Field Camp

05/09/2026

There are camps that promise nonstop excitement, camps that promise specialization, camps that promise technology and polish and endless programming. Field Camp has always aimed for something a little different. We try to create the kind of summer many parents remember from their own childhoods: long days outside, close friendships, tired kids at the dinner table, and the feeling that summer was genuinely lived rather than simply scheduled.

For almost three decades now here in Charlottesville, we’ve built our camp around a simple idea: children thrive when they spend meaningful time outdoors with people who know them well. So we swim nearly every day. We head out on adventures. We play games that become camp traditions. We get muddy sometimes. We come home exhausted in the best possible way. And over the course of a summer, kids gradually become more confident, more independent, and more connected to one another.

Field Camp is intentionally a little old-fashioned in spirit. We work hard to know every camper and family personally. Our counselors are thoughtful and engaged. The atmosphere is energetic and fun, but also deeply caring. We want camp to feel like a community kids are excited to return to year after year.

Today, Field Camp includes four different programs. Our main day camp remains the heart of what we do, but older campers can also take part in our more ambitious adventure program, our weeklong residential camp experiences, and our weeklong backpacking trips. Each program is designed to give kids increasing independence, challenge, and memorable outdoor experiences as they grow older.

Some sessions are already full, but as of mid-May we still have availability in many programs.

If you think your child might enjoy a summer filled with swimming, woods, friendship, adventure, campfires, laughter, and the sort of happy exhaustion that comes from being outside all day, we’d love to have you take a look.

www.fieldcamp.net

05/09/2026

Camp Plan

05/08/2026

There are camps that promise nonstop excitement, camps that promise specialization, camps that promise technology and polish and endless programming. Field Camp has always aimed for something a little different. We try to create the kind of summer many parents remember from their own childhoods: long days outside, close friendships, tired kids at the dinner table, and the feeling that summer was genuinely lived rather than simply scheduled.
For almost three decades here in Charlottesville, we’ve built our camp around a simple idea: children thrive when they spend meaningful time outdoors with people who know them well. So we swim nearly every day. We head out on adventures. We play games that become camp traditions. We get muddy sometimes. We come home exhausted in the best possible way. And over the course of a summer, kids gradually become more confident, more independent, and more connected to one another.
Field Camp is intentionally a little old-fashioned in spirit. We work hard to know every camper and family personally. Our counselors are thoughtful and engaged. The atmosphere is energetic and fun, but also deeply caring. We want camp to feel like a community kids are excited to return to year after year.
Today, Field Camp includes four different programs. Our main day camp remains the heart of what we do, but older campers can also take part in our more ambitious adventure program, our residential camp experiences, and our weeklong backpacking trips. Each program is designed to give kids increasing independence, challenge, and memorable outdoor experiences as they grow older.
Some sessions are already full, but as of mid-May we still have availability in many programs.
If you think your child might enjoy a summer filled with swimming, woods, friendship, adventure, campfires, laughter, and the sort of happy exhaustion that comes from being outside all day, we’d love to have you take a look. www.fieldcamp.net.

04/25/2026

After 27 summers, Field Camp has developed a kind of reputation that tends to travel by word of mouth rather than marketing copy. It is still run by the same family, still intentionally small, and still shaped by the fact that many of the people leading it were once campers themselves. Children arrive young, stay for years, and, in many cases, grow into the counselors who return each summer. Over time, that continuity becomes the defining feature.

Parents describe the experience in ways that are remarkably consistent. One writes that it “doesn’t feel like summer without it.” Another notes that after trying other camps, this one was “just different,” a place where their child felt immediately at ease and fully part of things. There is frequent mention of children coming home “happy, tired, and excited for the next day,” which is about as concise a summary as one could hope for.

What emerges from these reflections is a picture of a camp that families return to without much deliberation. Friendships carry over from one summer to the next. Younger campers look up to older ones they come to know well, and those older campers, in time, take on responsibility themselves. A number of parents describe it as feeling like “a neighborhood or extended family,” which captures the tone more accurately than any list of activities.

There is, of course, plenty to do during the day, but what seems to matter most is the steadiness of the place and the people in it. In an environment where many camps are designed to feel new each summer, Field Camp is something older and, in its way, more durable: the idea that a camp can be part of a childhood over many years, not just a single season.

The camp (ages 6+) has day, residential, and adventure components. Sign up now at www.fieldcamp.net.

