Written By Ari R. Content notes: acute onset chronic illness, medical ableism, chronic illness related grief, immunocompromised isolation, accessible hiking Despite a couple relatively minor issues here and there, I was a picture of health prior to 2021. I worked 9-5 three days a week while also in graduate school, led a ministry at a church, had a thriving social life, and walked everywhere since I did not (and still do not) drive. I could walk up to 10 miles a day in the midsummer’s heat and went on frequent runs. All of this came to an end in 2021. I managed to finish my Master’s Degree just a couple months prior to the rapid deterioration of my health. I became ill (unrelated to COVID-19). I lost weight and experienced fainting, chest pain with shortness of breath while standing, heart arrhythmias, bouts of debilitating nausea and sickness, and a vast array of symptoms that affected my entire body. After months of seeing many doctors (a majority of whom dismissed my symptoms as “anxiety”), I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), gastroparesis, vascular compressions, and other comorbid chronic health conditions that greatly affect my day-to-day life. I am no longer able to walk nearly as much as I did previously, and often when I do walk distances, I need to use mobility aids or even bring out my wheelchair if my symptoms worsen. I am immunocompromised as a result of my illnesses and live primarily in isolation with my husband who also has a chronic health condition. This inability to participate out in the world like I used to has led to difficulty with mental health, maintaining friendships, and feeling properly connected with the world and others.   Though my illness presents my husband and I with such challenges, it has led us to have a greater appreciation of nature. Being able to find a refuge in nature, though limited, has allowed me to find peace I otherwise would not have. Incorporating hiking (when I can) into my life with chronic illness has been a challenge in and of itself, but is important for my mental health. I can only go on short hikes in Autumn and Winter. I have heat intolerance due to POTS and am mostly homebound- sometimes bedridden- in the Spring and Summer. From making sure I have enough water, electrolyte powders, emergency medication, my medical ID, and my collection of joint braces and stability aids, to having to plan hiking trips on days and times when the parks are less crowded (as an immunocompromised person, it is essential that I avoid crowds), even short hikes with chronic illness require extensive planning and preparation. We have often planned a hiking trip with excitement, but I ended up feeling too ill to go, leading to feelings of immense disappointment; however, when I am able to go for a hike, the feelings of joy and gratitude are inexplicable. The first two photos are from my first hike post-illness. Though it was a short hike, my husband and best friend held my hands the whole way through, making sure I did not fall or get hurt. Having shared my first hike post-illness with two people I deeply cherish is something for which I am very grateful. I lost a majority of friendships due to my illness. Many people accused me of “faking it for attention”, or criticized me otherwise, while others simply walked out. Eric and Maddie held my hands the same way they have been holding my hands throughout the span of my illness. Maddie is one of my longest and closest friends but because we live hundreds of miles away from each other, we only see each other once or twice a year. Maddie is very understanding and accommodating of our health needs and takes a COVID-19  test prior to visiting us, while also masking in indoor settings. Photo C: me sitting by a beautiful dam after completing a hike. Please note that the author is not masking in the photos solely because she is with her partner in a mostly empty park, and her best friend who took covid precautions prior to visiting. There are many people with chronic illness, like myself, who cannot safely hike alone. For those without a hiking partner, group hikes may present a good option. Yet, parks rarely hold accessible group hikes, and when they do (or rather, claim to do), immunocompromised people are almost always  left out of the accessibility discussion. Masks, COVID testing and vaccinations are no longer required for group activities- even those that are supposed to be accessible. Because of this, many immunocompromised people have been forced into isolation. Why is this? Why aren’t invisible illnesses considered a disability despite how disabling they are? Why isn’t our society doing anything to protect the immunocompromised and physically vulnerable? These are questions to which I do not have the answers; however, I share my story with the hope of raising awareness of the fact that immunocompromised people deserve accommodations too, and encouraging others to reach out to their local parks and ask what accommodations they have in place for immunocompromised people who want to participate in accessible activities. Does the park require masks to be worn during accessible group hikes? Are these hikes planned during off-peak hours so as to minimize crowd exposure? Just as there are activities tailored for wheelchair users, could there be a hike tailored to those who are immunocompromised and are taking many of the same precautions? I plan to reach out to my local park system to inquire about accessibility for those who are immunocompromised, and I want to encourage others in my situation to do the same. I am grateful to have found a refuge in nature in the midst of my chronic illness. Though it can require a substantial amount of preparation and post-hike care, it has been a source of joy and healing for my mind, body, and soul. I hope that one day hiking, especially hiking in community, can become more accessible for those with chronic illness and disabilities, including those who are immunocompromised. I would like to thank my dearest friends Eric and Maddie for their unending love and support. I would also like to thank Maddie for helping me write the first part of this piece. Writing about my illness is very important to me for the purpose of raising awareness, but it can also be difficult due to the trauma associated with my chronic illness journey. For this reason, I am grateful for her assistance in helping me write my story. BIO: Ari R. is a 20-something who enjoys reading, writing, hiking, doing digital art, and crafting. Due to the extent of her disability and the nature of her illness, she lives primarily in isolation with her husband who has an autoimmune condition. Together, they enjoy listening to audiobooks, watching movies, and discovering new parks and sights around their town.

