May 21, 2025

By Amanda Conklin
Contributing Writer

As I poured my morning coffee a sleepy smile crept onto my face as my oldest paraded my youngest via piggy back around the room singing the Guggenheim song. “G-U-GGEN HUH! H-E-I-M GUGGENHEIM GUGGENHEIM!”

This summer’s 2025 camp season will be my eldest’s first year as a camper, and she is counting down the days until she can attend. She has been yearning to attend camp since she was old enough to say “Guggy.” Camp Guggenheim holds all the nostalgic memories a summer camp normally holds, but for our family it’s in an even bigger way. My mom attended Camp Guggenheim as a camper for several years. My parents met on Camp Guggenheim Staff in the Summer of 1983 and fell in love. They got married in 1986. After I was born, I was baptized at Guggenheim. I often played on the shore of Lower Saranac Lake at Guggenheim from a very early age as my parents offered to take the Summer Camp counselors on boat rides to relax on their Saturday’s off. I attended camp as a camper and then served on staff for four years including as the program director and director of Teen Vision. My husband and I had our rehearsal dinner on the grounds of Camp Guggenheim. I can’t believe I have a child old enough to attend as a camper.

I am also waiting with hopeful anticipation for my daughter to attend her first week of camp. She has recently had a hard time fitting in with her peers at school and has been on the receiving end of some bullying. She is at the age where cliques are starting to form, and though she is the sweetest child I’ve ever met and is incredibly social, she feels left out quite often. It seems history is repeating itself as I also was bullied and struggled to fit in at her age. I assured her she will meet life-long friends at Camp Guggenheim this summer, just as I did. There is something truly sacramental about entering those gates on Forrest Home Road that somehow erases social and economic status. Even the most homesick, quiet camper on Sunday somehow integrates wonderfully and by Friday closing Mass is part of the Guggenheim family. Even the most popular kid at school sets that trophy down for a week of Camp Guggenheim. It is some wonderful combination of attentive counselors, mountain air and Holy Spirit that allows a tiny piece of heaven on earth to settle on the grounds of our home on the water.

Most summer camps are a great atmosphere for memories to be made, but Camp Guggenheim has an added element that makes it well worth the money. It isn’t just camp fires, goofy songs, and team building activities. There is real, authentic depth in the Catholic faith that is the life-changing piece that sets Guggenheim apart from other woodsy summer camps. Though I attended Catholic School through sixth grade and had wonderful parents who raised me in the faith, it was at Camp Guggenheim where I first experienced praying the Divine Office as a counselor. I had my first moving experience with Eucharistic Adoration at camp. I felt comfortable enough to ask the hard questions about the faith of the counselors and chaplains at Theology on Tap there. I found peers and mentors who shared my deep faith, not as a side interest, but as the foundation of their lives. It is where I met most of my close, lifelong friends. There have been many birthdays, weddings, baptisms and even funerals with large Guggenheim contingents. There is something about the mountain backdrop and the mixed aroma of pine and sunscreen that opens a heart to Christ working on a soul. The number of marriages, priestly vocations, and religious vocations I’ve witnessed come from time at Camp Guggenheim is inspiring. I strongly encourage anyone who has a child they love between the ages of 11 and 18 to send them to Camp Guggenheim this summer. It will be a strange new “Guggy-first” attending closing Mass as the parent of a camper, but I can’t wait to see the joy on my tween’s face as she sings the camp song while holding the hands of her new friends and to be greeted with the sounds and smells of home once again.