A physically debilitating condition is one of the toughest things a person can face. When you can’t move yourself around, every aspect of life is more challenging. But you can still have a full life without fully functional limbs. And a non-profit called SOAR Experiences, based about 100 miles north of New York City, is running some very cool and creative events to get people with all kinds of physical impairments outside, overlanding, off-road driving, and more.
SOAR (stands for Specialized Outdoor Adaptive Recreation) is one of three enterprises run by Scott Trager and his sons, Sam and Alex, along with some other partners and volunteers. Based out of a neat woodsy lodge on about 70 acres in New York’s Hudson Valley, they also run an off-road driving school and a dealership for heavy-duty wheelchairs on tank treads that we’ll talk more about in this story.
I found Trager online while I was looking for places to go wheeling in the Northeast. There aren’t all that many, so I was pleasantly shocked to find an off-road-driving facility in Ulster County, NY, less than 20 miles from my front door. I was telling a group of other car journalists about it when my buddy Chris Perkins, currently at Motor1, told me he’d not only been to Northeast Off-Road Adventures (NORA), he knew the guy who ran it, and put me in touch.
On a subsequent tour of NORA’s grounds, I saw a motorpool of wheelchairs with tank treads, skid plates, LED lights, and heavy-duty frames. That’s how I started to learn about SOAR, and made plans to come back and see how its programming really works.
“It really started when we had a couple of guys who wanted to go through the off-road school,” Trager told me, “but, they were paralyzed. So we wanted to figure out, well, how do we make that work?” That attitude made me like him right away. He referred to himself as a “solutionist” at one point, as in, if he can’t go through a problem, he’ll get around it, or climb over it. And really, that’s what off-roading and overlanding are all about. Sam and Alex seemed similarly handy, taking on the maintenance of a large fleet of off-road rental rigs, and wheelchairs, as well as looking after guests who operate them.
Weeks later, I came back to the NORA lodge to join a group that had booked an off-road experience to celebrate a birthday. The guest of honor was a guy named Rob, who is paraplegic, having lost the use of his legs in a motocross accident not so many years ago. After a safety briefing, the whole group hopped into Action Trackchairs, and we wheeled our way along one of NORA’s many trails.
I got to operate one myself, and I have to say, it was a lot of fun. The joystick operation and a surprising surplus of torque made the thing feel like a little battlemech stomping its way through the woods. Flip through this slideshow to take a look around one of them:
There are a few versions of Trackchairs, with different levels of adjustability and features. But they’re primarily set up the same way—large lithium batteries are mounted low in a heavy-duty frame, slung under the seat. Below that is a long skidplate with a sled-like shape to it, extending pretty far out the back to all but eliminate the possibility of tumbling backwards, even on a steep ascent.
A joystick gives command of the treads a video game-level user friendliness, and another set of controls tilts and raises the seat itself to let you compensate for steep grades. With a small display screen and button set, you can control the vehicle’s speed threshold like you’d change gears in a car. All the same principles of off-road driving a truck apply: Go as slow as possible, as fast as necessary, and put the wheels (or tracks, rather) on top of obstacles rather than trying to straddle things.
The Trackchairs are best run at lower speeds over rough ground; they’re definitely most comfortable in the 3- or 4-mph neighborhood. But some of them top out at 6 mph or more, which, let me assure you, feels remarkably fast to the rider. Just like a 4×4, it’s easy to pick up but a little more difficult to master. And a lot of fun to take down a trail, regardless of your physical condition.
For the second half of the day, Scott, Sam, and Alex got the group into 4x4s. They have an XJ Jeep Cherokee set up with good tires, a mild lift, and hand controls to make it capable of being driven without feet. The steering wheel has a spinning knob attached to it to make big directional changes at low speeds easier with one hand, and the brake and throttle are controlled by a bar connected to both pedals by long rods, for the driver’s other hand.
Such a device is a popular one for those who need to drive in general without the use of their legs. Push left and the brake goes down, gas comes up. Push right, and you come off the brake and onto the gas. It’s not a setup I’d necessarily want on a race track, but in an old XJ climbing around rock gardens, it works great.
Trager and his boys have a loading dock-style transfer station where a wheelchair-bound individual can more easily access a lifted 4×4. Sometimes, folks with impairments just want to ride passenger, but Rob took the Jeep’s driver’s seat with some assistance. The rest of the group and I loaded into the Jeep and a pair of other SUVs and set out to explore NORA’s trail network.
