posted on Feb. 10, 2009

My friend Julie York Coppens recently posted photos from Ski For Light’s 2009 International Week on Facebook. Those images reminded me how that program, which began in 1975, has come to epitomize accessible recreation’s broad range of benefits.

Ski For Light affords many disabled people their first taste of outdoor sports; it can reveal deep reserves of untapped competitiveness; it’s turned professed non-athletes into Paralympians, and gives nearly every participant, guides included, a new perspective on what’s possible.

I first attended Ski For Light in 2003, the last winter till this that New Hampshire lay under a deep covering of snow. In Alaska, however, it was so warm they had to dump trucked-in snow on the rainy streets of Anchorage to start the Iditarod. Each day at Russian Jack Springs Park, volunteers shoveled snow from the woods to maintain our icy tracks. We had only one full day of skiing.

But I was glad I went. I’d read about SFL for years, but wasn’t sold until veteran skier Annemarie Cooke described the palpable energy she’d feel entering the hotel dining room each night, filled with over 300 people, accomplished, competitive, caring, all creating a dynamic community, from curious guide dogs howling softly from under tables, to relationships and rivalries that build and change over the years, and most of all, people who are more than what they were for attending Ski for Light.

I met many, including Laura Oftedahl of Berkeley, Calif., who attended SFL in the early 1980s depressed and sedentary, and within four years had dropped 50 pounds, quit smoking, and won a gold medal in the world championships. And Amy Bower, an oceanographer from Falmouth, Mass., who found in Ski For Light a way to maintain her love of cross-country skiing and connect with a peer group of goal-achieving, blind professionals.

I, too, was transformed. Ski For Light breaks down barriers: it doesn’t matter that you are blind, or a first-time skier, veteran guide, or a top athlete. Everyone is equal; everyone moves forward at their own pace. At week’s end, most skiers enter the race/rally, a competition that, rather than separate athletes, brings them together.

Simultaneously calling out to one’s need for a comfort zone and competitiveness infuses Ski For Light with that rare inclusive energy that can change lives.

The 2009 Ski For Light International week took place at Soldier’s Hollow (near Provo, Utah) the Nordic ski venue for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. Ski For Light 2010 (January 31st through February 7th) will also take place there.