Beth Krasemann recently went on a fly fishing retreat in Redstone. The Colorado Rocky Mountain School history teacher and endurance athlete has never really fished, nor is she that interested in fishing. “I kept trying to throw too much muscle into it,” she said, laughing. But she desperately needed that weekend up the Crystal.
“I went for the fellowship,” she said.
The retreat was hosted by Casting for Recovery, a Bozeman, Montana-based organization that hosts nationwide fly fishing programs for women in treatment or recovery from breast cancer. Krasemann, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in September 2023 and completed treatment in March 2025, had heard of the organization before.
But it wasn’t until she was sitting in a hospital gown, waiting for a routine mammogram at Valley View Hospital recently, that she finally picked up a flyer.
While she didn’t come home from the retreat and buy a fly rod and waders, Krasemann is bringing home something that she learned from the weekend: She’s starting a breast cancer survivor support group in Carbondale. The group meets for the first time Nov. 10 and the second Tuesday of every month thereafter.
Krasemann said that spending the weekend with 14 other women in various stages of breast cancer recovery helped her realize what had been missing in her own process.
“What do they say — you write the books that you can’t find to read? I’m starting this because I need this,” she said.
One of the women Krasemann met in Redstone was Kim Jones, a leader of the Bosom Buddies of Southwestern Colorado, a Montrose-based breast cancer support group. The group has been meeting weekly for 35 years and also hosts an annual 5K/10K walk and run. While Krasemann has an incredibly supportive network of family and friends, what she didn’t have was a group of women like the ones she met in Redstone — or the Bosom Buddies — who could identify with parts of her own experience.
“One of my doctors asked me, ‘what’s your support network?’ And I was like, ‘oh, I have so many people!’” Krasemann said. “‘I have my bike people and my skimo [ski mountaineering] people.’ And she said, ‘well how many of them have breast cancer?’”
The answer, of course, was none. “And she was like, ‘you need those people,’” Krasemann said.
While diagnosis and treatment were hard for Krasemann, she powered through with characteristic grit and an inordinate amount of physical movement. The harder part, she said, has been navigating post-treatment life. Medication questions have gone unanswered, and she’s dealt with side effects like lymphedema, neuropathy and sexual and hormonal dysfunction that no one prepared her for — these have been cancer’s parting shots.
While Krasemann credits her treatment team at Valley View for eradicating the cancer, she has struggled with the lack of follow through with what comes next. At the fishing retreat in Redstone, she finally found some solidarity — a powerful treatment itself.
“With Valley View it was like, ‘Okay, come here, get treated’ and then, ‘we saved you, go,’” she said. “The social and emotional fallout, there was no follow-up. So then when I met these other people, there was so much that I identified with, we had these common experiences, we just saw each other.”
That’s exactly what Krasemann wants to provide with the new survivorship group in Carbondale. There won’t be an agenda or any pressure, just a welcoming space to talk about whatever comes up — namely, what it feels like to be in medicine’s “blind spot,” that space where cancer treatment is completed but the physical and emotional effects are still very real.
“I just hope to support each other,” Krasemann said. “Like the retreat, it wasn’t about fly fishing, it was just us all being together.”
The breast cancer survivor support group meets the second Tuesday of every month at 6pm at the Carbondale Library. The first meeting is on Nov. 10.