Community Telluride Academy

HAPPY CAMPERS

Telluride Academy’s 40-plus years of outdoor exploration and adventure

BY SAGE MARSHALL

There’s nothing more “Telluride” than Telluride Academy, which has been drawing local and visiting kids together to explore the outdoors in the region — as well as international locales — for four decades. But when Wendy Brooks started the program in 1981, she was simply a single mom looking for a summer daycare option.

Then, Brooks organized a group of five boys, including her 8-year-old son, Dylan, for an informal camp. Each day, they took the Brooks’ family pickup truck on a nearby adventure. Tuition was 10 bucks for a week. To say that the program has grown and evolved from there is an understatement. Today, the organization hosts hundreds of kids each week all summer long for dozens of week-long camps.

Brooks emphasizes that the roots of the Telluride Academy remain strong. Today’s camp is surprisingly similar to its earliest versions: Each camp group has no more than 12 kids, each within a two-year age range, and runs four days a week with a Wednesday overnight. There is a sliding fee scale so that every local child can go to camp.

“I could not be prouder,” says Brooks of the 40-year milestone. “The academy is kind of like my fourth child — still growing, changing, adapting to the times and getting more amazing with each passing year.”

Luke Brown became the academy’s executive director in May 2017. He grew up in Dolores, south of Telluride, and jumped at the chance to return to the region after teaching for several years in Denver. Brown notes that one of the academy’s greatest assets is the area’s diversity, which offers kids the opportunity to explore everything from high-alpine tundra to low-desert canyons, all within a reasonable drive.

Brown adds that the academy pivoted as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic in a way that brought it back to its roots.

“We started off 2020 with all of these plans

‘THE ACADEMY IS MORE AMAZING WITH EACH PASSING YEAR.’

Wendy Brooks

and ideas to celebrate four decades of outdoor programming in the community,” he recalls. Instead of hosting any big events, though, the academy opted to run nine weeks of programming, serving about 50 percent of the kids it normally does. Still, Brown considers last summer a success. “Our priority became ensuring that we could be a great option for local and visiting families to emerge from the pandemic and give their kids an opportunity to reconnect with friends and nature. We really shifted to focus on the core of our mission. In a way, it was kind of an incredible way to celebrate 40 years.”

Moving forward, Brown says he hopes to bring more kids into Telluride Academy’s fold by inviting regional school districts and youth groups for special programming, as well as outreach to the local Latino community. He also envisions securing a “forever home … somewhere to put up some yurts, classrooms and staff housing.”

But, ultimately, Brown emphasizes that what really makes the program stand out is the people. “Telluride Academy has really been built on an incredible history of passionate staff — educators, characters, artists, musicians. The amount of people that have come through our doors as field instructors, interns and specialists is pretty incredible. It would be hard to meet anyone that has lived in Telluride for a number of years that doesn’t have a direct connection to the Telluride Academy as a former employee or knows somebody who does.”

Rohanna Mertens