Free Wheeling

Patty Cisneros Prevo looked across the dancing expanse of Lake Michigan as tears coursed down her cheeks. The day — complete with azure skies and mild temperatures — was perfect. Her children, 9 and 7 at the time, giggled as they leaped along the shore, their pup, Canela, shadowing their steps. They’d set out from the trailhead about an hour before, meandering through Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore’s dappled woods, across its sweeping meadows and onto a ridge overlooking the lake. Then, they’d descended to the sand, and that’s when emotion overcame her.

“I felt independent,” said Cisneros Prevo, a three-time Paralympian who has navigated the world via a wheelchair since 1996, when she sustained a spinal cord injury. “It was the first time that I could get to a beach area without any assistance.”

Prior to that 2022 trip, she’d accompanied her family on accessible trails in a range of parks by clipping an all-terrain wheel to the footrest of her wheelchair to convert it into a sturdier, more nimble trike. But beaches had been a different story. “Sand is impossible to push through with a chair,” she said. For nearly three decades, the only time she’d been to a shoreline was in the arms of her husband. So when a Google search had turned up a program run by Friends of Sleeping Bear Dunes that offered hikes in something called a track chair, a joystick-driven device with the ability to manage slopes and sand, Cisneros Prevo jumped at the opportunity.

“I was so pumped…. The fact that they have this chair, and it was free. And all you had to do is make a reservation.” After receiving brief operating instructions from the Friends volunteers, her family set off, with Cisneros Prevo — buoyed by enthusiasm as much as the chair’s small motor — leading the way.

When the vacation ended, she returned home bursting to share the good news. “I told everybody,” she said.

For decades, the National Park Service has strived to meet legal accessibility requirements by modifying buildings and natural features. Parks have installed ramps, added elevators, and constructed curb cuts, scenic pullouts and beach boardwalks. But what happens when the boardwalk ends?

Adaptive recreation, which refers to the use of activity-specific technology to overcome environmental barriers, gives those with mobility challenges an alternative to setting the brakes or turning around. The specialized equipment might take the form of an electric-assist device for hiking, a recumbent trike for cycling, custom grips for paddling or a special harness for rock climbing. And while the specifics might vary, the objective remains the same: to allow more people to experience the landscape in all its root-filled and rocky glory.

The concept is far from new — a pioneering World War II veteran kicked off adaptive skiing in the 1950s — and one need look no further than the Paralympic Games for proof of popularity and worldwide interest. In the public lands arena, early adopters of adaptive practices have been paddling and climbing for years. But the backcountry — including its trails and hard-to-reach shores and rock walls — has largely remained terra incognita for those with mobility challenges. That’s begun to change with the advent of a slew of trailblazing mobility devices, which have the capacity to take their operators farther than ever before. This tech, coupled with passionate advocates and heightened awareness, has taken park access into a new realm.

Today, visitors with mobility challenges can camp at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, hunt birds at Assateague Island National Seashore, paddle through the Everglades, climb along the Obed Wild and Scenic River and hand-cycle at Yosemite. In addition, a selection of national parks, from Rocky Mountain to Great Smoky Mountains, now offer all-terrain wheelchairs for interested hikers. At Grand Teton National Park, these devices are so popular that hardly a day goes by without someone requesting their use.

“We’re hearing the same thing from the same people, definitely regarding the desire to increase access to adaptive hiking, increase access to devices,” said Jeremy Buzzell, manager of the Park Service’s Park Accessibility for Visitors and Employees program. They don’t want to only use the paved trail that goes around the lake within view of the visitor center, he said. “They want to get out in nature.”

While these cutting-edge devices are revolutionizing recreation for visitors with mobility challenges, their rise in popularity isn’t without growing pains. Uninformed park-goers sometimes can be unwelcoming or outright rude when they encounter such contraptions in the backcountry. And in many cases, device usage — and heightened demand — has tested park managers, triggering difficult conversations about outdated standards, incomplete data and insufficient staffing.

Despite these problems, the field of adaptive recreation continues to blossom, complementing — and challenging — the accessibility work of yore. Beginning in the 1960s, a series of fundamental laws, including the Architectural Barriers Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, established guidelines to ensure equitable access in parks (and other public spaces) for all people. Over time, these guidelines have evolved and expanded, so that today, everything — from the carpet pile height in visitor centers to the benches along trails — is expected to conform to set standards. Parks from Assateague Island and Cape Cod national seashores to Great Sand Dunes and Redwood national parks have been incrementally upping their accessibility game, offering brochures in Braille or via audio translation, investing in removable mats to cross stretches of sand and assembling miles of smooth boardwalk.

