In Gratitude for Church Camps

Good to know. I assumed that there was no availability left after the wards and stakes do their reserving first, especially for July, and the use by families is a dead letter. Glad to be wrong.

@ John Mansfield,
Not necessarily! At the church camp where my parents are camp hosts, they generally have about half ward/stake and half family reservations. They may be booked solid, but families are 100% welcome to camp and partake of the available activities – which at our local campground are hikes, the Iron Rod experience, a climbing wall, and an archery/hatchet/ninja star range (instigated by my dad, to no one’s surprise), among other possibilities.

It’s Hit or Miss but you’ll either have one or two night gaps because the youth group didn’t want it for the entire week or like EC says you’ll have a camp that is mostly full with the youth group to where another youth group can fit in but they’ll have some space where a smaller family group could

I don’t remember “church camps.” Is this a new(ish) program, replacing that aspect of Boy Scouts?

Not exactly

A lot of steaks or groups of steaks have bought land up in the woods and build a little camp, originally usually just for young women

But in the last 10 years or so they’ve received a lot more funding from the church, a lot of them have been taken over by the church, and there is now an online reservation system that members can use to reserve them for families if they aren’t being used by a young woman’s group or a young man’s group or a ward

A church camp in Pennsylvania that the stakes north of mine acquired a decade ago had been a girl scout camp which that organization couldn’t afford it anymore. I haven’t followed what the decimated BSA has been doing with its camps. It wouldn’t surprise me if the church has acquired a few.