Adaptive sports have become core to Colorado skiing

BY TRACY ROSS THE COLORADO SUN

When Kevin Wilson was a kid growing up in Texas and Oklahoma he told his parents that if he didn’t get a college football scholarship he was going to move to Colorado to ski bum in the winter and raft guide in summer.

It made sense, what with his dad being a coach of all trades — football, basketball, baseball — and Wilson his heir to the interscholastic sports dynasties of eight di erent counties. School sports were the family’s life save for weekends. en they’d drive to their cabin in New Mexico to ski at Angel Fire and Red River resorts, ying downhill amid the scents of pinyon pine and Englemann spruce.

But when Wilson was 16, he was in a car accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down. ere began a long period of recovery and rehabilitation, learning to use a wheelchair, and pain pills doctors prescribed to the tune of 300 every time he went in for a checkup, while failing to address the pain itself, he says. rough it all he managed to go to college, meet his wife and survive heavy partying and drinking. But he su ered from depression linked to his inability to move through the world as he once did.

en, in a t of inspiration in 2014, he and his wife came to Colorado. ey loved it so much, they moved to Broom eld. Wilson had heard of

Eldora ski area, but it wasn’t until 2018 that he found out about the Ignite adaptive ski program housed at the resort, and went there to try skiing after his wife signed him up.

On a form his instructor gave him to list his goals, he wrote, “I want to be an independent skier and I want to work for Ignite.” e program grew, surviving a re in 2006 and basking in the spotlight of the Today Show’s Lend a Hand Program. In 2008, it received a grant from the United States Olympic Committee, allowing it to start serving disabled veterans. And in 2010, with its current name, it topped 1,000 lessons given by about 200 volunteers in a single season, after which it was “bursting at the seams” in its modular buildings.

It would take a couple years, but Wilson would achieve exactly what he wanted. He’s now a sit skier, a ski instructor and Ignite’s operations manager at an auspicious time for the non-pro t.

Founded as the Eldora Handicapped Recreation Program in the 1970s, Ignite struggled along, rst out of the back of a van, then out of a used AT&T shed and for 20 years, in a couple of cramped trailers in the corner of Eldora’s lower parking lot near the EZ chair and beginner terrain.

A curveball arrived in 2014, when Eldora’s old owner, Bill Killebrew, threatened to shutter the program by refusing to renew its lease at the resort. He welcomed the program back the following season as Dave Levin, Ignite’s then board chair, started discussing the possibility of Ignite raising funds to build its own facility.

In 2016, Powdr Corporation bought Eldora and Levin kicked o a capital fundraising campaign with $250,000 of his own money. Fast forward a few years and Brent Tregaskis, Eldora’s current general manager, says, “Ignite was maybe going to build a two-story building and rent the top oor back to us. But John Cumming, Powdr’s founder, was like, ‘Look. We should build it. We should own the building and give them a 99-year lease.’ You don’t want to have a little quarter of an acre (of your property) owned by somebody else.”

Levin died of cancer before he could see Powdr, Eldora and Ignite kick his dream into high gear. “ e only thing more important to him than Ignite was his family,” Carol Nickell, Ignite’s executive director, says. On May 18, Eldora broke ground on the facility. e new building, set to open for the 2024-25 season will span 12,000 square feet with roughly half going to Eldora’s ski and ride school for children and half to Ignite.

Nickell says Ignite is raising $1.9 million toward construction and an endowment to insure future programming. Tregaskis, while refusing to give a hard number, says Eldora is putting up many millions more to make the co-operating space a reality.

“Financially, it would have been better not to that,” he adds. “But John’s idea shows he’s really committed to Ignite.” e Breckenridge Outdoor Education Center o ers group or individual lessons at Keystone, Breck and Copper; Steamboat Adaptive Recreational Sports hosts multi-day camps for kids and adults; Foresight Adventure Guides for the Blind, an independent non-pro t operating out of Beaver Creek and Vail for level-4 skiers with visual impairments, matches coaches to skiers based on skiers’ ability and helps them ne-tune existing skills; and at Vail Resorts-owned Crested Butte Mountain Resort, Crested Butte Adaptive Sports, which operates independently of the resort, recently built a $14 million, 25,000-squarefoot, four-story, ski-in, ski-out base facility with living quarters. ese programs and a handful more now give thousands of snow sports lessons each winter to people a ected by disability at resorts that don’t appear too concerned about the programs bringing them a pro t.

As, it seems, are the 15 Colorado resorts that report supporting some sort of adaptive programming, according to Adrienne Saia Isaac of the National Ski Areas Association (“although there could be more; some folks are better than others about lling out their info,” she adds).

A short list includes the National Sports Center for the Disabled at Winter Park Resort, which teaches adaptive lessons and has a competition center for athletes wanting to race at the elite level. Vail and Beaver Creek both o er “integrative lessons” for individuals needing extra support in any of its general ski school group lessons. With Telluride Adaptive Sports, if you’re skilled enough, you can go heli-skiing with Helitrax and an adaptive instructor.

Ignite came to Eldora ve years after it opened in 1970. NSCD started up in 1970, 40 years after Winter Park Resort. Telluride rst spun its lifts in 1972 with adaptive lessons in its general ski school, while the non-pro t Telluride Adaptive Sports Program opened on its premises in 1995. And while Steamboat Resort opened in 1963, Steamboat Adaptive Recreational Sports (STARS) didn’t start until 2007.

Winter Park gives NSCD free lift tickets and “a generous rent rate” on their o ces beneath the Balcony House at the base of the resort, Diane Eustace, NSCD’s communications manager, says. And “while in theory, we’re losing space, we’ve been a longtime partner of NSCD because we’re a bunch of people who believe the outdoors are for everyone,” Jen Miller, Winter Park spokesperson, adds.

Chris Werhane, adaptive sports lead at Adaptive Adventures in Westminster, says people a ected by disability are increasingly interested in skiing because “everyone in the last 30 years has been born with technology,” and people aren’t afraid to step out of their comfort zones. He cites advances in prosthetics technology, cars with hand controls, public bus services like Bustang, which serves resorts up and down Inter-