How a Minnesota Summer Camp Experience Shapes Lifelong Skills for Boys

The profound impact of a Minnesota summer camp experience starts in its physical location. In 1934, Cap Endres recognized the site as the perfect environment for boys to escape the heat of the city and revel in the freedom and beauty of a Minnesota summer. His vision proved prescient, and Camp Chippewa’s wooded peninsula has remained a sanctuary for boys in the 90 years since. Gone are the sounds of traffic and heat of the city, replaced by a fresh lake breeze and the smell of pines. This fall, a camper from Houston said to me, “I can do everything I want at Camp! In Texas it is too hot to even play basketball outside. I just have to stay inside in the A.C.” Sure enough, the balance to Minnesota’s long months of frigid winter is a perfect summer. Days are sunny, the lakes beckon to be jumped in, and the nights are cooled by a gentle lake breeze freshening the screened-in cabins. It is as if Minnesota was designed for boys to be outside all summer long. As Richard Louv explores in Last Child in the Woods, time spent outside – or even just looking out a window – serves as “a significant factor in protecting the psychological well-being of children.” Given the prevalence of mental illness in young people, time in nature is more important than ever.

Freedom to explore and play with the outdoor environment through the senses in [children’s] own space and time is essential for healthy development.

– Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods

Camp Chippewa’s property occupies an entire peninsula between Cass and Buck Lake. Many of the trees are over a hundred years old, towering over the pine needle-blanketed forest floor. What is it like for a camper? Their entire immediate world – friends, events, hobbies, meals, homes – are a short walk (or, for many, an even shorter run) apart. The close-knit community that results from this proximity delivers boys the ample face-to-face interactions and opportunities to play that are crucial for social development.

Minnesota summer camps also provide children with the feeling of awe, and they do so through an embarrassment of natural wonders. The Chippewa National Forest holds the highest density of nesting bald eagles in the continental US. On an almost daily basis, campers at Camp Chippewa will pause whatever it is they are doing to stare up at an eagle soaring above them. Beginning and ending each day with a cleansing dip in Cass Lake, campers enjoy first-row seats to the sun rising and setting over the miles of glittering water, the sky afire with color. On many nights, glittering stars blanket the sky, the Milky Way impossibly bright compared to the sky home in the city. Most mystical of all is the call of the loon. Lying in bed in their cabins not far from the lakeshore, campers can hear the hauntingly beautiful cry of loons echoing through the trees. It is a sound that is emblematic of the Northwoods and impossible to forget. A parent of three campers living in Mexico plays loon calls on a speaker each night before his sons go to sleep. They say that is the single sound that reminds them most of their summer camp home.

Every summer we see boys step off of the bus into the forest at Camp Chippewa for the first time. They are unsure, peering around at their unfamiliar surroundings. In their first three days, they try all of camp’s activities and doing so learn their way around Camp. They have picked favorite places to play, read, and relax. In those woods, time flies. Far too quickly, the bus returns to Camp for the journey back to the airport, but now, Camp Chippewa feels intimately familiar. Those woods feel like home for those boys, and always will.

“Nature – the sublime, the harsh, and the beautiful – offers something that the street or gated community or computer game cannot. Nature presents the young with something so much greater than they are; it offers an environment where they can easily contemplate infinity and eternity.”

– Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods