Venture into the wild armed with only a knife, flint, canteen, and the clothes on your back. Forage and slay your own food. Find your own water. Strike your own fires. Build your own shelters by hand. And afterward, drink a well-deserved beer or six. Set in California's rugged Siskiyou Mountains, The Edge is an extreme survival camp designed by Mark Wienert Jr., consultant for the Discovery Channel's Man vs. Wild. Based on the adventures of that show's real-life survivor, Bear Grylls, The Edge begins with three days of training in such matters as starting and stifling fires, constructing shelters from found objects, and concocting high-protein meals out of lizards, fish, and roasted bugs. "Scorpions are big on the menu—and grasshoppers, of course." (Actual game animals are off-limits.) Then come three days spent alone in the backcountry—an outing potentially dangerous enough that campers must first provide signed medical-release forms. Wienert's Lifesong Adventures also offers Aboriginal Path, a wilderness martial arts camp.
Joni Kabana
Surfing isn't the boys' club it once was. WB Surf Camp's six-day women's surf camp in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, includes resort accommodations, two daily meals, yoga sessions, and lessons from pro surfers—one for every three campers—in too-warm-for-wetsuits 82-degree waves. Longtime surfer and WBSC founder Rick Civelli is also a marine-science educator and avid environmentalist. "I realized that if you can teach somebody how to love the ocean, you don't even need to teach them how to take care of it, because they'll know," he says. Southern California's Surf Diva Surf School also runs a weeklong women-only surf camp, now in its twelfth year. Traveling to and from the beach in a pretty pink bus, campers eat and sleep in ocean-view university residence halls, "so it's like going back to college," says former competitive surfer Izzy Tihanyi, who co-owns the school.
John Yao / Surf Diva
Its sing-alongs always include show tunes. Its talent show always has drag acts. Its rustic cabins are named "Barney Frank" and "Ellen DeGeneres." And it has its own beauty shop. Now in its fourteenth year, Camp Camp (geddit?) brings together both gay men and lesbians, "which is, unfortunately, very rare in the GLBT community," says co-owner and director Kerry Riffle. Summer-camp staples such as ceramics and canoeing are scheduled alongside classes in makeup, massage, stilt-walking, and crochet. There's also a costume parade, and plenty of Etheridge/ABBA-inflected "gay old campfire" songs. For most of the summer, this lakeside Maine acreage is occupied by a standard teen camp. "When the teens leave," Riffle says, "we move in and gay it up."
Israel Ferraz
Desk jockeys in the throes of midlife crisis have long yearned for a simpler existence out West. At Arizona Cowboy College, six-day immersion courses on how to be a cowboy provide a commitment-free taste of it. Lodging first at an equestrian center, then moving on to real working ranches, campers learn to ride—head instructor Rocco Watchman is a fixture on Country Music Television's Cowboy U—and study subjects like horseshoeing, cattle tying, even bovine inoculation. They then put some of these skills to use during range-riding in the Sonoran Desert—days that start, Wild West-style, with cowboy coffee at dawn. More rough-and-tumble than a dude ranch, Cowboy College is geared toward those seeking to sample the dying range culture before trudging back to their grim nine-to-fives.
Arizona Cowboy College
The camp of the future just might be a huge Manhattan factory-building loft whose five classrooms, five large labs, and wide open spaces equipped with touch-sensitive surfaces, projectors, a ceiling grid, cutting-edge computers sporting video and audio software, a wall-sized interactive screen derived from the one that formed the outer surface of a nearby Frank Gehry-designed building, and telepresencing technology that—thanks to hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of Cisco gear—brings videoconferencing to whole new levels. For one lump sum, campers come and go as they please for an entire month, all day every day until midnight, attending and inventing sessions while creating robots, apps, and art. (For an extra fee, campers can lodge in college dorms.) Running throughout June, ITP Camp for Grownups is a first-ever venture organized by NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. "It's an experiment following the un-conference model: The camp forms as campers need it, and they can add their own activities to the schedule," says program chair Dan O'Sullivan. "It's a knowledge cooperative where people can help each other." Initially, planners expected most campers to be those "who toiled all day for corporate clients. But then more and more people registered who were artists and inventors," O'Sullivan says.
Tom Igoe / NYU
Sandals, it ain't. For those whose idea of summer fun includes being tied naked to a post and flogged with a leather belt, pack your sunscreen and sex toys for Dark Odyssey's annual Leather Retreat. For four fetish-filled days (or the lower-cost weekend-only option) in the woods just north of Baltimore, campers explore a 200-acre site that boasts clothing-optional swimming pools, fully furnished cabins, and "playspaces" stocked with equipment for "almost any type of scene including medical, massage, wax, interrogations, suspension, and all kinds of bondage." The camp includes three meals a day plus midnight snacks, and campers can decorate shared cabins that are organized by orientations and interests such as gay, lesbian, mixed, and—for those who relish equine role-playing, with or without harnesses—pony-play. Cabins are outfitted with "electricity for hair dryers, vibrators, and violet wands." Campers can also sign up to be the subject of a staged "kidnapping," or attend an event called "A Taste of the Extreme," which features fairly terrifying devices to test the limits of the most hardcore bondage enthusiasts.
Odyssey Events, LLC
Walk in, pirouette out. For beginners and more experienced dancers, Russian Ballet Camp's adult session in the Catskills provides accommodations and classes with bilingual Russian Academy of Theater Arts (GITIS)-trained teachers in pointe, character dance, historical dance, variations, and partnering. Camp cofounder Julia Vorobyeva is a Bolshoi grad and former Russian State Ballet principal dancer who is currently a member of the New Jersey Ballet Company. RBC also offers adult sessions in Moscow.
www.russianballetcamp.com
From Indiana Jones to Jurassic Park, Hollywood loves an archeologist. Unearth some of this glamour while working alongside professionals under the hot Colorado sun. The weeklong Excavation Camp, hosted by the nonprofit Crow Canyon Archaeological Center at Hovenweep National Monument, includes food and lodging at the center along with history lessons, lab sessions, and days spent outdoors sifting for arrowheads, stone and bone tools, and pottery shards. This summer's camps will focus on ancestral Pueblo Indian settlements that thrived between 1100 and 1240 C.E., says CCAC's Joyce Alexander: "Every now and then, you'll come across an entire pot. Whatever you find, you look at it and wonder who held it last."
The Crow Canyon Archaeological Center
Best known for emceeing Woodstock and inspiring a Ben & Jerry's flavor, venerable hippie clown Wavy Gravy helms Winnarainbow, a circus-arts camp whose participants learn juggling, aerial arts, stilt-walking, stage makeup, storytelling, mime, mask-making, improv, and clowning from a staff of professional performers. On a sprawling rural site in California's Mendocino County, campers share large tepees, swim in a 3-acre lake with a 350-foot waterslide, and perform in flamboyant costumes. Now in its 24th year, the six-day adult camp includes three daily meals with vegetarian and "slimming" options. Gravy offers "big fun," as he puts it—or your money back.
Camp Winnarainbow
It's not just for teenaged Double Dare winners anymore. Headquartered at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and now in its 28th year, Space Camp promises to replicate the astronaut experience as closely as is possible without actual liftoff. Three- and six-day Space Academy courses for adults feature Rocket Park, Space Museum, and giant-screen IMAX Spacedome theater jaunts, along with mock missions and orange-jumpsuited sessions in training simulators such as the 3G centrifuge, high-performance jet simulators, 1/6th-Gravity Trainer, Underwater Astronaut Trainer, and—for that spinning-in-space sensation—the Multi-Axis Trainer.
www.spacecamp.com
