Happy Campers : The dog days are here. But while adults seek refuge inside, day camps make the most of summer’s end.

Scavenger hunts and Capture the Flag, lanyards and s’mores, skits and softball. Is anything more fun than to be a kid at camp in August? Not much, according to a late summer survey of happy campers. So what if it’s hotter than blazes? From the cool San Gabriel Mountains to the dusty San Fernando Valley to the gritty inner city, camp is gloriously in session.

HOLLENBECK PARK

‘This Place Is So Much Fun, So Much Fun’

*

Nature class is taught by pigeons nesting in the eaves. The swimming pool is a leaky plastic tub, and campers must pick their way across a blanket of cigarette butts and broken glass to come and go.

But it’s summer camp, no question. And from 8 in the morning to 6 at night, the red brick building at Hollenbeck Park in East Los Angeles fairly bursts with glee.

“This place is so much fun, so much fun, I can’t even tell you how much fun!” says Aarika Martinez, 11. “That is my favorite thing about camp--it is just so fun !”

She turns a cartwheel on the linoleum floor. “See? Fun!”

Outside, 10 children squeeze into a pool designed for three babies. Of course, it overflows and some of the children spill out, laughing.

One of them, 8-year-old Stephanie Aceves, dashes to the end of a row of blue mats and nods solemnly to a boy holding a garden hose halfway down the runway.

“Ready?” he says.

“Readeeeee!” she squeals and slides headfirst into the cold spray.

At the end of her ride, Stephanie stretches out in a corner of the cement patio, eyes closed tight against the midday glare.

“I’m at the beach. I’m sunbathing,” she says dreamily.

An old man with droopy trousers appears and the children stop playing.

The man holds an empty plastic 7UP bottle and moves toward the boy with the hose.

“ Por favor? Por favor? “ he pleads.

“He just wants some water,” says counselor Jenny Rockwell. “It’s OK.”

The boy fills the man’s bottle and returns to the makeshift game of slip and slide. “Who’s next?”

“Not me,” says Patrick Urban, 10. He isn’t “swimming” today, he says, because he forgot his bathing suit. Most of the boys getting wet, though, are wearing the same baggy shorts and oversized T-shirts they wore to camp.

“To tell you the truth,” Patrick confides, “this isn’t my favorite thing in camp. What I really like are field trips. Boy, we go everywhere. The beach, the library, Hurricane Harbor . . . all very excellent.”

Next to the park’s “No Loitering” sign, on the wall behind the folding chairs where the children eat their lunches, there is a poster listing the August camp trips.

Recently, some neighborhood gangsters scrawled their “tags” across the children’s happy plans.

“Y’know the guys who did this? I guess they don’t have anything else to do in the summer,” explains senior camper George Ramirez, 12.

“Too bad, huh?”

TOM SAWYER CAMP

‘I Can Be Dirty All Over by 10 A.M.’

*

Betsy’s Bionic Bugs are all abuzz.

“Want to see our secret fort? Promise not to tell? C’mon, this way. Look out for snakes!”

Snakes?

Deep in the jungles of suburbia, little girls in matching T-shirts gather five days a week to play house in the dirt.

Snake sightings are rare, but as they like to say at Pasadena’s rustic Tom Sawyer Camp, “You never know who you’re sharing the wilderness with.”

Besides all those boys on the other side of camp--creatures more despised than rattlesnakes, say the Bugs--the girls share their 50-acre camp with fish, frogs, birds, lizards and a gentle herd of non-indigenous horses.

Every morning, the Bugs and another 200 or so clean-scrubbed campers are chauffeured from their homes in spacious air-conditioned vans to the Arroyo Secco campsite at Oak Grove Park.

Within minutes of their arrival, the campers are dirty. Very dirty.

“I can be dirty all over by 10 a.m.,” boasts 7-year-old Catherine Cahill.

Out of sticks and rocks and tree trunks, the Bugs have created a 2,000-square-foot dirt home.

“At first, we had to push the dirt around with our feet to make the rooms,” explains counselor Betsy Fox. “Then we got a broom, so now we can sweep the dirt clean.”

There is a dirt living room and a dirt patio. And here, beneath a ledge, is the dirt hole where the earthworms are stored. “Lunch,” winks a camper.

The dining room is the only room with carpet--wall-to-wall, thanks to remnants someone scavenged from home.

Eight-year-old Pinky Farnum--”Pinky is only my nickname, my real name is Lark”--shows a visitor to the secret mud flats where the girls take turns digging in the cool brown clay.

“The deeper we dig, see, the more the colors change,” says Madison Kilbride, 7. “Sometimes we dig all the time and then it gets oranger and then we use it for makeup. Right now, we’re getting to the white makeup. Can you believe it?”

“It doesn’t really make us that beautiful,” sniffs Pinky. “But it’s fun anyway. Isn’t that right, Catherine?”

Catherine doesn’t answer. She’s too busy rolling a fresh mud ball down her arm.

CAMP FUNTASIA

‘They Give Us All Kinds of Sugar and Stuff’

*

“We’re up in the morning, singin’ a song. Camp Funtasia’s where we belong!”

Outside, the 111-degree air shimmers in waves above the blacktop. The playground is deserted. The grass beneath the empty picnic tables is baked dry.

But inside the gymnasium at Chatsworth’s Mason Park, 100 damp-haired children are singing the anthems of summer. “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands!”

“John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith!”

“One dark night when we were all in bed . . . Fire Fire Fire!”

They croon, they rap, they rewrite sitcom theme songs. To the tune of “The Brady Bunch,” they celebrate camp. “Here’s a story of Camp Funtasia, filled with a bunch of real cool kids. . . .”

Coolness is surely a state of mind because inside the gym, it is very warm.

Seven-year-old Nicole Carroll’s mother arrives an hour and a half early to “rescue her from this awful heat.” But Nicole, her T-shirt wet against her back, would just as soon stay, thank you.

Campers’ voices swell and reverberate through the cavernous gym, shaking the glass backboards overhead.

And then suddenly, they stop. A single counselor raises her hand above the jumping, screaming throng.

“Hand goes up, mouth goes shut!” she says. And a hundred little mouths obey.

The reward is formidable: cake and ice cream for everyone.

“It’s actually Shayna’s birthday but she went home ‘cuz she was too hot or something and so we’re just having the cake and everything without her,” explains Kelli McElvogue, 9.

After singing and skits, food is the favored activity at Mason Park Day Camp. “You won’t believe this,” whispers Heather Singer, 12, “but they give us all kinds of sugar and stuff. Punch, cookies, Rice Krispie treats, yummmmm.”

“But crafts are fun too. Don’t forget crafts,” adds C.J. Mahon, 10, who has just finished sanding and painting a wooden race car for the camp’s upcoming Pinewood Derby.

As parents arrive to coax their campers into air-conditioned Jeeps and shiny sport vans, children whine and plead to stay for just a little longer, just one more song.

One boy, a professional actor who recently appeared in the movie “The Little Rascals,” is begging for another two weeks of camp.

“Please, please, can’t I wait to start my new movie till camp’s done?”