Leading the blind to ski
On the morning of Thursday (March 3), a Taos Municipal Schools bus loaded with special needs students from Ranchos Elementary parked at the roundabout turn at the bottom of the Rio Hondo Learning Center up in Taos Ski Valley. The executive director of the Taos Winter Sports Team, Kristi Vine, was already on hand, waiting for their arrival.
When the students started to pile out of the bus, additional staff from the team showed up to help the kids get upstairs into the boot fitting room and get situated with all the accoutrement that entails a day of skiing and snowboarding. A special degree of mindfulness is needed here to assist the students get prepped for the mountain. Some students might not register nonverbal or verbal cues due to either a physical impairment or a cognitive challenge.
Some questions or concerns for ski instructors who specialize in adaptive skiing might have to ask include: At what level does their body not function? Are they completely dependent on another person to move? Can they pull or push against your hands?
The tools that the adaptive ski instructors use are as simple as hula hoops or as intricate as a device called a rider bar, a modified walker of sorts welded onto a snowboard for the student to hang on to. These kinds of rigs are made locally by Moritz Brinkama.
The Ranchos Elementary Staff pointed out which kids were “bolters,” kids who, if given a chance, without the utmost secure physical and visual connection to their chaperone, could make a break for it. Once again, a simple callout in this situation would be of little to no use, requiring that instructors take extra care. Letricia Lovato, a special education teacher at Ranchos, said “it takes an army,” rather than a village, to tend to all of the specific challenges they are presented with when trying to get their students onto the mountain to enjoy a day of snow sports.
While the kids got to slide across the slopes with their instructor, the Ranchos staff remained on standby at the bottom of the caterpillars (a conveyor belt lift for beginners taking them up a gentle gradient) for any sort of contingency.
Lovato spoke about the partnership between the life skills program of Ranchos Elementary and the Adaptive Program at TSV.
“My major goal is to always include the kids into community outings. The hardest thing for our parents is taking them out of the community, because they’re not used to like a lot of…there’s just a lot of things that happen that we take for granted. I want to see my kids out in the community. So what I do is, I try to create opportunities for them. Things that we can do here in Taos like hiking, so we go hiking during the spring, in the fall, we go swimming. And
then, of course, skiing is like the biggest thing,” Lovato said.
The school reached out to Peter Donahue, the Adaptive Program director for TWST. The story goes that, in 1986, Donahue volunteered to teach a girl who had contracted polio how to ski. He got the repair shop techs to attach a pair of skis to a walker, so Gina could ride down Rubezahl. Ernie Blake saw Donahue working with Gina, and insisted that he should be paid for his work, and the Adaptive Program was born.
Ranchos Elementary has been bringing students to ski at TSV for over eight years.
When the rest of the students were still being assisted by staff to put on their boots, Donahue was gearing up on his e-bike (equipped with fat tires) in order to bike his way up a bunny hill and traverse over to Pioneer Hill, where he would serve as a ski guide for a blind student. It’s an act of total trust between the guide and the athlete, especially when you consider that people pay top dollar for a pair of Smith polarized ski goggles, for optical clarity to see nuance and texture in a wide field of white — made dull by clouds or blindingly bright from glare. In essence, the guide has to replace a pair of proper goggles. As such, the guide must be as descriptive as possible, and create a complete visual landscape of the mountain. The athlete will have to trust that description in real time, in an environment that’s ever-changing.
Then, on steeper terrain, the two will have to negotiate their speed and distance in order to stay within earshot.
The arrangement seems incredible, but a former Taos resident, Danelle Umstead, who is nearly completely blind and is living with multiple sclerosis, has won three bronze medals in the Paralympics.
Donahue was using tethers to give his student, who is just starting to figure out turns, the feeling of going down and around. The
expectation is that she will be able to ski on her own one day with the help of a guide.
But is the whole purpose of the Adaptive Program to create Paralympic athletes or give people with disabilities a fun time on the snow? There is the clear humanistic endeavor of providing rich, lifefulfilling
moments for underserved communities. Who can forget their first time roaring down the slopes and how awesome it was? But as an added bonus and essential component of the program, the process of skiing or snowboarding is a form of physical and cognitive therapy for the students.
At the top of the Pioneer Lift, Taos Municipal Schools district physical therapist Susan Consolloy explained how the movement of snow sports benefit the students:
“Snowboarding, you’re doing things kind of symmetrically, both legs together, your body kind of bends together, it’s real fluid. Skiing is less symmetrical, or asymmetrical. So some kids lack the ability to do something asymmetrical, like going up and down stairs is really hard for them. Maybe there’s a little cable between our hemispheres. And it’s called the corpus callosum. And in some cases, it’s not so big. And when it’s not so developed in one hemisphere and the other hemisphere aren’t so balanced. So to do something asymmetrical is more difficult. So when they’re doing this, and practicing in this environment, it helps them really learn to weight-shift, so their balance increases accordingly.”
The lasting image — and noise — of the day was a student being led down Pioneer by Kristi Vine. The student was screaming the whole way down, half from fear and half from excitement and joy. After the run, both the TWST coaches and the Ranchos staff would check in on the student and see if she’s got the gumption to go up and do it all over again. As Lovato explained, “many times you’ll see that the kids are crying and are scared. But after a while they become used to it. And then they’re like rockstars.”