Kids don’t grow up all at once. They grow up in seasons, and summer is one of the biggest. There are only so many of these seasons in a childhood. At Thunderbird, we’ve been thinking a lot about what that means, and how lucky we are to be a part of them.

So let’s break those seasons down.

Two summers add up to about a third of a year. Five summers? Roughly a full year. Ten summers? About two years of a kid’s life, not all at once, but scattered across childhood.

If a camper arrives at age eight and stays through age sixteen, that’s ten summers.
Ten chapters in the story of who they’re becoming.
Ten years when “summer” and “Thunderbird” begin to feel interchangeable.
Ten summers woven through their sixteen years of life. And that proportion matters.

It means that in more than half of the years they’ve been alive, Thunderbird has been part of their summer. Part of their confidence. Their friendships. Their sense of what they can do, and who they are when surrounded by people who see the best in them.

A lot of conversations about summer try to measure things in days or weeks or countdowns.
But we’ve found ourselves drawn to something simpler, and truer:

We’re not measuring minutes. We’re measuring growth.

When a camper looks back on their sixteen years of life and sees that ten of those years included a Thunderbird summer, something shifts.

Camp stops being an activity. A program. A summer. It becomes a home base. A second home.
A family. The people who cheer for you.
The traditions that hold you.
The friendships that outlast every school year. The place where you feel most like yourself.

That’s what we mean when we say Thunderbird is family.

Not a tagline.
Not marketing.
A truth we get to witness, quietly, consistently, year after year. A truth made from ten summers out of sixteen. And whether a child spends one summer with us or all ten, we want every family to feel this:

Summer is precious.
Childhood is finite.
And the way we spend this time matters.

We’re honored, truly, to be part of the years that help shape each camper. And in the end, maybe that’s the real magic of camp:

Not how long they’re here, but how deeply it becomes part of who they are.