Meet Doc Camasta: Our New Assistant Program Lead
Tim “Doc” Camasta has stepped into the role of Assistant Program Lead for the Colorado Springs Program. Before the title, though, Doc’s story already reads like our mission.
Doc has been fishing since he was a Cub Scout in the 1960s — a thread that runs through a career most people wouldn’t believe fits into one lifetime.
He served in the U.S. Navy from 1973 to 1975 as an Air Traffic Controller, then in the U.S. Coast Guard from 1981 to 1986, working surfboats and helicopter MEDEVAC as a Corpsman. Between those two hitches, he spent four summers fighting forest fires on an interregional fire crew out of Idaho, and did whatever it took to stay near the mountains and the water — teaching skiing, bartending, framing houses. For six months, he lived in a tent along the beaver ponds outside Sun Valley, Idaho.
Doc left the Coast Guard to become a Physician Assistant, running two practices in California before moving to Colorado in 2006 to work in Flight Medicine at Peterson Air Force Base. During the surge, he saw a steady stream of redeployed service members coming in with traumatic brain injuries. In 2009, he moved to Fort Carson to help lead TBI research, and spent the last ten years of his 36-year career as a PA at what’s now the Intrepid Spirit Center, treating TBI and the challenges that often come with it.
Working alongside the 10th Special Forces Group — many of whom carried the weight of multiple deployments and dozens, sometimes hundreds, of TBIs or concussive events — Doc started recommending Project Healing Waters as a form of outdoor therapy. He watched Veterans who got outside do better at home, connect more easily with others, and carry less anger and irritability.
As his own career wound down, Doc was running on empty. So he took his own advice and got plugged into PHW himself. The camaraderie, the patience shown to a beginner’s “skills,” and the simple act of getting outdoors brought calm back to his body and his spirit. Now he’s paying that forward as Assistant Program Lead for the Colorado Springs Program.
Want to meet Doc, or get involved as a Volunteer or Participant? Get Involved — we’d love to have you on the water.
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