Camp Notes .07

I hadn’t set foot on Cheley’s property since 2002.

Cheley is where my camp story starts, though it’s not where it lives. My father grew up going to boy scout camp in upstate New York, and those summers are still so close to the surface that a campfire story can bring him to tears. So for me, spending a summer at sleepaway camp was a given. We lived in a tiny town in rural Colorado, population 2,000, where summers stretched out long and empty, camp was the escape pod.

Cheley was the obvious choice: the famous one, the Colorado institution. What my parents didn’t quite clock was that they’d sent me from the mountains to more mountains. Two summers in, they heard about a camp in Maine - all girls, all summer, on a lake - and that was that. Maine got the rest of my childhood.

So I returned this summer as something between an alum and a stranger. Which turned out to be the right way to see it.

Cheley is a true western camp. Horses are the backbone of the culture here. Girls learn to saddle, groom, and ride, then take the horses out on overnight pack trips. Riding was never my thing, even as a camper. But that’s the odd gift of coming back with a camera: I don’t have to love the horses. I just have to love the girls who do.

And there was so much to love this week. Girls braiding flowers into their horses’ tails. Girls setting off on a hike in tutus. Girls screaming and yelling for absolutely no reason at all, the purest sound camp makes. A counselor who gave up her free time to braid twenty campers’ hair, one head at a time.

At Cheley, some girls choose to stay on the main property; others opt for a second site seventeen miles out (Girls Trails End), where the accommodations are old covered wagons and the experience gets grittier. I spent a lot of my time out there. The remoteness creates intimacy and with less to do and fewer people to do it with, the girls turn toward each other.

This summer I’m photographing more on analogue than digital, relishing in the patience required to nail lighting and framing. Last summer I split between digital and analogue but deeply regretted not shooting enough on analogue. Because of this I will be sharing less photos along the journey but hopefully many more as the weeks go by and my film starts coming in.

Thank you to new subscribers, I’m excited to have you along with me for this journey.

On to camp #2.

xx,
Amanda