We Didn’t Remove the Screens.
We Never Needed Them.

There is a question I am asked more than almost any other: how do you handle the no-phones policy? Parents ask with genuine curiosity, sometimes with anxiety, occasionally with disbelief. They want to know how we enforce it. What happens when a thirteen-year-old goes two weeks without a screen for the first time in their life?

I understand the question. But every time I hear it, I want to reframe the conversation entirely. Because we do not handle screen-free at JRC. We do not enforce it like a homework policy. Being screen-free is not something we do to campers. It is the world we live in. It has been the world we have lived in since my grandparents opened this ranch to children in 1934.

JRC did not become screen-free in response to smartphones. We were screen-free before there were screens to be free of. That distinction matters more than it might seem.

We Were Here Before the Screens

When Roderick and Catherine Jameson began hosting children in Bohna Creek Canyon, the idea of camp was not built around what children should avoid. It was built around what children should experience. The sound of the creek in the morning. The specific satisfaction of gathering wood for the outdoor oven and knowing that the bread your whole community eats at dinner came, in part, from your hands. The weight of a saddle. The view from Big Rock.

Our mission, to make the world a better place, one summer at a time, has never been a reaction against technology. It is a statement about what we believe childhood requires: the chance to live close to the earth, to contribute to a self-sustaining community, to take acceptable risks, to sit with boredom until it becomes curiosity, and to discover that you are more capable than you imagined.

That has not changed in nine decades. Not because we are stubborn. Because it works.

What Screen-Free Actually Looks Like

Let me be specific, because what most people imagine when they hear screen-free camp is not what JRC is.

We are a working ranch at 4,500 feet in the Sierra Nevada. There is no cell service. There is no Wi-Fi. Our bathrooms are outhouses. Our showers are solar-heated. Every camper, every counselor, sleeps on open-sided sleeping porches with roofs but no walls. You fall asleep looking at the stars. You wake up to birdsong and the particular quality of Sierra morning light moving through the oaks.

In this environment, you do not remove screens. There is simply nothing to remove. The question of technology does not arise because the world we have built is so full of real things, horses to ride, rocks to climb, gardens to tend, fish to catch, bread to bake, songs to sing, friends to make, that the absence of a screen is not an absence at all. It is the presence of everything else.

Simplicity Is a Philosophy, Not a Rule

One of the five pillars that guide everything at JRC is Simplicity: a natural environment free from technology and the distractions of urban life. This setting allows campers to connect more deeply with others and with themselves, fostering presence over performance.

It does not say we ban phones because phones are bad. It says we operate in a setting where deeper connection is possible precisely because distraction has been removed. One framing is punitive. The other is invitational.

When I was a child on this ranch, simplicity was not a branding concept. It was just the way things were. Our pace of life was connected to the sunshine of each day. We grew our own food, tended our own animals, built our own structures. Every child at JRC still lives that way for two weeks each summer. A six-year-old who feeds chickens every morning before breakfast understands something about responsibility that no app can teach.