Pine Manor: The Summer Nobody Regrets
No boy has ever regretted coming back for his last summer as a camper. I’ve said that to a number of families this fall, and I’ll stand behind it. The opposite is another story. Plenty of alumni will tell you that skipping their Pine Manor summer is one of the biggest regrets of their lives.
I understand why the question comes up. At fourteen and fifteen, there are very compelling alternatives. A club sports summer can mean better coaching and a shot at a varsity roster. A summer at home with school friends has a pull of its own. A job brings a paycheck, though if the thinking is that it will help a college application, I’d gently point out that admissions offices are not combing through a sophomore’s shifts at work. And for the athletes, the captain of Spain’s World Cup team spent three summers at camp, the first of them at 14, when he was already in one of Europe’s top academies.
Last spring, Charlie had all but decided to stay home. He had basketball to think about, his school friends would be around, and by April the plan felt settled. Then it started to feel strange to him that the guys he had grown up with at camp would spend their last summer on Spider Lake without him. He came for 1st session. A couple of weeks after he got home, he emailed me a message for the Pine Manor boys who were still at camp: “If I’m being honest I rly wish I went 8. Even the runs at my usual rec are worse than some of the games we had at camp.”
Basketball had been the reason to skip camp. By late July, it was one of the reasons he wished he had stayed.
The trip they’ve been training for
Every cabin trip a North Star boy takes, starting with that first overnight on the Namekagon, is preparation for the Canadian. It leaves at the start of 1st session, and it asks a great deal of them.
The boys spend their first night in an outfitter’s bunkhouse in Atikokan, Ontario, where the walls are lined with paddles signed by Pine Manor groups going back generations. Then they put in. For nine days they carry everything they need, paddle across open lakes into headwinds, haul their canoes over rocky portages, drink from the lake, build their own fires and navigate by map and compass. Each group decides which portages to take and which lakes to cross based on what they find.
Every boy is nervous beforehand, which is the whole idea. Jack swore for years that he would never go. He wasn’t a camping-trip kid, and in June of 2024 he was nervous enough that I heard about it. Ten days later he got off the bus and told me the trip had been “incredible.” He said he had learned that he was stronger than he knew. When I asked whether he meant physically or mentally, he said, “Both.” Then the boy who never wanted to go camping told me he wanted to be a Junior Tripper.
They don’t do it alone. In 2025, when one camper froze at the start, two of his cabinmates came over and said, “We’ve got you. We’ll be with you the whole way.” That was enough for him to take the first step.
Where else will a fifteen-year-old spend ten days in which every decision matters, nobody can rescue him from a headwind, and the boys beside him are the friends he grew up with? Nobody comes back unchanged. They stand a little taller for the rest of their lives, because they know something about themselves they didn’t know before, and they learned it together.
The summer they lead
The day after Pine Manor got back from the Canadian in 2025, the boys called their own meeting in Mike Hall to talk about how they expected each other to behave for the rest of the summer. They spent their first full day back deciding what kind of oldest campers they wanted to be remembered as. The kitchen made 45 pizzas for the all-village party that followed.
Leadership at camp rarely comes with a title. More often it looks like that meeting, and the Pine Manor summer is built to give boys room to practice it. Our Senior Leadership Program has them shadowing younger campers in the same activities that once taught them. College Days hands the biggest competition of the summer to the oldest boys and lets them run it, from soccer and waterskiing to debate and the cook-off. The captains of the North Star Games and the Green-White Series usually come from Pine Manor, and so do our camper President and Vice President. 1st session opens with the Canadian, and 2nd session Pine Manor campers close the summer with the Duluth trip.
None of that can be handed to a younger camper. It grows out of years in the cabins, and Pine Manor is the summer those years pay off. On the last night of this past summer, the camper farewell came from a Pine Manor boy finishing his sixth summer. He told the whole camp, “This home in Northern Wisconsin is what it is because of the encouragement that comes with the grit.”
The club season, the job and the friends at home will still be there next summer and the summer after. Pine Manor comes once. Charlie’s only regret was the four weeks he didn’t stay.
Carry on,
Andy
