One of the best things at Sky High Hope Camp: Nobody has to wear a wig.
The campers are young cancer patients and their siblings. And many of the counselors once were Sky High Hope campers themselves. Nobody stares at bald heads.
Everyone knows what a hairless head signifies, because they’ve either gone through chemotherapy themselves or know someone who has.
“You don’t have to worry about being judged or saying the wrong thing,” said Renata Bradford. She first came to Sky High Hope Camp about 19 years ago as a camper undergoing treatment for leukemia, and became a regular counselor in 1992.
“The biggest impact for campers is when they’re finished with treatments,” Bradford says. “People assume they’re fine, but there’s a lot of scarring — physical and emotional — that follows those treatments. It’s so therapeutic to be in a place where people understand that, and don’t care if you have to take daily medications, or have physical scars that show. You can just be yourself. It’s been my sanctuary.”
Sky High Hope Camp is among a dozen or so Colorado summer camps that focus on children and adolescents in extraordinary circumstances, including facing cancer or other life-threatening illnesses, recovering from burns, or living with a disability.
Often, those camps are offered at a reduced price or free — a relief to families struggling with medical care and other expenses. Support groups and medical staff typically put families in touch with the organizations that finance those camps. Most don’t own a permanent camp facility but lease camps from other organizations.
“Camping is so important for kids that they need this,” says Casey Stalkfleet, director of camping and recreation for Easter Seals Colorado.
“It’s not just kids from metro Denver but kids from rural areas who need that social interaction. We have a hemophilia camp for kids with bleeding disorders. Some of them live in the middle of Wyoming and never see anyone with their same disability.”
Sky High Hope Camp, which rents space from a camp in the foothills near Fort Collins, is only one week long, but as camp director Connie Hirz-Herrick said, that is “the one week a year when they just get to be kids, and not cancer patients, or siblings of cancer patients.
“And it’s all normal camp stuff: canoeing, fishing, horseback riding, whitewater rafting, ropes courses, arts and crafts, archery and a big dance on Thursday night with a band,” she added.
There are physicians and nurses on-site at the camp.
One of the best things, from the campers’ point of view, is the freedom to talk about things that they’d think twice about mentioning elsewhere, for fear of the reaction provoked. One telling example from the 2008 summer session:
Some girls were making beaded necklaces during an evening of arts and crafts, listening to music played on a docked iPod. One girl’s face brightened when a new song began.
“This is the song that they played at my little sister’s funeral,” she said, and began singing along.
The rest of the girls, all teenagers, started singing too. Hirz-Herrick, who was in the crafts cabin at the time, was dumbstruck.
“It was the only place they could do that,” she observed later.
“If they’d done that outside camp, everyone would go, ‘Oh, no,’ and get sad. But the girls were smiling and singing. They felt safe. It was one of my favorite moments.”
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477, cmartin@denverpost.com
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