Riders of all abilities will join together to take on the Summit Games at the sixth annual Ski for All on Saturday, March 18. This event is hosted by Oregon Adaptive Sports as one of its major fundraisers. OAS is an adaptive sports organization that provides access to life-changing outdoor experiences for people with disabilities.
To keep OAS running, fundraising is critical to keeping outdoor recreation accessible to Oregon residents.
"It's not a disability that prevents somebody from being a skier or a mountain biker. It's not a disability that prevents someone from achieving a high quality of life. It's the barriers that are fabricated in front of them — societal, policy, social, various types of barriers that have been created over time. And OAS is working to remove the most significant barriers for people with disabilities to access the outdoors," said Pat Addabbo, OAS executive director.
OAS focuses on five pillars of access: access to affordable and state-of-the art adaptive sports equipment, individualized safe and successful outdoor experiences with instructors, financial accessibility to programming through scholarship, accessible transportation and general inclusion. OAS has and maintains over $300,000 of adaptive outdoor gear and continues to invest thousands each year in equipment, according to Addabbo.
At Ski for All, attendees will see all sorts of equipment in action—bi-skis, mono-skis, two track skis, three/four track skis, Snow'Karts and more.
"The event itself is a full day, sort of ski-a-thon, combined with a scavenger hunt," Addabbo said.
Participants will receive a Summit Games guide with a list of challenges, including the most vertical feet, random location visits, mind-boggling puzzles, seeing who can hit the most trails and more. As the day goes on, participants can tick challenges off their lists, earn points and win prizes at the end of the day. The top three participants in youth, teen, adult and masters age will be awarded prizes. Costumes are encouraged.
Participants can either just have fun with it, or make it an intense day of competition.
"There are people who get really dialed in, and they know exactly how long it's going to take them to get up the mountain, on which lift, and how many vertical feet they'll get. They eat their lunch on the chairlift. There have been people that have gotten 50-60,000 vertical feet in a day. It just floors me," said Gail Webber, OAS president.
Central Oregonians are invited to register online at oregonadaptivesports.org, spread the word, raise money and get up to Mt. Bachelor to support accessibility to the outdoors.
"The success of the fundraiser relies on there being a large number of participants, each one gathering a large number of small donations," Webber said. "If you can get all of your friends to give a small amount of money, when you start adding it up, it becomes a significant amount. And it's fun."