Disabled Hikers interviewed Amber Katzira about their experiences finding belonging in nature and the importance of time outdoors for physical, mental, and emotional well being. Amber also shares the ways that criminalization of camping in the US has affected their health and safety, and how meaningful it was to experience "right to roam" in other countries. CN: mentions of assault, criminalization, trauma Disabled Hikers : How has nature supported you as a neurodivergent person with trauma? Has your sense of safety and well-being shifted with time outdoors? Amber Katzira: Honestly there aren't words enough to express how much. Its not just psycho-emotional or whatever, it's very physical. When spending time in Nature, of course I feel less stressed and more content, which affects every body system. Inflammation, fatigue, these are all reduced. But it's more magical than that, it’s like it flips a switch that changes everything in my system. Because it reminds me very deeply, in a way that even my deep nervous system and body systems understand, that we are part of something harmonious and beautiful, relational and cooperative. That we are not and can never be outcasts. That belonging is everywhere. a selfie of a non-binary person with red wavy hair, white skin and blue eyes in a mossy forest where deep pink foxglove is growing in the background, they are smiling. DH: How have your experiences of pain, chronic fatigue, or cognitive differences impacted your access to nature? What kinds of barriers do you encounter? AK: Even though I do experience a reduction in pain, inflammation and fatigue, I still have these things, especially with walking. There are times I can walk very far and times I can't and shouldn't walk at all. I don't think the outdoors should be about walking or even necessarily about moving from point A to B. There are times when I'd just like to Forest Bathe and not go anywhere. What if we had resting places in Nature that were harmonious with the land? Places you could lay down for example? I saw something like it in the Swiss Alps where they had curvy wooden ergonomic benches so you could lay down with your head supported and view the scenery! But they were in a very inaccessible location. These should be in places you can get to easily but are outside the city. The other problem is that I don't drive due to cognitive differences and there are very few ways to get to Nature without a car. What if public transit went to more Nature areas instead of just towns? What if agencies drove disabled people to Nature instead of just to like doctors appointments? And in general, if people organized to drive those who couldn't to Nature areas frequently? DH: What does time outdoors look like for you? What activities do you enjoy? AK: I enjoy camping, making fires, cooking over them. Foraging and making herbal medicines. Making cordage and baskets from plants. Especially invasive ones, as a way to not only clear them but also make them into something useful and beautiful. I also enjoy just being with all the beings, having sensory moments, touching leaves, sharing energy with trees, seeing shapes in the sky, faces in the rocks and so much more, just communing. I also love a good ritual, all our rituals, no matter what tradition, are more powerful outdoors, on the Earth, I believe. DH: What does camping mean for you? How does it feel different to camp out of necessity or by choice? Have you experienced stigmatization or criminalization for camping? AK: Camping is kind of fraught for me. I have been homeless many times due to being disabled and autistic and not being able to work. It was both liberating and terrifying. In a way, I enjoyed finding places to camp, using my skills to live instead of working to pay rent to a landlord. However being disabled meant I was sometimes not able to care for myself, and now it would be even harder since I have trouble walking sometimes. But the hardest thing was the criminalization. I could sleep outside ok, find lovely places to sleep on the earth, but then have constant fear of being arrested, ticketed, woken up in the middle of the night, having my camping gear confiscated so I couldn't survive outdoors. Over time it was a constant source of anxiety, because that did happen, many times. It's led me to have anxiety even when I'm legally camping now. There was also the worry of being assaulted, because of being outside with no protection, which has also happened many times. Other things are criminalized which could improve our quality of life, such as