Stormy the Nature Specialist.

Garter snake hatchlings, 2010.

The very first post of this blog was my story before I was a camp counselor.  It’s my background and why I would ever want to pick a camp to work at for a summer, let alone aspire to make a career of it.  

My second summer after starting college I wanted to take online classes, but I also wanted to live on the other side of the state instead of moving to my parent’s new house several states from all my friends.  I moved in temporarily with a friend, and needed to find a job before settling for the entire summer.  I came across an advert on Craigslist (of all places to advertise for camp!) and remembered how happy I was at camp as a child.  I applied and was hired as a counselor and CIT (counselor in training) director.  I got a quick tour of camp a week before staff training and felt it would be an excellent summer.  

And it was!  It was an incredibly small staff, the 19 of us (including the kitchen staff and two rangers!) and a small amount of girls each week, but it worked. There were highs and lows, but it was a great summer to remember.  

Why did I want to become a Nature Specialist after that summer?  That goes back to my childhood camping days.  At my camp there was a nature director named “Nature Boy” and he taught me more each summer about everything, nature and art and books and otherwise, than I could have ever imagined as a kid. He was one of the handful of counselors I wanted to see summer after summer.  As the youngest child, daughter of a veterinarian, and generally outdoorsy girl I loved everything outside.  The bugs, the trees, the animals – everything.  As a child I had a growing collection of “found” items like rabbit jaws and deer antlers and skulls.  Where some found it creepy, I found it immensely interesting to learn about them.  

Let’s go back to my first summer as a camp counselor – there were so few of us that we all did our own programming.  Nature, Art, Sports, all of it was done by unit staff, no directors or specialists.  We did well, we had good supplies, but I really felt like I couldn’t guarantee a quality program for every unit, I could only do it for mine, and I felt that wasn’t fair.  The next year in school I took more science classes and applied at a new camp for the Nature Specialist position. 

Even now as a Program Director I have a deep soft spot for nature programming because kids are really out of tune to what’s outside these days. Oh, and I have a real love for teaching on night hikes.


-Stormy