The car crash that paralyzed me from the chest down at 18 years old took away many things: namely my ability to walk or feel much of my body as I once did, and the ease of moving through a world built almost entirely for people who aren’t, like me, physically disabled.
My lust for adventure, however, was not one of them.
Over the past two decades, I have snowmobiled across frozen lakes in Canada, skydived in California, scuba-dived on coral reefs in the Maldives, bungee-jumped in New Zealand, tracked the Big Five at dawn in South Africa, carved down mountains in Colorado, and driven through the foothills of the Himalayas, all as a full-time wheelchair user.
My opinion—or, perhaps, stubborn conviction—is that disabled people should have exactly the same right to hurl themselves into the world as everyone else.
What I’ve learned along the way, however, is that conviction alone won’t get you there. Behind every extraordinary experience is an extraordinary human being: a guide, operator, founder, or pioneer who refused to accept that adventures are for some bodies and not others.
The travel industry has spent decades treating accessibility as a compliance issue, something to be solved with a ramp and a well-meaning apology, but the founders here understand the challenge differently. They understand that disabled people don’t want a modified version of adventure. After all, the question was never whether disabled people wanted adventure, but whether the world would let us. These are some of the people and businesses who make the seemingly impossible, possible.
Let the adventures begin!
Safari excursions: Endeavour Safaris
In Botswana’s Okavango Delta, adapted camps and safari vehicles designed by Endeavour Safaris open up wildlife experiences once considered out of reach for wheelchair users.
Photo by Alick Robertson
Mike Hill, founder of Endeavour Safaris, opened his business in 2003 and has spent more than 20 years facilitating access into the wilderness in Botswana. He began his career as a ranger. But after recognizing how disabled safari loves were being underserved by the industry, he decided to change that, though he’d never experienced disability himself. He spent months volunteering in a home for disabled people, learning how to apply his expertise to a gap no one else had noticed. Two decades on, Endeavour Safaris has a fleet of vehicles fitted with hydraulic lifts and four-point wheelchair restraints, as well as an adapted camp with roll-in showers and step-free access, making it the first adapted mobile safari operation in the world.
Trekking: Accessible Travel Peru
The assumption that serious trekking is off-limits for wheelchair users is being eroded, one mountain at a time. In Peru, Francisco Padilla has spent the better part of a decade proving that the wonders of Peru—the ancient streets of Cusco, Lake Titicaca, the Rainbow Mountains, and Machu Picchu—are not beyond reach for physically disabled travelers. His company, Accessible Travel Peru, was the first to take wheelchair users to the ruins 10 years ago, deploying purpose-built, single-wheel, off-road chairs carried by guides through terrain that defeats most nondisabled tourists.
Trekking: Impact Adventure
In Nepal, Pankaj Pradhananga, founder of Impact Adventure in Kathmandu, has dedicated his life to building inclusive itineraries through the Himalayas. It was Pankaj who, in 2014, first began pushing for accessible tourism in a country where the infrastructure barely accommodates wheelchairs. That effort led to the inaugural International Conference on Accessible Adventure in Pokhara and, with it, the opening of Asia’s first wheelchair-accessible trekking trail at Kaskikot: a six-foot-wide path with a handrail at about 5,000 feet above sea level, with views from Dhaulagiri to Manaslu. His company now runs itineraries from the Buddhist temples of Kathmandu to wildlife safaris in Chitwan and into the lost Tibetan kingdom of Mustang, with guides, adapted vehicles, and routes that take disabled travelers off the beaten trail.
Mountain sports: Rocky Mountain Adaptive
In Canmore, Alberta, Rocky Mountain Adaptive is expanding access to the outdoors, from alpine trails to glacial lakes, through year-round adaptive programming.
Photo by Shawn.ccf/Shutterstock (L); photo by Nicole McFadden (R)
In the Canadian Rockies, Jamie McCulloch, British-born cofounder of Rocky Mountain Adaptive in Canmore, Alberta, has spent 15 years systematically dismantling barriers to the mountains. It all started with his sister, who had Down syndrome. Jamie taught her to ski and, in doing so, discovered a skill that would shape the rest of his career. What began as adaptive ski lessons at Sunshine Village has grown into a year-round program offering more than 20 disciplines—including sit-skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking, kayaking, and rafting—for people who have physical, intellectual, cognitive, or developmental disabilities. Jamie’s gift is making sure the same people who once sat at the bottom looking up can now sit at the top looking down.
Diving: Dive Butler
It was Alexis Vincent, founder of Dive Butler at Amilla Maldives, who first showed me that breathing underwater was not, in fact, a superpower beyond my reach. Amilla is the world’s first resort certified by IncluCare, meaning all staff, including Dive Butler’s team, are disability-awareness trained and can support guests with a range of abilities. Pool hoists help divers access the water safely, and the adaptive program pairs physically disabled divers with dedicated one-to-one specialists who manage everything from boat-to-water transfers to in-ocean support. Operating across six PADI five-star centers in the Maldives, Dive Butler proves that the ocean doesn’t discriminate, and neither should the people who take you into it.
White-water rafting: Making Trax
In 2010, Makingtrax Foundation founder Jezza Williams broke his C5 and C6 vertebrae in a canyoning accident in the Swiss Alps. Today, he is New Zealand’s first quadriplegic to earn a solo paragliding license, in an adaptive buggy he designed himself. He founded his company on a single conviction: that adventure is therapy and it belongs to everyone. Through his foundation, he has pioneered world-first adaptive experiences across Aotearoa, including white-water rafting on Class V rapids, glacier visits by helicopter, sea kayaking, paragliding, and skydiving—all with harness systems and adaptive rigs he developed personally. His philosophy is not adaptation as compromise, but adaptation as access to the same experience.
Camel riding: Morocco Accessible Travel Consultants
With custom-designed saddles and tailored itineraries, Morocco Accessible Travel Consultants is making even Sahara camel treks accessible to travelers with mobility challenges.
Photo by Reece Chapman
Erik Neufeld and Jeremy Schmidt, two American climbers who moved to Fez, founded Morocco Accessible Travel Consultants after recognizing that one of the world’s most compelling countries had almost no accessible infrastructure for visitors. Jeremy, a doctor of physical therapy, brought the clinical understanding of what bodies need; Erik, fluent in Arabic and deeply embedded in Moroccan culture, brought the ability to make it happen on the ground. Together they have built adapted itineraries across the country, from navigating the 9,000 alleyways of the Fez Medina by wheelchair to riding camels across the Sahara Desert in a custom saddle they designed specifically for riders with mobility impairments.
Group adventure travel: Wheel the World
Álvaro Silberstein was an 18-year-old surfer, snowboarder, and under-19 rugby player in Chile when a drunk driver left him with a broken neck. Years later, while studying at the University of California, Berkeley, he and his lifelong friend Camilo Navarro decided to attempt the W Trek through Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park, a 50-mile hiking route that no wheelchair user had completed. They crowdfunded a specialist chair, assembled a team of 12, and completed the journey. That trip became the start of Wheel the World, now the largest accessible-travel platform on the planet, with trips across Costa Rica, Iceland, South Africa, and Greece. For each accommodation, the platform verifies more than 200 accessibility criteria.
