Imagine schussing down acres of untracked powder at 10,000 feet, biking 400 miles across the Colorado Rockies, or rafting down a scenic whitewater river. Sound impossible? With today’s organizations like the Breckenridge Outdoor Education Center (BOEC), Adaptive Adventures, and Disabled Sports USA (DS/USA), if you can dream of doing it, chances are you can.
Adaptive adventures not only removes physical barriers to outdoor recreation, the company also removes social barriers, bringing together groups of often isolated people with disabilities and raising awareness levels for both the able bodied and disabled alike.
“Most people who suffer a disability or go through a disease process become isolated and find themselves in front of a television,” says Bob Bond, director of the BOEC’s Wilderness Program in Breckenridge, Colorado. “We wouldn’t want to be sitting in front of a television for the rest of our lives if we ever became injured or ill, and we want to make sure others don’t have to either.”
Western Accessible Adventures
The BOEC prides itself in offering “western-flavored, human-powered adventure activities for people who are routinely excluded from outdoor recreation.”While they offer some programs at their 39-acre site, others are conducted in natural areas throughout the West and include Nordic hut skiing, mountain peak climbs, hiking, backpacking, camping, fishing, and sea kayaking.
Courses are specifically tailored to accommodate each group’s physical and mental abilities and focus on strengthening communication, emphasizing abilities, challenging one's self by choice, and of course, having fun. According to Bond, gravity assisted sports, such as floating down a river in a canoe, river rafting, and downhill skiing are extremely popular because they are so accessible.
Adventures in Your Area and Beyond
Like the BOEC, Adaptive Adventures offers accessible adventure and wilderness programs. Having no actual facility to come to, this team of experienced staff and volunteers brings adventures to groups throughout the United States. Co-founded in 1999 by above-the-knee (A/K) amputee Joel Berman and Matt Feeney, a T9 SCI, the organization developed out of a need to bring more off-site and advanced adventures to people with disabilities.
“We wanted to provide some opportunities for people who already knew how to ski, bike, or do other sports to travel elsewhere with others who shared the same physical challenges,” says Feeney.
With this in mind, Adaptive Adventures’ offerings include several consecutive-day mountain camps each year where experienced skiers head out to great ski areas, sometimes take a snowcat to untracked powder and cut up the slopes, feed off each other, and enjoy the important social component that can be missing when people simply go skiing for a day then go home.
They also offer houseboat/kayak/water ski trips on Lake Powell on a fully accessible custom-designed houseboat. To integrate adaptive sports into the mainstream, each year they also send a team of adaptive riders to the 400-mile Bicycle Tour of Colorado, riding 60 to 80 miles a day alongside able-bodied bicyclists.
“Incorporating our trips into already established able-bodied adventures opens up the eyes of the other participants, helping promote disability awareness,” says Matt.
Besides offering adventure trips, the Adaptive Adventure website also serves as an on-line resource, listing 300 adaptive activities organized by state, funding resources, rehab hospitals, parks and recreation, kids, and camps.
Nationwide Disability Resources
DS/USA also lists adaptive adventure organizations on its website. Begun in 1967 by disabled Vietnam veterans as the National Amputee Skiers association, the organization now includes 80 community-based chapters nationwide that offer a variety of recreation programs that vary by location.
Adaptive Adventures offers the opportunity to achieve success and become free of physical barriers that may inhibit adventure and recreation in everyday life. Joining with others to share positive recreational experiences, whether among groups of people with similar disabilities or participating side-by-side with able-bodied people, helps people with disabilities, as Bond says, “go out and be people again.”
Resources
http://Adaptiveadventures.org
http://www.boec.org
www.dsusa.org
Photos courtesy of Adaptive Adventures
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For more information about adaptive sports, including cross-country skiing, see Adaptive Cross-Country Skiing for People with Disabilities.
If you have a disability, learn how you can better protect yourself, in Self-Defense for People with Disabilities.