“I always say accessibility is just a little bit at a time. You make progress by making it a priority with the capacity you have, with the money you have, with the community you have,” said Lynne Dominy, the superintendent of Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Wisconsin. Since 2008, park staff have been working to install accessible restrooms, boardwalks and campsites on a few of the park’s 21 islands. Their newest project involves the construction of a 500-foot ramp to reach a popular boat launch, which sits at the base of a set of steep stairs. 

Buzzell acknowledges that “there is no one-size-fits-all solution for accessibility.” Access is unique to the individual, he said, as well as to the park. “What we are trying to do is modernize our way of thinking about accessibility as we modernize our approach to managing parks.”

These efforts don’t just benefit the millions of park visitors with disabilities. Anyone who has ever visited a park while recovering from surgery, pushing a stroller, wielding crutches or steadying a loved one with a walker, knows the value of restrooms with wide stalls and buildings with push-button doors. Unfortunately, there’s no magic wand — and certainly no pot of gold — that is going to immediately transform the Park Service’s aging buildings and trails. Furthermore, not everything can be made accessible. (No trail that drops into the Grand Canyon, for example, will ever meet current accessibility standards.)

Tasked with balancing the agency’s dual directive to preserve resources and grant access, managers must make unenviable judgment calls. When creative solutions are exhausted, and managers determine a feature or experience can’t be made physically accessible without damaging the landscape or infringing on a site’s historic character, it’s “gut-wrenching,” said Linda Cook, the superintendent of Weir Farm National Historical Park in Connecticut. “You just pray the technology comes along that allows you to fill the gap.”

Weir Farm developed immersive virtual tours for those who can’t maneuver through the tight entrances and crowded interiors of the park’s historic art studios. In the case of parks with hard-to-navigate trails, the replacement for hiking might be scenic drives or narrated films. Or for those seeking something more, backcountry access may be achieved by pairing adaptive equipment with thoughtful trail design. With respect to the latter, Joe Stone is an expert.

Fourteen years ago, Stone crashed while speed-flying off Missoula’s Mount Jumbo and was paralyzed from the chest down, though he retains limited hand function. (An offshoot of paragliding, speed-flying uses a smaller canopy, a difference Stone likens to driving a Ferrari rather than a bus.) Having grown up camping and backpacking in national parks, he was desperate to return to the backcountry but found his options lacking. “In those days, there was very little technology to get on trails,” he said. The unsophisticated gear made off-road hand-cycling “so much of a struggle that I spent most of my time on the road until better technology was invented,” he said.

Now that tech for getting people with disabilities off the pavement has improved, Stone and his business partner, Quinn Brett, have become leading adaptive recreation advocates. Their business, Dovetail Trail Consulting, offers trainings for land managers about everything from disability laws and etiquette to trail assessments and design. They also bring hiking equipment out to parks and other public lands to demonstrate “the capabilities of this new technology and how it’s allowing us to go places that we really haven’t been before,” said Brett, a former Park Service climbing ranger who has been paralyzed from the waist down since falling from Yosemite’s El Capitan in 2017.

Modern mobility devices, like the people who use them, take many forms. Some appear to be the rugged cousin of a typical wheelchair, with knobby tires by the hips and a single tire in front. They may have additional levers or gears to assist with manual braking and maneuvering. Other devices are powered by a motor or have wide tracks (picture an elliptical conveyor belt) instead of wheels. Recreationists might find themselves sitting upright, as in a wheelchair, in a reclined position, as in a recumbent bike, or kneeling, as in Brett’s face-forward trike.

Practically speaking, the Park Service doesn’t have the cash to purchase hundreds of these devices, which can bear car-like price tags, or the staff to run adaptive programming nationwide. Thankfully, the agency has a long history of collaboration, and several park partners have stepped up.

The Friends of Sleeping Bear Dunes is one such partner. Their track chair program, which launched in 2019 and now serves around 40 people a year, is the brainchild of longtime pals Jeanne Esch and Kathy Tuckerman. When park staff approached the Friends group about 10 years ago seeking volunteers to help with trail assessment work, the request landed in the lap of Tuckerman, who roped in Esch. After realizing that many of the park’s hikes weren’t navigable for those with mobility challenges, the women began researching devices that would get more people on the trails. 

Esch, who uses a wheelchair, first piloted the track chair on a trail that she had always heard about but never hiked. She cried when she and her friends got to the top. “To be in that quiet and to see what everybody had been telling me about, it was just overwhelming,” she recalled. 

