Washington Trails
Association
Trails for everyone, forever
Washington Trails
AssociationTrails for everyone, forever
Wheelchair accessible hiking allows us to share reverence for the natural world as a family. By Krista Hanson
Each summer, as friends fly across the country to visit family or on destination vacations, I mostly feel lucky to be “stuck” in the Pacific Northwest. Like many disabled people, my son uses a wheelchair that is custom built for his body, and he cannot get out of that chair to sit in an airline seat. So instead, we load up our wheelchair-adapted minivan and drive to accessible hikes around Western Washington.
A few summers ago, we took a weeklong trip around the Olympic Peninsula, pushing Lucas’s wheelchair and cajoling our younger daughter into wandering the accessible trails around Hurricane Ridge, the Hoh Rain Forest and near Lake Quinault. The trail we had read about and most hoped would work for us was a flat, hard-packed loop trail through the temperate rainforest. It was August, but the weather was cool and damp.
Exploring a trail at Lake Quinault on the Olympic Peninsula. Photo by Susan Hanson
We rolled Lucas out of our van and pushed his chair onto the quiet, duff-strewn trail. What I remember most was the magic of the forest hush and the lichen swaying off the branches, the trees like old men with beards down to their bellies. There was every possible shade of green: the vibrant, bright leaves of the small plants near the streams, the dark, earthy greens of the sword ferns, the sunlight barely dancing through the dark green canopy of cedars, firs, oaks and maples, and the light sage green of the lichen beards.
The Lake Quinault Loop was half a mile long, and it ranks among my top-10 favorite hikes. But this is not the hiking I expected to be doing with my kids. I grew up in Oregon, and when I was a teenager I was thrilled when I learned how to fill a pack with 40 pounds of everything I’d need to camp. I loved the feeling of going far, whether it was to camp in a place where I knew I’d see no other humans, or to the top of a ridge where I could see more miles than I could walk in a week. I loved the feeling of awe, feeling so small in the lush mountain habitat. I imagined one day sharing this joy with kids, if I had them.
Lucas was born in 2009 with a rare disease related to muscular dystrophy. He has needed a ventilator to assist with breathing since the moment he was born. He uses a wheelchair. Thirteen years later and now as tall as me, he needs either his very strong dad or a mechanical lift to transfer him to and from bed and chair. We carry medical supply bags and emergency airway clearing machines with us everywhere we go. He would want me to tell you he is also lucky to be the handsomest kid in the world. I would say we are so lucky to have him, a kid who is incredibly fun and funny, easy going, patient and determined.
We decided early on that we were not going to let fear keep us from getting Lucas out. If he couldn’t move himself, we would use our arms and legs to bring him out into the world. When he was a year old, we propped him up with rolled towels in a baby seat and placed it, together with his ventilator and other medical machinery, in a wheelbarrow. I remember Burke gently lifting the handles and pushing our delicate and curious baby up the hill, onto the crackle of fallen leaves and into the woods. We were giddy. We were taking our baby hiking!
Lucas is far too big for a wheelbarrow now (however, we did cross paths with the Vancouver disabled hiking crew on a B.C. trail, and their incredible adapted-hiking wheelchair looks like a fancy wheelchair/wheelbarrow hybrid, with a single wheel and long handles off the front and back so that two or more shleppers can steadily guide it, even lifting their passenger over fallen logs or onto rocky beaches!). Lucas’s body is so weak that he needs to ride with his chair tilted back. He prefers a paved path, but we can also manage a hard-packed dirt and gravel trail or a boardwalk.
Everyone with a disability is different. For us, when we go looking for information about a new trail, we mostly want to know the surface and the grade. We want something relatively flat, but we have the strength to push Lucas’s chair up a short, steeper grade. The details of the surface are particularly important to us — very hard-packed gravel will do, but a dirt path that became mud and shaped around foot prints or bike tires in the winter will be too uneven for us, even in the summer. And bad information is the worst. A ranger once told us about a hike on the other side of a mountain, “I think it’s accessible!” with a confidence we believed.
Lucas got excited and we went out of our way, only to find a trail with steps. We tried, carrying him down the first few steps, lifting his heavy chair over the first few massive root balls, but we quickly realized that nothing about the trail was accessible. Wishing it so doesn’t make a trail accessible.
Lucas and Ida enjoy a moment on a dock at Seattle’s Arboretum. Photo by Krista Hanson
We like a mile or so loop, though if the view is good enough — like the less than a quarter-mile walk to see a tall, powerful waterfall from up close near the Elwha River — we’ll take a really short trail, too. Our ideal hike has a picnic table at the halfway point — there is one at the Padilla Bay Reserve and another, Camp Brown, a new accessible hike on the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie. A picnic table allows us to throw down a blanket and lie Lucas down on the table — lying down is his rest position — to wonder up at the sky or tree canopy above.
Wheelchair-accessible hiking is teaching me to see the beauty in not just majestic, sweeping vistas, but also the smaller, the closer in. We have rolled along a paved trail in a ravine in SeaTac, next to a babbling creek and giant trees, with silhouettes of big box warehouses on the horizon. We were not deep in the wilderness, but I remember loving that day — pushing Lucas’s chair down the paved trail, noticing the tiny wildflowers. We found benches and the four of us sat and soaked in the shade of the Douglas firs and the cool of the creek. We were outdoors, we were in a new place and we were 20 minutes from home.
Some of our favorite hikes include boardwalks. They often open out to a vista — of wetlands, marshes, bogs and estuaries. These are rich habitats, and often we find interpretive signs telling us about the natural and human history of the place. Our favorite is the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge just north of Olympia and the Theler Wetlands Nature Preserve in Belfair. Both take hikers out over tidal estuaries.
Estuaries like Padilla Bay Reserve offer accessible connections to nature for Lucas and the family. Photo by Burke Stansbury
And we are fortunate to have wheelchair-accessible hikes that get us to the majestic, breathtaking views, too. I want our kids to know the feeling of being small and humbled, in the shadow of millions-of-years old mountain giants. Gold Creek Pond trail, near Snoqualmie Pass, offers us this possibility. In a paved, 1-mile loop around a pond that reflects the jagged North Cascades, we get to feel the presence of this incredible geology. The first year of the pandemic, we started a website, Rolling Washington, to document the accessible trails we were finding, and Gold Creek Pond was one of the first we featured. Lucas wrote in the welcome to our new website, “During this time, I’ve adored, simply adored, going on wheelchair-accessible hikes with my family.”
And for more of the accessible and breathtaking, there are the paths around Paradise Lodge on Mount Rainier. Years ago, we pushed Lucas’s little-kid wheelchair up the paved trails that are built so beautifully for access. The path wound gently uphill, and with each turn of the switchback we were able to point Lucas toward the incredible peak of Mount Rainier; it felt like we could reach out and touch it. It was wildflower season, and we marveled at the breathtaking beauty of the colorful mountainside. Lucas was 3 years old, so, like any little kid, the scene’s grandiosity was somewhat lost on him. He was as interested in the penguin toys he carried as any sweeping view. But for Burke and I, that half mile of paved trail felt like such a gift. A reminder: people before you advocated and legislated so that parks and trails would work for your family. You, with your wheelchair and medical equipment, can still walk in awe into these beautiful habitats.
Krista Lee Hanson lives in Seattle, home of the Coast Salish people, with her partner and two children. Krista’s writing has appeared in The Rumpus and the South Seattle Emerald, among other publications. Her family documents accessible hikes around the state at rollingwashington.org.
