Adaptive Sports Adventure Gets Published!

Sylvie Fadrhonc, a friend and education and development manager of the Telluride Adaptive Sports Program (TASP) just had an article published about a collaborative trip that we have been helping them run for the past two years. Spokes n Sports Magazine, a publication about wheelchair athletes, has a feature article article about our "Alaska Adventure" program. We've not marketed this trip, as we really want it to act primarily as a benefit to the athletes and the TASP, as we are ardent supporters of their work. With the publication of this article, I suppose it's time to pass along a bit of information about the program and how it has evolved over the years. Click on this link to download a pdf of the article from the Alaska Adventure.

Telluride Adaptive Sports Program has been an institution in the Telluride area offering ski instruction and year-round therapeutic and adventure opportunities to people with disabilities since 1995. In the fall of 2008 we approached TASP about helping them offer a trip into the Alaska Range for some of their disabled athletes as a very partial "thank you" for their helping my son become the ripping little skier that he is today. Their enthusiastic response and effort resulted in a collaborative "Alaska Adventure" that we led in the summer of 2009.

Such an adaptive trip into a glaciated environment as remote as the Alaska Range had never been attempted to our collective knowledge, and we knew that we would all have a lot to learn about how to safely and effectively manage the many levels of logistics. We therefore carefully selected the first year's participants and made certain to manage their expectations so that they knew we were all proceeding with this trip with the best possible intentions and planning, but that we'd have to figure out a lot of the systems while in the field.

The trip was a resounding success!

A team of 12 flew onto the Coffee Glacier and included three spinal-cord injuries and a traumatic brain injury. We set up a very comfortable base camp and, despite rough weather, had a great time exploring the area on skis and sit-skis. In an article in our local paper one participant reflected, "Being in remote Alaska restored my own inner vitality and belief that I could still experience what I thought was untouchable from a wheelchair.”

With one successful trip under our belts, we felt we could develop an even more challenging curriculum for a true mountaineering course and offered two such trips in the summer of 2010. Both teams flew onto the Pika Glacier, south of Denali and home to the stunningly beautiful area known as Little Switzerland. TASP staff and our guides worked together to develop efficient glacier travel systems which enabled wheelchair bound participants to become Alaskan mountaineers. One highlight was when Sylvie intentionally launched into a crevasse on her sit-ski, and the remaining participants with disabilities successfully extracted her! It just doesn't get any better than that!

We plan to continue developing this program and will send a team into the Range next summer with an objective to climb, in the hopes of attempting Denali in the very near future. Our dear friend and guide Heidi Kloos initially took the reigns of this program in 2009, and a scholarship fund has been set up in her memory. Enough donations came in to sponsor a wonderful young lady named Amanda Young, an athlete with spinal bifida. If you'd like to make a donation, information can be found at the Telluride Adaptive Sports Donation page.