Classic Car Buff, Ryan Stevenson: He Keeps on Rollin’

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February in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains is prime time for prodigious dumps of “The Greatest Snow on Earth”™. It’s the stuff of legends, coveted by snowboarders the world over.

It was in February of 2006 that 25-year-old Ryan Stevenson of Salt Lake City and a group of his buddies were trolling the backcountry above Brighton Ski Resort looking for untracked stashes of the fabled white stuff. Just below 10,721-foot Clayton Peak, Ryan found his untracked stash.

It was untracked for a reason. Hidden beneath the surface were rocks that grabbed Ryan’s board and flipped him backwards. He landed on his back on another rock hard enough to fracture his fifth thoracic vertebra, and severe his spinal cord. It would be Ryan’s last snowboarding trip. 

Two years later, Ryan is a paraplegic and in a wheelchair. But he’s still going places—more often than not in his custom 1965 Chevrolet Impala, retrofitted with a 350 cubic inch LT-1 fuel-injected V8. Ryan’s love for snowboarding has been replaced by a love for custom and classic cars.

“I guess the accident was a wake-up call,” says Ryan.  “I decided I should start doing some of those things I had been thinking about, but hadn’t done.” One of those things was customizing classic cars. But for Ryan, that wasn’t enough.  “I felt that I needed to give something back.”