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A Summer of Significance
by Ken Wright

Reprinted with permission of Ken Wright and Inside/Outside Southwest Magazine, Sept/Oct 2004.

This summer I got to work with my heroes. Not many people can say that. But I’m glad I can.

My heroes are a crew of forty-some people who come together every summer to populate a small, lovely valley north of Durango. And each summer those people, together with the valley itself, create a space — a circumstance, an opportunity, a vortex, a cubic centimeter of chance — for transformative experiences for a couple hundred kids.

The camp is Colvig Silver Camps, a residential summer camp set in and around the lower end of Missionary Ridge’s Red Creek Valley. Since 1969, the Colvig family — now in its third generation of camp life — has for two months each year created on their property (and in nearby public lands) a world predicated on one simple premise: There is nothing more important than getting kids out of doors. So in the summer, this little side drainage off the Florida River becomes its own world, a world unlike ours, where play is learning, where the outdoors is home, where ages mix and mingle, where children share the power, where appreciation, celebration, and cooperation are The Rules, and where every personality has a place — and where the Place itself has a personality.

The Colvigs’ stated goal was, and remains, to give kids "a summer of significance." The camp staff do this by getting them outside — both in camp, and out on forays in the desert, up in the high country, and on rivers. Also, though, and equally importantly, they achieve this by encasing those physical spaces in an atmosphere of cooperation, support, inclusion, respect, and shameless fun — getting them "outside" their 21st-century-kid lifestyles.

The Colvigs, of course, don’t do this alone. The invocation of this summer-camp magic relies on a devoted, spirited, and amazingly hard-working staff. Most of this summer crew — the counselors and support staff — are in their 20s, and are basically people craving summer camp but who are too old to go as campers. Since they barely make enough for their experience to qualify as a "job," it ain’t the living they’re making that makes it worthwhile, it’s the living they’re doing that draws them here, and keeps drawing them back.

But that, too, is part of the alchemy: it’s that spirit of wanting to be doing what they’re doing that conveys contagious joy to the kids — through mood and action rather than any sort of planned or preachy agenda. And the kids return their own excitement and joy. It’s an anti-vicious cycle, and it creates a community where everyone has a role in unfolding the camp magic, and where everyone appreciates that everyone has a vital share in that experience.

Next year Colvig Silver Camps will be celebrating its 35th. The camp was founded in 1969 by Craig and Mary Colvig when they acquired the Silver Saddle Camp for Girls and Silver Spruce Camp for Boys, which was located farther up the Florida Valley. They soon moved their new business onto their recently purchased property on Red Creek.

Of course, a lot has happened since then: The property has expanded to some 600 acres, and several more camps have been added — Homestead, for kids in second through fourth grades; Outpost for eight and ninth graders; and Pathfinding, for tenth and eleventh graders, a program in which the campers are in the Four Corners backcountry for four weeks at a stretch. Silver Spruce and Silver Saddle, for fifth through seventh grades, are also still in the mix. The camps together comprise the greater summer camp as a whole, and even though they do a lot of in-camp activities together, each camp also has its own space, physical and social, in the Red Creek Valley.

Management of the camp has changed, too. Craig and Mary divorced in 1979, and Craig was killed in a plane crash on Missionary Ridge in 1981. The camp is still in the family, though, and since 1989, family members have managed and directed the camp. Craig’s brother Jim (known in camp as "Uncle Jim," or "UJ") served a stint as director, and now is the camp’s jack-of-all-trades, a one-man physical plant and maintenance crew. Craig and Mary’s son Cameron also manned the helm for a while. Presently, as it moves into the 21st Century (just barely, since the camp narrowly escaped devastation in the 2002 Missionary Ridge Fire), Cameron’s younger brother, Clay, is the most recent Director and embodiment of the soul of Colvig Silver Camps.

