Meet Tim
I am 23 years old. I was born in Salem, Oregon and lived in
a small town outside of Salem until I was 11. Then we moved to Glenwood as a
family for the mountains, rivers and everything outdoor that Glenwood has to
offer. I went through Glenwood Springs Middle School and graduated from
Glenwood Springs High School. I’ve left a couple of times but I always come
back. Partly because of the recreation opportunities but also because there’s a
really great support system in the community.
After graduation, I moved to Gunnison to go to Western State
Colorado University to major in Business and skiing and biking. Once I got out
there, it was good to learn some new recreation areas and meet some new people while
going to school and learning what I could from that. It was awesome. I love it
there. I didn’t even come back for my first summer in college. I just stayed
and worked, biked and dirt biked and got ready for the second ski season. I was
on the Western Mountain Sports Ski Team the first year for the big mountain
competitions. I competed once that season but I got to practice with the team,
meet a bunch of people and learn the ropes of Crested Butte.
The beginning of the next season a group of friends and I
were doing some ski filming and gearing up for the season. We had already put
out a video from early October on Monarch Pass that had gotten some decent
traction on the internet. We were really stoked about filming and trying to get
ourselves out there a little bit so my friend, Peter, and I went out. We were
skiing backcountry off of Kebler Pass on November 18, 2014. I had a gentle but
unexpected crash and ended up breaking my neck at C5 and was immediately paralyzed
from the chest down. Luckily, I was with Peter and he is an experienced back
country guy. For some reason, I could stay sane for a couple of minutes and we
quickly realized it was an emergency situation. We dialed 911 with our one bar
of service that we had and two and a half hours later the Crested Butte search
and rescue showed up. They moved me to a toboggan and I passed out. I’ve hear
stories from that point on but I don’t have any memory until they brought me
back to consciousness at St. Mary’s Hospital. They told me I had broken my neck
and I would need to go to surgery. What I didn’t know is in between the
extraction and the hospital, I was in a helicopter and was severely
hypothermic. I had aspirated on snow when I had crashed so I had fluid in my
lungs. Somehow the flight nurses kept me alive and got me to the hospital.
I went through surgery and was in the ICU for approximately
2 weeks. I was just trying to get the liquid out of my lungs and kick the pneumonia
so I hadn’t even started with any paralysis recovery. I was just trying to swallow
and breath on my own because at this level of injury to the spinal cord, your
diaphragm is partially paralyzed. Once I was able to breath and swallow on my
own, then my focus switched from surviving to rehabilitation and learning to
live in my new body.
I got shipped off to Craig hospital. The saying is, you
never want to be there but it’s the best place you could be. They really know
what they’re doing and a lot of people with spinal injuries don’t get the opportunity
for a 3 month intensive rehabilitation program from 8:00-5:00, if not more.
There is an occupational therapist who is teaching you how to eat and a physical
therapist who is teaching you how to move, and a counselor who is helping you
deal with insurance and whatever medical costs you might have and how you are
going to survive after. There are specialist who come and help you adapt your
home and everyone is working to get you back to real life in 3 months.
After Craig hospital, I came back to Glenwood and, luckily,
my parents still had a place for me and could help me learn my new life. That’s
when I became more appreciative of the community and the support system that
this valley really will give.
The High Fives Foundation picked me up as an athlete before
I was even out of ICU. They are a nonprofit program out of Truckee, CA. Their
main goal is to be the safety net for extreme sport athletes that are injured.
It’s a realistic problem with skiing and biking and dirt biking and all of
these extreme sports, there are extreme injuries afterwards. They provide a
community and a support system and resources to those people that they choose.
I was lucky enough to be one of those people. They have funded an immense
amount of things that wouldn’t have been possible for me without them. When I
first got home they helped with some daily living expenses. For example, I
needed a special bed to sleep on because being in a chair, it’s important for
it to be the right height and then it has to be specific for skin issues. They
helped make that happen. So starting at the very bottom, the foundation of what
is going to make you a healthy and productive person, and then moved all the
way up to now I’ve gone on adaptive fly fishing trips in Montana with them.
They made it possible for me to try sit skiing. They have taken me adaptive
surfing and adaptive mountain biking. They bought me an adaptive mountain bike.
It’s a three wheel hand cycle that I can take out anywhere and it’s built
specifically for me to ride it. Those guys are super important to me because
they know what makes you tick. I have made a ton of friends who are similar
situations and then we can bounce off paralysis solutions about how to get back
to doing positive things, not just surviving.
The Bridging Bionics Foundation started up right about the
time I was getting home. They’re a local program that makes it possible for
people with disability to participate in rehabilitation and therapy outside of insurance.
They are a nonprofit and charge a minimal fee once a year to participate in the
program. For somebody like me, I get an hour and a half, once a week of one-on-one
training in the gym. I do everything from specific adaptive weight training to
get stronger, to vibration training to keep my lower body in shape. This keeps
the complication of spinal cord injury to a minimum, like UTIs, atrophy, bone
density issues, or skin issues.
Once a week, I go up to Snowmass Club and there’s a physical
therapist and a trainer where I do functional physical therapy and more
vibration training. They have access to a handful of world class exoskeletons
and I can use those for therapy as well. I walk once a week but I can’t feel my
nipples. So that’s a big part of the support system this valley has put
together. Very few other communities have something like that. We’re lucky to
have that and a lot of people put time, energy and resources into making that
possible to everyone in the valley who needs it.
All of these people in each of these organizations showed me
that there are so many opportunities. I was inspired by their generosity and
tenacity to put together these programs that had given me so much and had
really opened my eyes to the positive side of life. When I, with their help,
leveled out and started living my own life again, having interests and recreation
back into places I wanted to be, their work and ambition, gave me the
confidence to try and do the same for others. Return to Dirt and the adaptive
program that we are offering aims to grow the community of positivity and
comradery from our personal networks within the valley.
