Camp Widjiwagan in Ely, Minn., was blanketed by wildfire smoke in July.
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On a beautiful summer day in July, seven-year-old Penelope is turning into a mermaid.
“I like playing mermaid,” she says, with her feet dangling in the swimming pool at Beauvoir Summer Camp in Washington, D.C.
“Like, I’m a human, and then I turn into a mermaid and I use one of the pool noodles as a dolphin, and I play with my friends,” she says.
It’s Friday, which means free swim, and the kids are splashing around on blue kickboards and sinking miniature torpedo toys. In the kiddie pool, the littlest campers jump in and show off their twists and turns with screeches of delight.
Penelope and her best friend Sam, also 7, say pool time is their favorite activity at this camp. NPR is only using the kids’ first names because they are minors.
The pool was empty during the last free swim. Campers spent the day indoors to avoid hazardous air quality from wildfire smoke. And, earlier in the summer, the heat forced them to cut down their outside play time, says Drew Mackay, the director of auxiliary and summer programs at Beauvoir School.
This summer has brought no shortage of extreme weather and wildfires across the country. In northern Minnesota and Canada, fires devastated communities and caused dangerous smoke to blanket large swaths of the Midwest and Northeastern U.S. Deadly floods prompted disaster declarations in parts of Texas. And an extreme heat wave in July was dubbed the “new normal” for July Fourth celebrations.
As the climate warms due in large part to the burning of fossil fuels, research shows that heat waves, droughts, hurricanes, and floods have become more intense and more frequent.
Families are feeling it. Further north in Pennsylvania, Lauren Smith and her kids have had a summer full of dangerous weather. First, it was the extreme heat that disrupted the normal activities at a soccer camp, with temperatures reaching almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit on a big, treeless field. Then, wildfire smoke kept the family in the house. When the nonstop rain hit, it was almost a blessing.
“The kids are going crazy in the house — that’s it, we’re going for a walk,” she remembers thinking. “Then, they’re like, ‘It’s starting to rain.’ I’m like, ‘Doesn’t matter. It’s an adventure.’ “
Smith added that, surprisingly, her kids have enjoyed helping her declutter the house. They also took up baking and painting acorns. But on the few days of sunny bliss, she can’t get them back inside, she said. “The summer is just like a waiting game — just waiting to do some stuff outside,” Smith says.
This generation of school-aged kids has already dealt with the isolation of COVID-19, the global pandemic that forced students to work from home. Now, they’re up against extreme weather.
Throughout the summer months, parents scramble to get kids out of the house. But with weather conditions that make outdoor fun not just impossible, but dangerous, parents, summer camp leaders and school-aged kids told NPR how they’re experiencing the effects of the changing climate.
“It’s changed my summer a lot,” Penelope, the mermaid, says. She describes climate change as “the areas around you are just, like, changing all around you all the time.”
Summer camps confront ‘a new reality’
For many kids, summer is an around three-month break from school routines and homework.
A 2024 Gallup survey found that 55% of U.S. parents reported their school-aged kids attend at least one structured summer program. Henry DeHart, the CEO of the American Camp Association, which provides resources and accreditations to hundreds of camps across the country, says the skills kids learn at camp — independence, problem-solving, and teamwork — will equip them for the future, especially in an increasingly AI-centric world.
“Kids need camp now more than ever,” DeHart says.
While dealing with the whims of weather is nothing new for camps, and accredited ones are required to have thorough safety plans, DeHart says the frequency of these extreme weather events is noticeable.
In the past few decades, he says, “A camp might have had three or four or five days with the heat index over 105 [Fahrenheit]”. Now they may have eight or 10.”
The impacts on specific camps across the country are varied. In Ohio, Ellen Watkins directs Miakonda Day Camp on a 160-acre site for Scouting groups. When wildfire smoke filled the air, they were able to move inside and provided masks.
While inside, they did swim exercises on dry land and pulled out an inflatable archery set. She said she got many comments from parents thanking them for finding a way to keep the camp running.
“Was it stressful to have campers inside of buildings all day when they would rather be outside? Yes. Did it stress our program? No, we were fine,” Watkins said.
But for some camps, switching up activities to deal with the smoke wasn’t an option. That was the case in Ely, Minn., at Camp Widjiwagan. The camp, which hosts over 700 kids each summer and leads programs across North America, evacuated in July.
The camp drew considerable attention after a haunting photo showing 19 of its canoes under water was widely seen online. Ben Hoffman, the camp’s executive director, said they decided to submerge the historic canoes that were too fragile to move to safety.
“This is a pivotal moment,” Hoffman said. “We have never sunk canoes at camp.”
Camp Widjiwagan submerged some of their canoes in lake waters to protect them from the wildfires.
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YMCA of the North/YMCA of the North
Eleanor Pitts, a 17-year-old camper at Widjiwagan, went on the camp’s 26 day backpacking trip in Willmore Wilderness Park in Alberta, Canada, starting in June with four other girls and a counselor.
“It was an experience like no other,” Pitts, who has attended the camp for seven summers, said. “We become the closest group of people. They were genuinely my family by the end.”
The last day of the trip was supposed to be a homecoming back at the base camp in Ely with a huge celebration of hot dogs and watermelon and campfire skits. Her group found out the day before that the wildfire smoke would force them to miss that last day. ” ‘Wait, so this is our last night?’ ” Pitts said she and her fellow campers asked their counselor. “And we all just started crying.”
Pitts said it brought the reality of climate change right before her eyes. Beyond the wildfires, throughout the trip, her counselor pointed out flooded rivers in Canada because of extreme heat melting snow runoff.
“Going forward, trips are just going to be different because of this climate change situation,” Pitts said. “It hasn’t affected me until I’m seeing it right now and I’m just like: now it’s too late.”
In D.C., at Beauvoir Summer Camp, summer programs director Mackay said adapting to extreme weather is now part of the summer camp job. “For us, it’s a new reality,” he said.
The kids, on the other hand, are just worried about getting as much pool time as possible.