04/11/2026

There is a parental unease that settles in at some point, when the screens multiply and follow your kids from room to room, and you begin to wonder, quietly, what all of this is doing to them. “Destructive” is probably too strong a word, but it's close, which is why, as summer approaches, many of us find ourselves looking for an antidote. For our family, that antidote has long been Field Camp, a place that is genuinely, almost stubbornly, outdoors, not in a manufactured sense but in the older, simpler one where children spend their days swimming, wandering within reason, and constructing small adventures of their own, returning home tired in a way that feels earned, with damp shoes, dirty hands, and lots of stories. The setting helps, and perhaps more than helps, as the camp was started 27 years ago and, through a combination of foresight and luck, came to occupy two remarkable hundred-year-old sites in western Albemarle County, one anchored by a large, spring-fed swimming pool that feels borrowed from another era, and the other a place with cabins and a lodge along the Moormans River, which is about as good a place for exploration as one can find near Charlottesville. The campers wade through creeks, climb over rocks, see bullfrogs and groundhogs, notice water snakes slipping through the shallows and dragonflies hovering overhead, and, if they are attentive, catch a glimpse of the semi-resident black snake known as “July,” whose midsummer appearances have become part of the camp’s lore. What happens is not especially complicated, but it is meaningful in the accumulation of small victories—passing the swim test, staying for the Thursday overnight rather than being picked up, winning a game whose rules matter less than the experience of playing it—while older campers take on more ambitious versions of the same ethos, hiking, backpacking, and occasionally venturing into caves or up the side of rock walls, all of it within a community made up of counselors who, having grown up there themselves, return year after year and create an atmosphere that is patient, slightly idiosyncratic, and consistently attentive to the welfare of the children in their care. There is, too, a kind of nostalgia being constructed almost without intention, as campfire songs work their way into memory, so that years later one of these children will hear “Take Me Home, Country Roads” in some entirely unrelated setting (as a former camper once shared) and be transported back in an instant, recalling the smell of smoke, the taste of a burned marshmallow, and the feeling of a summer that was both expansive and fleeting. For parents, it is a genuine relief to know that, for a time at least, they are living in a way that feels grounded, physical, and real, coming home worn out, a little scraped up, and full of stories.

02/21/2026

Your kids could probably benefit from being outdoors and away from screens this summer, right? Join Us at Field Camp for our 26th season this summer. An outdoors day and overnight camp in the Charlottesville area for boys and girls aged 6-16, our camp features 10 weeks of sessions (June 1- August 7) including a day camp with a once-a-week overnight, an Adventure program for 11+, and a residential camp--Camp Poplar--for two weeks in June and July (ages 8-16). Be safe, do good, have fun, and help out. More info at www.fieldcamp.net.

02/02/2026

Go Hogs!

07/26/2025

The 23rd Annual Field Camp Days games ended in a tie in 2025. It began when Caitlin Clark addressed the athletes, and then was rudely pushed into the water by Hogs after revealing her Frog sympathies. The Hogs won the penny dive (even though Hakim had aged out, the old man), and the Frogs blew out the Frogs in hoops (one of the two games that really matters according to Anders). The Frogs also won the egg toss, but then the Hogs seemed to be on the verge of their first victory in five years with wins in the Tug O’ Prace and the two relays, but the Frofs closed it out with the victories in CTF and Trivia. Cheers to Emma and Flora on the tie dyes and to all the participants! (Anders’ other game that counts is CTF.)

03/02/2025

Your kids could probably benefit from being outdoors and away from screens this summer, right? Join Us at Field Camp for our 26th season this summer. An outdoors day and overnight camp in the Charlottesville area for boys and girls aged 6-16, our camp features 10 weeks of sessions (June 2 - August 15) including a day camp with a once-a-week overnight, an Adventure program for 11+, and a residential camp--Camp Poplar--for three weeks in June and July (ages 8-16). Be safe, do good, have fun, and help out. More info at www.fieldcamp.net.

02/06/2025

Registration is open now for one-week residential camp sessions at Camp Poplar near Charlottesville, Virginia. $1100 per week. Boys and Girls ages 8-14. Come y'all!

Day and overnight summer camps and outdoors journeys based in Charlottesville, Virginia. "Adventure, Friendship, and Wonderful Memories of Summer."

01/15/2025

Come to Camp Poplar this summer! One- or two-week sessions, $1100 per week all inclusive. See www.fieldcamp.net/camp-poplar for more information.

Day and overnight summer camps and outdoors journeys based in Charlottesville, Virginia. "Adventure, Friendship, and Wonderful Memories of Summer."