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When she moved to Colorado Springs from the Washington, D.C., area with her mother in 1994, then-eleven-year-old Patricia Cameron looked up at Pikes Peak and wondered if she’d ever get to the top.

“I grew up without any experience in the outdoors,” Cameron says. But in middle school, while participating in a mentoring and education program for at-risk girls, she got to go to Camp Shady Brook in Deckers, which is run by the YMCA of the Pikes Peak Region. “It was my first real experience doing Colorado-type nature, and I had a bug for it,” she says. “But I couldn’t afford it.”

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