Clay is a Lodgepole pine of a man, so tall and gangly you’d swear he sways in the wind. Personality-wise, he is like Tom Hanks in Big, an adult body loping around with the energy, spirit and heart of a 12-year-old Silver Spruce boy (which he once was, having himself gone through the entire summer-camp cycle, Homestead through Pathfinding). Clay and his wife, Tavia, work year-round on bringing the two months of camp into being, working from either his house or office, both of which hang on the valley rim overlooking Red Creek. And in the summer, he is a little bit everywhere, doing a little bit of everything — part counselor and part camper, part administrator and part gofer. Mostly, though `85 he just radiates the Colvig Unified Theory, the spirit that everyone else then embodies and manifests in his own way.

Clay can do that because his year-round administrative staff is his hands, taking those ideas in his head and the soul in his heart and turning them into trips, events, schedules, plans, permits, menus, marketing, enrollments, and summer staff. Part of that administration is the Office Manager — yours truly, for the 2003-2004 season — whose job it is to manage the business-side of the festiveness. The core, though, are the Program Directors, who turn Clay’s fervor into actual occurrences.

The present program directors are Megan Weidmann and Lindsay James, themselves former campers and counselors (Megan’s parents were counselors at Colvig, and spent their honeymoon helping build the Homestead camp; they then sent their three kids through the entire camp cycle), and who, in their mid-20s, have taken the next step: from making summer camp part of their lives, to making it their lives. They are the `FCbercounselors, keeping that goofy camp-spirit flame alive in the winter; and in the summer, which is pretty much a 24-7 marathon for the summer staff, for Megan and Lindsay it’s the Hard Rock 100.

The summer’s cast of characters expands to include the three dozen-or-so who move into the valley to make camp. These are: the support staff — cooks, wranglers, nurse, climbing and art barn coordinators, and the expedition coordinator; the camp coordinators, who set the tone and agenda for each camp; the head counselors, who each oversee a bunk of three to five kids; and the assistant counselors.

The ACs, as they’re called, are the musculature on the staff skeleton. They work both with the kids as aides to the counselors and also do the grunt work — dishes, trash, setting up and taking down of events, setting up and taking down of the dining hall, and whatever else requires manual labor and a good attitude. Also, as counselors in training, they’re generally younger than the rest of the staff, and still checking out the summer-camp scene. Yet, my experience has been that some of my most enlightening and engaging philosophical conversations of the summer were while helping ACs like Andrea and Addie and Patrick over piles of dirty dishes and the steaming Hobart dishwashing machine. That willing-to-do-anything-to-be-where-you-are thing, again.

As vital a force as the staff is in making camp work, though, it’s the Red Creek Valley itself that shapes the mold. In fact, the staff acknowledges this extra player by printing those European-style "country" stickers — the white oval with the national abbreviation in black letters. Colvig’s just says "RCV." But rightfully so: It is its own country. And like any country, the lay of the land shapes the culture.

Even though I’ve found no evidence that this was a deliberate plan, each camp just seems to be `85 in the right place. Stories say Clay’s father, Craig, was both impulsive and intuitive on his building projects, constructing solid, functional buildings that somehow each fit village-like into the landscape. It also seems, at least to a parent like myself, that each camp and its location also fit the states-of-being of each age group.

Homestead houses campers in grades 2 through 4. It’s the only camp that is offered in four two-week sessions, while the rest of the camps require four-week stays. Set up on the mesa above the valley, it’s built as an Old West dirt Main Street, with bunks such as Apothecary, Assay Office, and The Bank. The "town" stands amidst Ponderosa pines at the foot of a small, rocky hillside. Breakfast and dances are held uphill, at the Livery, with big views of the Florida Valley and Rob’s Ridge. While in camp the Homesteaders also take care of the chickens, pigs, goats, and donkey, and they help the wranglers, who also live in Homestead, maintain the camp’s 10 horses.

The Silver Saddle and Silver Spruce camps mark a move into the valley for campers. This is the only camp where the boys and girls are physically separated: The boys live in a series of nine bunkhouses built on stilts set under some tall cottonwoods; and the girls are in two big buildings, each broken into four bunk rooms that share a common room, with lovely views over Main Lake and the cottonwood grove along the stream.

