacefulness.