One crisp morning near the mountain visitor center in Olympic National Park, I crested a hill and saw something remarkable. A young girl, around 8 years old, was cruising up the trail toward me in a Barbie-pink wheelchair that looked like it had tank treads instead of wheels. She was squealing with delight, her grinning family beside her.
“This is the coolest thing I’ve even seen!” I told the girl, pointing to her chair. From the joy on her face I think she agreed.
Her parents told me that they were testing out an all-terrain chair for a company that had made this pink one specifically for their daughter. With her regular wheelchair, she hadn’t been able to explore a mountain trail or other rugged spots. Now they felt they could take her almost anywhere.
I took photos of the family and the pink tank/wheelchair before they chugged on and later placed them on the bulletin board in our park breakroom. This was 2016, and the hiking wheelchair was a novelty. But I could feel a sea change coming.
A few years later, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore became the first US national park to offer sand wheelchairs to visitors who wanted to access the park’s beaches. Sleeping Bear Dunes also built a wheelchair accessible beach deck and designed its visitor center displays to be accessible for wheelchairs (it’s a fantastically accessible park–though I might be a little biased having worked there).
State parks around the United States are leading the track wheelchair trend, offering the chairs for rent or free. Georgia, Minnesota, South Dakota, Michigan, and Colorado are some of the states that have all-terrain wheelchairs available in their state parks, and several other states are looking to purchase them.
Action Trackchair, the company that provides many of the off-road chairs purchased by these parks, charges around $12,500 a chair, as 0f 2022. Parks often buy the chairs through donations or fundraising efforts.
Not everyone can afford an all-terrain wheelchair, but everyone should have access to the natural world. When parks provide accessible equipment for exploration, visitors are less burdened with its transport and cost. The more parks that have all-terrain wheelchairs and other accessible features, the more equitable our public lands become.
Contact your local park to see if they have all-terrain wheelchairs for your use or if there is a way to donate for them to purchase some. Encouraging the expansion of such programs starts with each of us, in the parks in our own backyards.