Return to Dirt is the adaptive program of the greater
outdoors. We have adaptive off-road vehicles that are custom built to cater to
a huge range of different disabilities. The next question is why is that
necessary? If you have a physical disability or a mobility impairment, if you
can’t move at full speed, then accessing the back country that we are all
generally here for becomes sometimes impossible. You can imagine if you’re in a
wheelchair, the most efficient way to get around in terms of vehicles is a minivan
with a lowered floor. If you are driving a minivan that has very little
clearance with only front or rear wheel drive and you’re in a wheelchair, then
there is not an option to access the backcountry. If you can’t run, hike or
bike there and your car can’t get there, then you can’t get there and you are
just precluded from that type of recreation. I found that I, personally, was in
a position when I got my adaptive vehicle to get full size pickup that has four
wheel drive. I did that because we live in the mountains and that seemed
necessary. I come to find out that that is now my favorite type of recreation:
using my vehicles as my off road wheelchair, or as some of my friends call it,
my mountain legs. But, that is not the most efficient, cost effective way for
most people to get back out there so we started thinking about how we could
deliver this positive experience I enjoy to the greater community. We came up
with Return to Dirt, which lines up the resources necessary for many people
with disabilities to get off of the pavement and out into the Colorado
backcountry we all love.
You can imagine it is one thing to scrape together $20,000
for a razor. That is only step 1 of 100 because you have to adapt it. Some people
know how to do it, some people don’t. There are kits and Some work, some don’t.
There is a lot of technical research and development to make something
comfortable, accessible and safe above the $20,000. That’s not to mention a
trailer to move it to and from, a truck to pull that trailer and then a support
team to help you get from place to place and to be out there with you while
you’re in the backcountry. You can’t be doing these things by yourself. You
think about just loading the trailer by yourself in a wheelchair. It’s
possible, but it’s only possible for a small percentage of the disabled
population. So we bring those able bodied people to help with the trailers and
take care of the logistics. Once we are there, we have a backup team to keep
everything safe. So Return to Dirt has brought together the material and
physical resources to deliver a backcountry experience to a whole host of
disabilities. Depending on the physical strength and the interest of our
athletes, we can give them a trip into the woods for free. They don’t have to
buy any of the equipment, they don’t need to know anything but where to show up.
We have the experience packaged and ready to go for them. It’s highly malleable
for a number of different interests and experiences that people would want. Some
people just want to get in and drive, twist, throttle and have the freedom of
the vehicle where you can go where you want, point it and do what you need to
do. Other people don’t care at all about driving and they’re more interested in
accessing a certain area for whatever the activity may be: sightseeing, leaf
peeping, fly fishing, or returning to a spot they used to camp with friends. It
could be camping, it could be collecting rocks or looking at different trees.
There’s nothing that we can’t do and we’re flexible enough that we can put
together experiences for people. When an athlete contacts us and says they want
to go on a trip, we ask them what kind of trip they want to do. Then we can
build our trip, equipment and experience around exactly what the athlete wants
to do.
When considering accessibility in the mountains or the
backcountry, our outlook is rather than try to make the backcountry accessible,
we make ourselves backcountry capable. The awareness needs to be that if you
have difficulty getting into the wilderness because of physical disability or
mobility impairment, it is possible and awesome. For people outside of that,
recognizing that equipment used on a daily basis by able bodied people can be
adapted and really important and useful in someone with a disability’s level of
exploration. It’s an important thing to note. When people are thinking about
how do we make this area accessible they think accessible toilets with wider
door frames and paved areas around the picnic areas to allow wheelchairs to
roll over. Those are really important pieces of the backcountry experience. But
for us, being able to responsibly and respectfully use our equipment to access
the wilderness should be right on par with those considerations as far as being
paramount to backcountry accessibility. I think in the future it will be common
knowledge, especially as the technology gets better. Sometimes you have to rely
on some motorized assistance to be able to get somebody back there. That’s the
long and the short of it, there’s not another way for a lot of people to do it.
There seems to be a common realization that it wasn’t
necessarily the activity that you were doing that became your passion. It
wasn’t necessarily the skiing or biking or doing these things that you are
actually yearning for and missing post injury. It was the experience with your
team, family or friends, out in nature and just doing a day of play. I don’t
ski like I used to, I don’t bike like I used to, I don’t dirt bike like I used
to. I can’t hike or run. But I get the same enjoyment out of doing different
backcountry activities with the same people and in the same areas as I used to.
It is much less about what the activity is and it is much more about your
surroundings and your attitude while you are out. You could enjoy the sights
and the sounds and the company of you close friends and family in currently
accessible areas but it is that much
sweeter when you are out in the woods on an adventure together.
The summer of 2018 was our first summer running the program
in the local area. We got 12 athletes out on 13 different experiences in our first
year. We have plans unfolding right now to more than double that for the coming
season and to bring our program farther and to a whole new demographic of
people. Because it was so successful its first year, we grew from having one
razor and one trailer to having two razors and looking for our second trailer, along
with a truck specific for pulling these trailers. We also have a dedicated crew
of directors and volunteers that make the project possible in the future. We
are laying out our calendar right now. For people who are interested, get in
contact with us through our website or social media. Reach out, say you’re
interested and we’ll put you through the application process. We already have
trips laid out on the calendar for this season but we have more room. We are
still looking for people who are interested to come out with us and have some
sort of experience.
Join the conversation.
We want to hear YOUR voice.
How could your favorite activity be adapted to make someone
backcountry capable?
Valley Life for All, A Non-Profit.
Reach
us at: 970-319-1279
www.valleylifeforall.org
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