Summer Camps Offer Adventures, Training, Politics

Andy Wexler didn’t much enjoy his own childhood camp experience. The only part he liked was going on field trips. That’s why, as a 19-year-old junior at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1990, he borrowed $1,000 to start his own camp based entirely on daily excursions to Disney Land, Magic Mountain, karate studios, and more. “I thought it would be a fun thing to do, so I got a list of kids and called them up,” says Wexler. “I probably did about 1,000 telephone calls and convinced 25 parents to send me their kids.”

Within five years, his Southern California-based enterprise grew to more than 500 campers, and had revenues of more than $1 million for an 11-week season. Today, Wexler’s idea has evolved into Pali Overnight Adventures, a 74-acre camp complex offering 9-to-16-year-old attendees 16 areas of concentration ranging from Secret Agent sessions, where kids do things like soar down ziplines while firing paintball guns, to Hollywood Stunt Camp, where campers learn to jump from a two-story building, to a Culinary Institute where they receive instruction from professional chefs. Wexler’s camps cost almost $1,700 per week, as compared to, say, Camp Marston, a 90-year-old YMCA camp near San Diego, which costs $535 for six days. Pali’s revenue has averaged 10 percent growth annually over the past decade and rose 39 percent this year: “If we have a day where we make under $25,000, we’re in trouble,” he says.