COMMUNITY
HAPPY CAMPERS
Telluride Academy’s 40-plus years of outdoor exploration and adventure BY SAGE MARSHALL
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here’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
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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