Outpost is down the end of the valley, near the confluence with the Florida. For the older kids, it’s set off by itself in its own densely-wooded space, sequestered away where the campers and staff have to walk a mile-long dirt road together up to the lodge for meals. Down here, in their own symbolic space, they live in a longhouse-style bunkhouse, with boys at one end and the girls at the other, and a common room in between. Outposters, in addition to their symbolic placement near the mouth of the valley, are also out of the camp half the time, building toward the rite of passage that is the last camp, Pathfinding.

Pathfinders go, Out There, like a teen would in a hunter-gatherer society, into a true rite of passage: a series of challenges, guided but not directed, chaperoned but not guarded, accompanied but not parented, alone but also with a group of peers and counselors. Colvig has permits all over the Four Corners, so Pathfinders face a variety of adventures, from canyon hiking in Utah to rock climbing on the Uncompahgre Plateau, from walking across the San Juans to solos in the San Miguel Range.

This Pathfinding experience — blending skillcraft and adventure, challenge and confidence, and teamwork and independence — is the logical outcome, the targeted goal, of the entire camp experience beginning with Homestead. Homesteaders, in their two-week stays, spend three of those nights in the backcountry; then Spruce and Saddle are out 12 nights over four weeks. For all groups, their first backcountry trips are held in the upper Red Creek Valley, so, in ceremonial fashion, the first place campers go is to just walk out of camp together.

But even in camp, the living is out of doors. The bunks are aesthetic — what little kid wouldn’t want to live in an Old West Town? Or pre-adolescent boy in a tree-house village? — but they’re also airy and minimalist. The in-camp activities are almost entirely out of doors: the games are held in the meadows, or in the pond, or along the creek, or up the trails laced throughout the valley; vespers are held in the surrounding foothills; and the big entertainment events are the campfires and skits at the teepee along a cottonwood-covered bend in the creek. At these campfires, campers turn their adventures into little stories, and the counselors present their individual talents (every counselor comes to work armed with some crowd-pleasing shtick).

While in camp, the campers’ days are punctuated by ritual and a rich social agenda. Meals are announced by the dinner bell, begin with a non-denominational grace, and are marked by singing (penalties for being late or for losing something) and games of full-body rock/paper/scissors (by the counselors to contest, to the campers’ cheers, who has to clear the table). In-camp days are wrapped around big-group projects, driven by the campers themselves, such as building and running an all-camp carnival, or the all-day folk-and-arts festival (where everyone performed on stage), or even a horse-and-donkey wedding put on by the Homesteaders for the appreciative Outposters. Then there’s always the traditional camp activities: riflery, archery, canoeing, jewelry making, horse-back riding, rock climbing, and on and on and on.

Very cool stuff, in a powerful setting, and operated by devoted, sincere, engaged people. Yet in my year here, observing, studying, digesting the Colvig summer-camp experience, and even seeing my own two kids go through four weeks of camp themselves, I’ve come to realize — to see — that the magic of Colvig Silver Camps is not just about the things the campers do or the places they go or the counselors they bond with. That alone is not enough. The real key lies in that commitment-through-sacrifice thing again: The four-week commitment for a term of camp (or two weeks for Homestead, but for an 8 or 9 or 10 year old, two weeks is like four) is the real magic-maker.

By requiring four weeks, the simple strategy of Colvig Silver Camps — put kids into challenging, creative situations and take them to cool experiences — is given the essential time required to make a difference. Each kid is then given the time to find her or his niche. With four weeks to find your space, you have places to risk and practice being who you are, to try things new and risky, to try wearing different skins. And in that time, you’re given a place where it’s a hard to be a jerk, or to not see something cool in someone you normally wouldn’t hang with, or to be lazy, or to be competitive instead of cooperative. And in a month, the long-lasting effects of those things have time to take root.

Do that, and the best — whatever that is for each kid — will come, says the unstated but understood Faith that underlies Colvig Silver Camps. And it’s this faith — faith in the kids themselves — that bonds the staff that works here.

And that is why they’re my heroes.

Ken Wright is a Spruce Boy at heart. He is the author of Why I’m Against it All (Raven’s Eye Press) and A Wilder Life: Essays from Home, and lives in Durango with his wife and their two campers.

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