Ann Cathcart & The Learning Camp Story

For Ann Cathcart, wintertime in her hometown of Roslyn Farms, Pa., meant a succession of gray, dreary days devoid of reprieve. The first time that Ann visited Vail she was shocked at how Colorado winters play out.

The first time I ever came to Vail was in 1976 and it was blue sky and sunny and white and there were so many colors I was taken aback,” Ann remembers. “It was the end of my senior year in college and I packed my bags and moved here.”

There was just one catch: in order to receive her parents blessing, Ann had to promise that she’d only be here for one ski season (’76-’77) and that she would not “waste” her shiny new college education
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Now Ann has been in this valley, on and off, for nearly 30 years.

Ann has worked at Garton’s Saloon as their business manager and as a program director for Colorado Mountain College.

“I fell in love and got married and moved to Steamboat Springs and then on to Fort Collins. The marriage didn’t work but we had a wonderful baby boy named Tucker,” Ann says.

While in Fort Collins Ann served as president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau for the mountain states. Tucker was in the first grade in Fort Collins when he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia and concurrently, Ann’s marriage had reached a breaking point. Life was a little bleak for Ann but newly divorced and slightly defeated, she decided to move back to the valley with her 6-year-old son.

“I didn’t know anything about those learning problems and my marriage had fallen apart and I was a single mom and all I could think about was coming back home to Vail,” Ann says.
And so she did. She quit her job in Fort Collins, sold everything and came back. She bought a duplex near Edwards Elementary so that her son could walk to school and she sat down to try and figure out what to do with herself.

Little did she know that her son’s disabilities would be the inspiration for her future endeavors– a summer camp that would eventually bring 160 children every summer to the valley.
“Around that time I was looking for a summer program for Tucker to go to that would incorporate fun and academics for kids that learn differently because tutors and summer school felt like a punishment to him by second grade.

“A dear friend named Ilene who passed away just last year said to me, ‘ You live in the most beautiful place in the world and you have all this business background, why the heck don’t you start a summer camp for kids like Tucker?’” Ann says.

It was a moment of revelation for Ann and that mere suggestion developed into a life goal. The first year in its existence, The Learning Camp was just a day camp at Edwards Elementary School, but the following year Ann leased six acres of land at McCoy and switched the camp over to a residential, or overnight, facility. She began traveling to different conferences to speak about learning disabilities and to promote her summer camp.

“Because I didn’t have a whole lot of experience, I hired people with backgrounds in special education and teaching kids who learn differently,” Ann says. “The first year that we opened (residentially) this wonderful man came to work for us from Children’s Hospital in Denver named Tom Macht and had he not shown up that summer, that would have probably been our last summer.”

Tom was more than a lifesaver for the camp, he was also a good match for Ann in many ways–in 1999 the two were married.

“What helped make things fall into place is the people she surrounded herself with,” says Macht. “She’s an excellent judge of character. She found people that had similar desires when it came to helping kids.”

Ann never thought that she’d be able to afford land in the valley for her summer camp, at least not enough of it to make it work.

“We met with the owners of this land and made an offer that was half what they were looking for and they didn’t laugh us out of the park,” Ann says, “they just said ‘let’s talk.’ In meeting and talking with the owner, he wanted to know what we wanted to do with the land. Well, it turned out that he was dyslexic and he was such a believer in what we were doing that he helped us to finance the whole project. These doors just flew open.”

This summer marked the camp’s ninth in the business and things are a little different now. Rather than having six acres to fill with happy kids, the camp is now located on 36 acres off of Spring Creek Road between Eagle and Gypsum. The land is surrounded on three sides by BLM land and so their views will remain much as they are now: unobstructed and stunning. There is a stream that runs along the side of the property and a pond complete with a canoe and a kayak for the kids to play in. There are horses to take on trail rides and “kid fields” for soccer and baseball games. Standing sentry is a two-story log structure called Abbott Lodge, named after Joe Abbott, the local general contractor that believed in Ann’s vision and worked tirelessly to build her a lodge completely designed to function as a big house for children.

“When you have an idea, you’ll do anything to make it work,” Ann says. “The people of this community that have come together and made this camp happen—I could give you a list of names. Joe Abbott and Jake Schweiger were our construction guys who single-handedly built this place for half of what it would have cost us, just out of love.”

There are 160 kids from all over the world that travel each summer to Colorado to visit the camp. Over five sessions Ann welcomes children ages seven to 14 from the U.S. as well as Russia, China, Kenya, Israel and even Iraq.

“No body notices color, no body notices the language barriers, they’re all just here being kids,” Ann says. “People find us largely on the Internet and 60 percent of our kids are return campers. They come and they just live this Colorado lifestyle that we take for granted.”

The key ingredient for the camp is the teachers and the adults that all have some understanding of learning disabilities. The student/teacher ratio is very small, nearly one employee for every two children. In the morning the kids practice academics: reading, writing and mathematics, on picnic tables in the trees alongside Spring Creek. After lunch the books are put away for the day and the kids concentrate on having fun.

Ann’s son Tucker has come full-circle– for years he himself was a camper, soaking up all the summer camp had to offer. Now Tucker is a sophomore at Colorado Mountain College in Steamboat Springs and each summer he returns to the camp, except now he’s a counselor, spending his summer days mentoring to children with the same difficulties he’s struggled with in his academic life.

“I think one of the reasons we work with such young kids is that when kids first start getting the news in first or second grade that something is wrong, they feel broken,” Ann says. “It gives them great hope to look up to Tucker and the rest of the staff and see that they’re not broken. The kids spend two or three weeks with us learning to take care of themselves, being loved by adults that understand them and playing hard and their self-esteem just blossoms in ways that they can’t get by going to a doctor or focusing on a tutor, it’s about what they feel inside.”

Now Ann spends her winters focusing on the summer camp and preparing for the three months that will go by in a flash. She devotes a significant amount of time to finding funding for those kids that can’t afford the camp. Last year she was able to find funding from local donors to scholarship 22 kids.

“If anyone had said to me 20 years ago that I was going to own a summer camp and that I was going to be a camp director, back in my career mode, I would have said, ‘Excuse me, what?’” Ann says.

“But I just feel like one of the luckiest girls in this world because I get to live in this valley and I get to work a job that I love, still ski in the winter and sneak out for powder days.” VT

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