Two nights in a cabin, and nobody can tell whose grandchildren are whose

By Earth to Sea News · August 2026

A Minnesota park district built a camp around the pair nobody usually plans for: a grandparent and a grandchild.

Most children's camps are built around dropping children off. This one is built around the opposite. At the Baker Outdoor Learning Center, twenty minutes out of Minneapolis, the Three Rivers Park District runs a camp where a grandparent books a rustic log cabin, brings up to three grandchildren, and stays. Eight bunks and a wood stove to a cabin, ages five and up, two nights, four sessions across the summer. The price is 325 dollars for the whole cabin rather than per person, and every meal is cooked by the staff. In between there are naturalists running rock climbing, pond dipping, campfire cooking, canoeing and fort building, and singing on the first night, and there is also permission to do none of it and sit on the lodge porch instead.

The detail that makes it work is the cooking. Because nobody has to cater, the grandparents get to be companions for two days rather than kitchen staff, which is a different holiday entirely. Anne Jaeger, a naturalist with the park district, says the demand was already there: “We have grandparents seeking opportunities to connect outdoors with their grandchildren.” Her description of how it ends is the loveliest thing about it. “The beauty of the Grandparent Camp experience is that by the end of our time together, it's not clear which kids came with which adults.” Two nights, and the cabins have quietly become one loose tribe. In fairness, the district does not publish how many families come or how long it has been going, and the earliest account we could find is one family writing in 2019 about their sixth year, so treat it as a well kept local institution rather than a national movement. It is the kind of idea any park or council could copy tomorrow.