“I was less than a year out of college…when I had the chance to purchase the camp… the elderly widowed camp director—who had been ready to retire and sell Gold Arrow Camp for several years—contacted me,” wrote Audrey Monke in Happy Campers: 9 Summer Camp Secrets for Raising Kids who Become Thriving Adults. She has gone on to serve as Gold Arrow’s owner/operator for over thirty years.
Gold Arrow Camp is a summer camp located on Huntington Lake in California, where since 1933 children ages 6-14 have made fun, lifelong memories while participating in non-competitive recreational activities like wake boarding, horseback riding, and rock climbing. Monke says: “In the 1980s, while my Stanford University classmates dressed in suits and pursued internships at Oracle and Coca-Cola, I spent my final three summers of college working as a camp counselor at Gold Arrow Camp.”
One of the main attractions of a camp like Gold Arrow is that it is a haven, a safe place where campers can relax and be themselves, “experience living in the moment, enjoying each other’s company, challenging themselves, and figuring out who they truly are and what they really like.”
Through her adventures as a camp counselor, Monke realized she wanted a different path from her classmates: “Being outdoors and chatting around the campfire with my campers and fellow counselors, I felt a sense of belonging. I enjoyed being with people who were unconcerned about appearance, accomplishments, or material belongings… Having been on the academic treadmill of a college-preparatory high school followed by attending a competitive college…I had never stepped off the prescribed path long enough to figure out what I was actually interested in.”
She enjoyed the rustic, supportive, familial, noncompetitive community of camp life, and the spectacular backdrop of the Sierra National Forest. “I had found what I was meant to do,” wrote Monke. “At a very young age, before I was married or had children…I took on the weighty responsibility of taking care of other people’s children… It’s been an incredible ride.”
