What a Week Without Hospitals Looks Like: The Story Behind the Karl Studer Foundation's First Family Retreat

For seven days this July, two families didn't check a single hospital calendar: no appointments, no treatment schedule, nothing to be anywhere for. That was the entire point of Trip of a Lifetime, the Karl Studer Foundation's first family retreat.

Pulling off a week that actually feels unstructured, rather than just unplanned, takes more coordination than it looks like from the outside. The program brought two families facing a terminal illness or another life-altering event to Alpine, Wyoming, and the Foundation's work happened almost entirely behind the scenes, in the logistics nobody on the trip had to think about.

The setting was Alpine, Wyoming, a small town in Star Valley near the Greys River, roughly an hour from Jackson Hole. The families stayed in glamping tents rather than a lodge or cabin, and Jackson Hole Outfitters, the company that hosted the week, built the setup around comfort rather than full modern convenience. Guests sleep on cots with provided linens rather than in cabin beds, and each tent has a wood stove for the nights that call for heat. Wi-Fi is available when guests need it rather than running around the clock.

Bathrooms are flush toilets housed in outhouses, with shower trailers nearby; hot water depends on a generator running, and occasionally that means manually assisting the flush. It's not a hotel stay, and it isn't meant to be. It's built to keep a family that's already carrying a lot from also having to manage the logistics of being outdoors.

That distinction mattered to how the Foundation designed the week. Karl Studer and the organizers wanted families who might already be dealing with a lot of physical strain to have full access to the wilderness experience without the wilderness part being a burden. Professional outfitters and camp staff stayed on-site the entire week, handling meals, gear, and horses, so nobody in either family had to think about logistics.

The location itself did some of the work too. Alpine sits along the Greys River roughly an hour from Jackson Hole, close enough to reach by car but remote enough that Jackson Hole Outfitters markets the same stretch of river for corporate and family retreats specifically because it feels cut off from everyday routine without being hard to get to. That combination, genuinely quiet but not genuinely inaccessible, is part of why the Foundation picked this corner of Wyoming for a first-year program rather than somewhere farther afield.

Here's what made this trip different from a typical guided vacation: almost nothing was mandatory. Families could go wagon fishing on the Greys River, take a guided horseback ride into the backcountry, kayak at Murphy Lake, sit in on a hat-bar workshop, or head to the Jackson Hole rodeo for the evening. They could also do none of that and just rest, and the schedule was built to make either choice equally fine.

That's a deliberate design decision, and it's harder to pull off than a packed itinerary. A trip with back-to-back activities is easy to plan and easy to justify to donors, since every hour is accounted for. A trip built around choice requires trusting that unstructured time is doing real work, even when there's nothing photograph-worthy happening in a given afternoon. The Foundation built in long stretches of exactly that kind of open time on purpose.

Evenings followed a simpler pattern: campfires, shared meals, and one night with a live performance from musician Henry Pepin. It's a small detail, but it tells you something about how the week was framed. Nobody organized a support-group session or a wellness workshop. The organizers weren't trying to help these families process an illness. They were trying to give them a normal evening, the kind any family might have on a trip, illness or not.

That's the through-line of the entire week. Foundation organizers have said they wanted the families treated as guests, not as recipients of charity, and built the trip to work regardless of anyone's outdoor experience level. Karl Studer, who also runs the electric power division at Quanta Services in his day job, put it plainly: the trip was built around noticing what a family still has, not what they've lost. "Instead of dwelling on what's difficult, we wanted these families to spend a week noticing what they still have: each other," he said.

The Studer Foundation isn't the first organization to land on this model. A Week Away Foundation, a Pennsylvania nonprofit founded by Caleb Walker, has spent over a decade financing and coordinating respite weeks specifically for families battling life-threatening illness, working from the same basic premise: a week of rest can do something a fundraiser or a check can't. Programs like it tend to share a few structural choices with Trip of a Lifetime, among them keeping costs fully covered so a family never weighs the trip's price against a medical bill, and building in real choice rather than a packed schedule so the week doesn't just become another obligation.

Where Trip of a Lifetime stands apart is scale and intent. It's a first-year program for a foundation whose other giving, until now, mostly served families the Studers already knew in their own Rupert, Idaho community. Extending that same direct-giving instinct to families found through an open nomination process, rather than a personal connection, is a real shift in how the Foundation operates, even if the on-the-ground experience it built looks similar to what more established respite organizations already do well.

The Foundation has said it intends to run Trip of a Lifetime every year and expects to grow the number of families it can host as the program matures. If this year's version is any indication, that growth will probably show up in ways that are easy to overlook: not more scheduled activities, but more capacity to do the same thing this year's two families got, well. A rodeo night, a fishing trip, a campfire, and a week where nobody had anywhere they had to be.