The summit of Colorado’s Pikes Peak sits 14,115 feet above sea level. Next Thursday, 30 single moms from northern Michigan will embark upon a quest to reach that summit, navigating 13 miles of trail and an elevation gain of more than 7,500 feet. It’s the most ambitious adventure yet for Single MOMM, a local nonprofit with a focus on helping single mothers find hope, healing, confidence, and “healthy independence.”

“I founded Single MOMM in 2008, and it was probably a few years in that I met an amazing single mom and struck up a mentorship relationship with her,” recalls Executive Director Jennifer Finnegan Pool. “She was ill, and it became apparent that she was coming to the end of her life. Around that time, I was headed out to Colorado to hike Pikes Peak, and she asked if I would consider climbing the mountain in her socks. So, I took her Smartwool socks with me, and that became my ‘why’ and my focal point during that climb. I wanted to climb for her.”

Reaching the summit of Pikes Peak, Pool says, gave new perspective on “what it looks like to engage in the impossibilities of life” – a lesson she decided to pay forward to the women participating in her organization’s programming.

“A lot of times in the chaos of being a single mom – and I was one – you get lost and you start to feel like you're insignificant, or that you're drowning in the midst of something so big,” Pool explains. “To be able to stand on the top of a mountain and see that the impossible is possible, I felt like there was a beauty in that that was incomparable. And so, as Single MOMM continued to grow and we expanded our programs from mentorships to classes and then to camp experiences, I knew I wanted to design a specific camp that would be symbolic of the day-to-day climb that single moms make.”

So it was that Pool’s solo trek out to Pikes Peak evolved into a group camp experience called “I Climb for Her.” Single MOMM offered that camp for the first time in 2018. Another version was slated for 2021, but the pandemic scuppered those plans. 2025 marks just the second incarnation of I Climb for Her, and interest in the experience has grown substantially in the past seven years.

“There were 12 of us [in 2018], with no guides,” Pool says. “This time, there are 40 of us going. We’re all climbing, 30 are single moms, seven are staff, and three are guides. Last time, we were much more grassroots, with less logistics, less coordination, less everything. So, putting the camp together this time has been an incredible undertaking.”

All told, Pool says that she and the rest of the group spent eight months getting ready. Regular group hikes and Pilates sessions were part of the training regimen, but so were things like “using soup cans as weights” or “climbing the stairs at every opportunity instead of taking an elevator.”

It wasn’t just physical preparation, either. Just like Pool got her “why” for climbing Pikes Peak when a friend tossed her a pair of Smartwool socks, she encouraged every mom in the group to define a motivating focal point to drive them forward.

“Our collective ‘why’ is to show, as a community, what we're capable of,” Pool tells The Ticker. “But the individual whys vary dramatically. There’s a woman hiking who is a survivor of a significant medical crisis, and her ‘why’ is to rise above that and find symbolism of new life. We have a woman who has survived severe domestic violence, and her ‘why’ is to show that every day is a gift and that she now has a choice to live fully alive. We have another woman who is a widow, and her ‘why’ is to hike this mountain in honor of her deceased husband. And then we have lots of women who are hiking because, symbolically, they want a marker to remind them for the rest of their lives that they can do hard things, that they can overcome.”

The 40 hikers participating left Michigan this week en route to Colorado. Today (Sunday), they are traveling to Camp Elim in Woodland Park, Colorado, where they’ll participate in team building activities, embark on shorter day hikes, and acclimate to altitude at approximately 9,000 feet above sea level. The group won’t undertake the actual Pikes Peak climb until Thursday, August 21, when they’ll roll out of bed at 3am, pack their bags, and commence their trek up Pikes Peak’s Barr Trail.

Pool encourages northern Michigan locals to support the Single MOMM team from afar, whether by following along with a “prayer calendar” the organization has put together for the trip, or by keeping an eye on the nonprofit’s social media accounts.

“Starting Saturday, we’ll be posting pictures on Facebook and updating our Instagram stories all the way through, and we’d love to have community members cheering us on,” she says.