Rob seemed to get the hang of the controls pretty easily. But more than his driving skills, I appreciated how much his energy changed as the tires started to roll. The Jeep kicked up rocks and scrambled through mud; Rob got loose and comfortable. The whole group made a three-vehicle convoy and had a lot of fun teasing each other over the radio as they challenged NORA’s driving obstacles.
Later, after the party had gone home, I got to try the hand-control Jeep myself. Somewhat ironically, I had far more trouble with this than most would. My left hand is partially crippled and quite weak; riding the brakes on a short descent took a lot out of me.
It was great to see what SOAR can do to get physically impaired individuals into Jeeps and off-road experiences for fun and skill training. But SOAR’s also doing important work with an even bigger challenge: Improving access to the outdoors for those who can’t typically enjoy a walking trail, let alone a rugged truck trail, on their own two legs.
Beyond its on-campus activities, SOAR runs regular public adventure hikes for those with ambulation impairments all over New York’s Hudson Valley. While the tracked Action Chairs are somewhat expensive to buy, there’s currently no charge to borrow one if you sign up to join an adaptive hike ahead of time.
In early July, I rallied with SOAR again for one of its hikes at a place called Mohonk Preserve—a sprawling forest with carriage roads crisscrossing it near the town of New Paltz, NY. Jeeps and trucks aren’t allowed to play there, but Trackchairs are.
About a dozen people were gathered in the parking lot, some loading from regular wheelchairs to the off-roaders, others helping, and some volunteers facilitating. The first thing I noticed was the diversity of the group. A teenager, some middle-aged guys, and older folks were all getting ready to share an outdoor experience together. Their backgrounds and challenges were different as well. A young dude named Nate had been born without feeling below his waist; a guy named Pat had lost a leg in an accident.
But the second thing I observed, and maybe what stuck with me the most, was how immediately everybody vibed together. There was a palpable sense of camaraderie amongst the wheelchair-bound individuals that I picked up on instantly, and a great openness in general. The whole group was warm and conversational with me right away.
We traversed trails as a group, some on wheels and others walking. Both Sam and Alex Trager came along to provide mechanical assistance if needed, and I chatted with everybody as we made a big loop around gravel tracks cutting through woods and fields. Everybody’s story was a little different, but a common theme was gratitude. Everybody driving the Trackchairs was appreciative of the opportunity to get together and get outside.
By the time everyone disbanded, I was feeling pretty good myself. Taking a hike through the countryside and getting to know some new folks was a literal and figurative breath of fresh air.
SOAR’s still small and local, but it has been growing. A few folks told me that they’d been referred by an NY-based physical rehabilitation company called Burke, and some local parks have been working directly with the Tragers to be able to offer adaptive hiking to guests who need it.
The non-profit still has challenges with awareness and logistics, though. The Trackchairs are large, and moving them around and keeping them clean isn’t a trivial task. Expanding SOAR’s offerings is a goal, but Trager doesn’t want that to come at the expense of reducing the quality of services. That means finding additional resources—and getting on more peoples’ radar.
As you might have guessed, that’s part of the reason why I wanted to write this story—to let more people know about SOAR and maybe indirectly help it grow. Improving the quality of life for those with physical challenges is something I felt strongly about, even before seeing the impact of SOAR’s offerings firsthand.
In 2018, I had a serious crash driving a UTV in the Wyoming wilderness. The vehicle rolled over multiple times, and as it tumbled, my left hand got crushed between the roll cage and the Earth. When the buggy came to rest on its roof, the Alpinestars glove that my left paw was in felt like a bag of sand. The following hours involved a medevac flight and all-night surgery. I had several more operations over the next few months, and pretty much the whole year afterwards had me parked on my ass, strung out on painkillers, effectively immobile. To this day, I’m down a finger and stuck with severely limited left-hand dexterity.
As dramatic as that was and is, it’s nothing compared to what some others have gone through with losses of basic ambulation. But the experience gave me a deep empathy for those who are prisoners of their own bodies, and it’s part of the reason I’m so enamored with what SOAR is doing.
The combination of physical pain and emotional frustration of being physically impaired is beyond brutal, but getting outdoors and connecting with others can be a great reprieve, and a critical injection of life for those who have to sit on the sidelines so often. Here’s hoping SOAR can continue its work and give more chairbound folks the opportunity to adventure!
Do you have any experience with adaptive driving or adventuring? I’d love to hear about it, drop me a line at andrew.collins@thedrive.com.
www.thedrive.com
#Crew #Empowering #Paralyzed #People #OffRoad #Adventures
