Equitability dominates 5th outdoor rec conference
Event drew 350 attendees to Taos
From the opening reception at the Taos Country Club on Wednesday evening (Oct. 5), across two days of engaging panel discussions and seminars at the Sagebrush Inn and Conference Center, to what’s become an annual conference tradition of final-afternoon field trips to local outdoor recreation hotspots, this year’s New Mexico Outdoor Economics Conference in Taos left attendees with a lot to think about. It was the fifth consecutive year of the conference.
“It was stellar,” said conference organizer Sen. Jeff Steinborn, who also represents state Senate District 36 in Doña Ana County. “We always do a survey. And 80 percent of attendees answered yes to the question, ‘Did you learn something you will use in your job?’
“People were very interested in infrastructure but, also, conservation was a high priority — protecting the natural world — and the pressing challenges facing the state,” Steinborn continued. “And there were a lot of policy issues on inclusion and equity that everyone wants to become more educated about.”
Equitable access to the outdoors for disabled persons, a subject that’s been broached during conference panel discussions in previous years, was given a lot of attention in Taos, as were the economic barriers many low-income New Mexicans face when it comes to enjoying outdoor sports like skiing or rafting.
Silver City Councilor Guadalupe Cano, who has mobility issues that require her to use a wheelchair, said the discussion of accessibility itself was an important basic step toward creating more uniformly-accessible outdoor recreation infrastructure.
“How many people have you seen at the conference in wheelchairs? In the past five years, it’s always just me and Dustin” Berg, executive director of GO Unlimited, an Albuquerque-based nonprofit that facilitates adaptive outdoor recreation experiences, Cano said. “We say we want a seat at the table, but we can’t even get to the table sometimes.”
In a separate panel, Berg said that outdoor recreation infrastructure needs to keep pace with the fast pace of adaptive sports equipment development.
“Some of the things that were major limiting factors, are no longer [factors],” he said. “I imagine a lot of you guys don’t know there’s an adaptive mountain bike with full suspension, three-wheel-drive with E-assist that we can go ride down the Taos Ski Valley trails. And Santa Fe and Red River. When we’re developing our plans for infrastructure, we need to include those ideas in the overall plan.”
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which requires new infrastructure and public spaces be designed in compliance with standards that permit access to buildings, public spaces, sidewalks and other infrastructure, is not robustly applied to outdoor recreation infrastructure such as trailheads and trails.
“There are some adaptiveaccessible or ADA-accessible trails — but its not a federal requirement,” Carl Colonius, outdoor recreation planner for the state Outdoor Recreation Division, told the Taos News. “For mountain bike trails, specifically, the adaptive mountain bike tech has only been around for five-to-seven years. So when a trail manager tries to keep ATVs off a non-motorized trail, they designed the gates so that you pull a bike up on its back wheel and wind your way through. They weren’t thinking about adaptive cycles and wheelchairs.”
Colonius added that, “Getting these federal land management agencies to come up to speed quickly is like bringing the Titanic up and then getting it to turn.”
Like most people who rely on mobility aids like wheelchairs to get around, Berg had an example at his fingertips of a small design flaw that can make an entire area inaccessible to people like himself.
“A normal mountain bike’s handlebars are about 29 inches wide, and then your adapted mountain bike is 36-to-38 inches wide,” Berg said. “We don’t find the difficulty on the trail — where we find our difficulty is just accessing the trail, the entry point. A lot of times,
there’s just a gate that’s just an inch too [narrow]; and if that gate were an inch wider, it would still stop a four-wheeler from getting through.”
According to U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, it’s likely up to land management agencies like the U.S. Forest Service or U.S. Bureau of Land Management to apply more of the federal disabilities law, which was enacted in 1990, to their internal policies. The statutes to support new planning rules are already on the books.
“I think when [the ADA] was originally envisioned, it was a mechanism to make everything more accessible when things are built or remodeled,” Heinrich told the Taos News. “But people weren’t thinking about natural landscapes at that time and are just now having the conversations about incorporating that into trail planning, land-use planning. I think it’s probably something that needs to happen in every agency, so that the BLM, for example, is considering accessibility when they’re doing planning; and the Forest Service is considering it when they rewrite forest plans.”
In the Carson National Forest Plan, which was last revised this year, one of the stated “recreation desired conditions” is “a variety of high-quality developed and dispersed recreation opportunities
and activities are available to a diverse group of forest users, including persons with disabilities.”
The desired conditions for infrastructure like forest campgrounds, man-made fishing areas like reservoirs, scenic vistas and toilet facilities, for example, include accessibility to persons with disabilities, according to the 300-page Forest Plan, which mentions the words disability or disabilities just 11 times, mostly in regards to employment.
There are a few forest sites in the Taos area that are designed with accessibility in mind, according to a Carson National Forest spokesperson, including the Agua Barrier Free Trail. However, due to windstorm- and wildfire suppression-related closures, at least two sites are not recommended for mobility-challenged forest visitors. Eagle Rock Lake, a former gravel pit located adjacent to the Red River outside of Questa, underwent remediation and was reopened in 2015 with wheelchairaccessible fishing in mind.
“I think, like we realized during COVID, the outdoors is not a ‘niceto-have,’” Heinrich said. “Access to the outdoors is really important for people, for our physical and mental health, and we should make sure that our entire populace has access to the outdoors.”