In the Southeast, expanding access to the outdoors has been a driving passion for Eric Gray for more than a decade. A recreation therapist by training, Gray started his Atlanta-based nonprofit, Catalyst Sports, after he noticed that the region was an adaptive recreation desert. “Nobody was providing any opportunities,” he said. His group, which today can be found in 12 locations in eight states, takes people climbing, biking, hiking and kayaking. For the past two years, Catalyst Sports has partnered with Great Smoky Mountains National Park to offer a variety of adaptive outings. (The National Environmental Education Foundation supported this work as part of a grant program that funded nearly two dozen accessibility projects on public lands.)

At a hike Gray attended last year, the participants all shared where they were from. Many had arrived from out of state, but one man was from nearby Cherokee, North Carolina. When the ranger asked him how often he came to the park, seeing as it was practically in his backyard, the man said it was his first time on a trail. Gray watched the realization set in. “You could see it in the ranger’s face,” he said. This place the park staffer both loved and took for granted had been off-limits for someone in a wheelchair until that day. Gray remembers thinking, “Holy crap. Why is this a historic thing happening in 2023, right? Why hasn’t this been happening for many, many years?”

Sometimes, visitors need more assistance than technology alone can afford. At Acadia National Park in Maine, for example, a locally led partner group, MDI Wheelers, has wrapped up its second year offering rides to park-goers unable to pedal their own bikes on the park’s famous gravel carriage roads. “Acadia is pretty inaccessible if you have mobility challenges,” said Janet Wood, one of the organizers. “If you can’t walk, or ride a bike, you can only see it from your car or the bus,” she said.

It all started when a group of friends who frequently cycled the carriage roads started getting on in years. A few, including Ed Wood, Janet’s husband, developed health conditions that precluded them from operating a standard bike. Ed, who has Parkinson’s disease, switched to a recumbent for comfort and balance, but eventually, he couldn’t manage that either. Then, he and his friends discovered the Opair, a two-seat device with a wheelchair in front and a bicycle in back. (Critically, these Opairs are equipped with Class 1 motors, the lowest electric-assist classification, and can go anywhere in the park that non-motorized bikes can go.)

After Ed purchased an Opair and began using it, fellow park visitors took note and expressed interest. “It didn’t take half a second to figure out that this is a service that others can benefit from,” said Susan Edson, who helps coordinate volunteers and riders for MDI Wheelers. The nonprofit, which is still primarily operated by that core group of cycling pals, now owns three of the pricey Opairs (thanks in part to funding from Friends of Acadia) and can provide two outings a day, two days a week, during the summer season. The leisurely tours, which can cover up to 7 miles, often include stops to take in the scenery.

“There’s so little that I’m able to do with my limitations,” Ed said. “Bicycles mean freedom.”

Sometimes, all a park-goer needs to explore a park is an arm to hold on to, a tactile map or some verbal cues. Such is the case for Laura Oftedahl, a Paralympian with low vision, who loves visiting parks but was hesitant to travel to them on her own until she discovered Wilderness Inquiry, a group that offers multiday paddling and hiking trips for people of all abilities. A tandem cyclist and accomplished skier, Oftedahl speaks fondly of kayaking through the sea caves of Apostle Islands and canoeing through the Everglades with the help of Wilderness Inquiry guides and equipment.

“Back when I was growing up, it would have been unheard of for somebody to call up and say, ‘Well, I want to come on your trip, and I’m blind, and I just really need this and this and this,’” said Oftedahl, who is 72. “You know, it didn’t happen.” She appreciates that groups such as Wilderness Inquiry exist and that they “actually understand that there are people who want to go out and enjoy the outdoors but need some help doing it,” she said.

As more visitors seek out adaptive opportunities, park managers are finding themselves in uncharted waters, buffeted by outdated policies and inadequate visitor education. For starters: Are modern mobility devices permitted on trails? Everyone agrees that wheelchairs are allowed, even in congressionally designated wilderness areas (those spaces where motors and tires are generally prohibited). Some argue that this means mobility devices are legal wherever foot traffic is allowed. But the Park Service’s Buzzell says the issue is more complicated. Which devices, he asked, fit the legal definition of a wheelchair? In the absence of a cut-and-dried answer, Buzzell encourages park staff to assume that devices they encounter in the field are allowed unless there is a valid reason they shouldn’t be.

