Camp Stevens provides a welcoming home for retreats, education, and adventure. Our summer camp, year-round programs, and retreat center are designed to foster and deepen connections among people, between people and the earth, and for individuals and their spiritual journeys.



Camp Stevens is a summer camp and retreat center with year-round programs located in the town of Julian just outside of San Diego, CA. Our summer camp program includes adventures in hiking, camping, swimming, rock climbing, organic gardening, team building, backpacking, and whitewater rafting. Our retreat center is available to all non-profit groups for retreats, conferences, and meetings. Our year-round programs include ropes course and team building, environmental education, organic gardening workshops, cooking workshops, adult and family trips, family camps, eco tour vacations in Baja and Ecuador, and backpacking trips. Our caring and trained staff includes volunteers and interns living in an intentional community.

The camping program of the Diocese of Los Angeles began in the 1930s when the Right Reverend William Bertrand Stevens, second bishop of Los Angeles, began taking groups of young people to camps in the San Bernardino Mountains for a week or two each summer. Even then the program was known as Camp Stevens.

In the mid 1940s a group of clergy and lay persons from the San Diego area rented a camp in the Cleveland National Forest near Descanso, and began a second program called Camp St. Aidan. In 1950 a committee, under the leadership of the Rev. Jack Lax and the Rev. C. Boone Sadler, Jr., purchased the buildings they had been renting. Just after that summer camp season a disastrous forest fire leveled the campsite. Undaunted, the group searched for another site and found a beautiful 66-acre property near Julian offered for sale for $20,000. They managed to raise enough for a down payment, bought the property, and re-established Camp St. Aidan in 1952.