DREAM Adaptive Promotes Disability Visibility with Summer Outdoor Recreation
Participants recall their positive experiences with the organization’s slate of outdoor summer recreational activities
By Cathy Li
For Russ Fuller, an adult with a visual and hearing impairment, finding a sport he loved was initially a challenge.
However, that all changed in 2020 when he learned that DREAM Adaptive Recreation offered water sports skills training. He jumped at the opportunity and signed up for a session right away.
“I got right up on two skis and the wakeboard and discovered a new sense of freedom,” he said.
DREAM Adaptive Recreation is an outdoor recreation organization that works closely with local communities in northwest Montana so that individuals, with disabilities can enjoy the benefits of outdoor recreation. Annually, DREAM provides around 1,500 lessons and opportunities to participants with physical, cognitive, developmental, intellectual, and sensory disabilities. In 2023 alone, DREAM delivered 1,560 lessons and experiences to 329 unique individuals.
Today, DREAM continues to serve individuals with disabilities from age 5 to adults year-round with adaptive recreational opportunities. General programs are free of charge for active-duty service members and veterans with disabilities, and special programs are available throughout the year.
Since 2009, DREAM Adaptive’s suite of summer events run from May through September, ranging from a variety of activities from mountain biking to motorized watersports. Watersports Skills Sessions, the programming that Fuller first participated in nearly four years ago, takes participants out waterskiing, wake-boarding, and wake-surfing in early to mid-August on Whitefish Lake. The sessions are in partnership with Backcountry Xperiences — a local company that provides boats, safety jet skis, coaches, and boat drivers for all their motorized water sports programs throughout the summer.
DREAM also hosts a mountain bike program that runs May through September, which offers private lessons and rides. During the summer stint, however, there is a weekly, community trail ride programming available called “Tuesday Night Rides,” in which about 10-15 individuals ride. Every Tuesday in June and August, community members, volunteers, and adaptive riders all enjoy a ride together. While the summer stint concludes Sept. 3 with a final Tuesday night ride at Beaver Lakes, individual private rides remain open to registration from August to September.
These programs expose participants to the benefits of engaging with nature. Participants forge new relationships and engage with a close-knit community, gaining camaraderie and connecting with one another.
Thomas Shea, a frequent DREAM participant, takes full advantage of the plethora of programs whenever he can. “The Tuesday Night Group Bike Rides are wonderful for meeting other people in the adaptive community, and the individual sessions allow people to focus on skills and personal goals. I was just recently able to drop the rope and surf behind the boat while wake-surfing during one of these sessions,” he said.
DREAM provides a wealth of resources for every lesson and opportunity, including trained staff and volunteer instructors who utilize adaptive teaching techniques and adaptive equipment.
With the participant’s goals at the forefront, DREAM provides specialized adaptive equipment to leverage each person’s strengths and create a safe and quality experience. One example is utilizing headsets for those who have a visual or hearing impairment. For Fuller, who has profound vision and hearing loss, he wore a helmet with internal speakers connected to a headset with a microphone so that he could communicate with them as he skied.
DREAM programming focuses on the individual participants, aiming to personalize each experience so that individuals can discover their agency and realize what is possible for them.
“Our goal is to create a safe, fun, and empowering environment for our participants to learn and grow. Every person is unique, and therefore our lessons and experiences are tailored to each person’s specific goals!” DREAM’s website states.
People should have equal access to the trails and the rivers and all the things that make [the Flathead Valley] an outdoor-minded community, Executive Director Julie Tickle said. “[We] ask all of our participants and all of our volunteers what they hope to accomplish through dream and what are their goals for.”
DREAM Adaptive Recreation partners with local organizations to ensure outdoor recreation spaces are accessible and inclusive, assisting participants with grant applications to secure their own equipment as part of their three-pronged approach to promote accessibility and inclusion spaces beyond their daily programming. DREAM believes that people with disabilities should be able to fully participate and be represented in all aspects of the community. “Our mission is to break down barriers and help educate the community so that more folks can get outside and receive those benefits,” Tickle said.
About 13% of Americans live with a disability. Representation of people with disabilities in outdoor recreation spaces is rare, often due to the lack of consideration and lack of focus on inclusion.
In addition to delivering adaptive programming, DREAM creates guides so people with disabilities are informed about the recreational activities accessible to them in the area and how to participate. “All of our programs fill up. We want to create a world and a community where people do not have to plug into DREAM all the time to have access,” Tickle said.
Besides running outdoor activities, DREAM staff members and volunteers engage in community infrastructure betterment projects. For example, DREAM partners with the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service to ensure that outdoor recreation spaces are designed to be accessible. In the past, the organization has worked with the Flathead Rivers Alliance to increase access to river put-ins and takeouts along the three forks of the Flathead River, and provided training on different all-terrain mobility devices in Glacier National Park. The organization is currently conducting more trail assessments around the Flathead so that people with disabilities can make their own informed decisions before heading out on trails and navigating the environment around them.
Find more information about available financial aid and scholarships here.
To be involved with DREAM Adaptive as a volunteer or participant, contact DREAM Adaptive Recreation at (406) 885-9539 or email [email protected].
Correction: In an earlier version of this story, the Beacon published an incorrect range of dates during which several DREAM Adaptive Recreation programs are available. The article has been corrected. The Beacon regrets the error.