Advocates urge park visitors to follow the same advice. Both Brett and Stone have encountered folks on the trail who feel the need to police those using devices. They’ll say things like, “You don’t belong here. You’re not allowed here,” Stone said. Some park-goers raise safety concerns, implying that people with disabilities are more likely to require aid. Brett, who has a background in search and rescue, takes umbrage at that notion. There will always be unprepared people, she said, but most of the folks using mobility devices are acutely aware of their needs and take steps to mitigate risk. Those with visible physical disabilities stand out, she said, “so you can see us hiking uphill, and it looks different. Whereas the guy with heart disease who has no water and is wearing inappropriate footwear isn’t going to get called out.”

Other visitors speculate that devices harm the trail tread, a fear Stone secretly harbored until he began demoing the equipment for resource managers. He asked how they felt when they saw his tires spin against a rock, and he learned that they were “far more concerned about the damage that foot traffic and equestrian use is putting on our trails than anything that our tires are doing,” he said. (The devices’ low speeds and the small number of them on the trails certainly contribute to that lack of concern.)

A common barrier for those with mobility challenges is one that many other visitors also face: lack of clear, detailed information about trails, park features and facilities. “I think what happens a lot for a lot of disabled folks is we have to spend so much time and energy even just trying to figure out whether we can go to the park, what we can do, where the trails are, that by the time we get there, we can’t really enjoy it,” said Syren Nagakyrie, founder and director of the nonprofit Disabled Hikers, which aims to build disability community and justice in the outdoors. The Park Service’s progress on this front has been slow, but Buzzell said the agency is “all in” with respect to park accessibility. He is encouraged by the steady headway and points to a new centralized webpage that allows users to find parks with available adaptive equipment, such as all-terrain and beach wheelchairs. (As of this fall, the tally of participating sites had reached 28.) Buzzell’s comprehensive vision, which is still years off, includes a more robust master list, as well as individual park webpages that provide useful data about trails and programs.

“There is an awful lot of person-power involved in gathering all this information,” he said. Not only do staff at 430-plus parks need to collect details about facilities, noting the location and quantity of accessible bathrooms and parking spots, the height of water fountains, the presence of firm surfaces around picnic tables and boat launches, and much more, but they also need to assess miles and miles of trails. What’s the cross slope, elevation gain and width for every section? Is the trail a jumble of rocks, sandy or braided with tree roots? Do branches dangle at eye height? Are there stairs?

In light of the growing need, several parks, including Grand Teton and New River Gorge, have begun prioritizing these trail assessments, relying on staff, interns, volunteers and grant-funded consultants to put in the labor. While there are many ways to do an assessment, using high-tech tools or just a notebook and pen, the one immutable variable is boots — or wheels — on the ground. “You can’t fix an accessibility barrier if you don’t know it exists,” said Cindy Burkhour, the consultant who trained Esch and Tuckerman at Sleeping Bear Dunes. “You have to get out there, and you have to walk your trails.”

These assessments can then inform trail maintenance decisions. Perhaps trail crews remove or retrofit bollards or fix a tight pinch-point. Stone and Brett said there is a misconception that accessibility means “dumbing down” a trail experience and making everything wide and flat. “The trail’s still going to be that adventurous, rocky trail that leads to a lake,” Stone said. “But there might be a couple of rocks that get removed or get kind of shaved down to make it better for our mobility devices,” he said.

Ultimately, this is what an inclusive park experience and adaptive recreation are all about, according to Burkhour. “It’s a way of thinking, and it’s a way of believing that everyone has a right to participate in the fun stuff of our life,” she said.

Following his accident in 2010, Stone said he felt like a burden. Not only did he have to come to terms with the emotional, physical and financial fallout of his new life, but he also had to make peace with the possibility that his park exploits were over. But 364 days post-crash, having endured a month in an induced coma and many more in rehabilitation, he hand-cycled Glacier National Park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road. Motorists cheered him on as he chugged over Logan Pass at 2 to 3 miles per hour. The experience, which he called “really magical,” made him wonder whether he could try his hands at a trail next. So, Stone ventured into the backcountry accompanied by a couple of friends who could hoist and shove his tires when he got into a jam. The rudimentary tech made for a torturous first outing, he said, but the experience proved that there was “still a place for me off the pavement.”

In 2015, Stone returned to the skies and, last January, he placed second in an international adaptive paragliding competition in Colombia. He talks frequently about how grateful he is, and how these experiences motivate him to continue his work as an advocate.  “With the technology that we’re using today, paired with skill sets and access,” Stone said, “we’re now able to go places that historically have never been possible for people with physical disabilities.”