hitchhiking, making things and selling them on the street, busking, or even just sitting in public nowadays. a scene from the Carpathian mountains where my ancestors used to live: a steep forested slope with a bare rock mountain top that is striated and gray in color When I learned that some countries have “right to roam” I wanted to experience that. It's like another reality after being criminalized just for camping for years and years. I went to a country with “right to roam” a few years ago. I asked my hosts how would I know I'm on private property and where is ok to camp? They told me, no one will mind if you're on their property, they will be happy to see someone enjoying the outdoors! Wow! I couldn't wrap my brain around it. We aren't even allowed to sit on public property here a lot of the time much less sleep. So the way camping is highly regulated here, only in designated areas where you usually need a car and it's expensive and you need reservations and so on, it's very directly because camping is associated with homelessness and poverty and that's stigmatized in the US. I still love camping but it's a whole thing, with a lot of trauma attached to it for me now. If I could, I'd mostly live outdoors or in very natural housing, such as a rammed earth house. I feel WAY better if I do and all my issues get better. I probably have chemical sensitivities that are improved by it. But that seems to be possible only if you have money to live on land and build stuff. I've never found a way to live the way I need to, ideally for my mental and physical health, instead usually living in subpar housing with mold or other issues. So that's all very hard and has systemic reasons of ableism and classism.

A video interview between Judy Smith and Syren Nagakyrie Syren Nagakyrie, founder of Disabled Hikers, interviews Judy Smith, a longtime disabled advocate, about her experiences as a disabled person before and after the Americans with Disabilities Act and her dream for a more accessible future. Judy Smith became disabled in 1977 at the age of 17, due to a spinal cord injury in a car accident. As a lifelong nature and outdoor lover, she had to learn how to navigate the world as a wheelchair user. A founding member and former Artistic Director of AXIS Dance Company in Berkeley, CA, Judy is an avid birder and organizes accessible outings in the Bay Area with Golden Gate Bird Alliance. Transcript Syren Nagakyrie: Hello, I am Syren Nagakyrie, they/them pronouns. I am a white non-binary person with shoulder length brown hair, and behind me is the Disabled Hikers logo. And I am here with Judy Smith, a longtime disabled outdoor advocate and recreationalist who's going to share a little bit of her story with us today. Welcome, Judy.   Judy Smith: I'm glad to be here.   Syren: Would you like to introduce yourself?   Judy: Sure, I can say a little bit about myself. My name is Judy and I do use she/her pronouns. I am a white, older lesbian. I have my gray hair pulled back in a braid. I'm light skinned and I'm wearing a gray turtleneck. And I am actually zooming in from Ohlone land. They are the rightful owners of this place that I live called Oakland.   Yeah, so I was lucky enough to grow up in the mountains of Colorado. I spent most of my childhood being in nature and riding my horses in national parks and that kind of thing. So nature has always just been a first love of mine.   I was injured in a car accident when I was 17 in 1977, which was, 20 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act. And at that point, disabled people were still really not very seen at all. And I was in a small town of about 1000 people. I was the only physically disabled person that I knew of in the county.   And becoming disabled that young, I have a spinal cord injury, so I use a power wheelchair. It changed everything for me. I really thought that my life was pretty much over because I was planning on an equestrian career. And so having my plan A and the only plan I had for my life yanked out from under me and not being able to access the outdoors was really devastating.   I had the good fortune, after spending 5 winters in a wheelchair in Colorado in the mountains, to have a disabled friend that I knew in Boulder suggest that I move to Berkeley, California. Which I did. It was crazy. I was 23 years old, I knew nothing about urban living. And I still kind of don't know how I ended up here in an urban environment.   But I got here in 1983. It was really at the height of the civil rights movement for people with disabilities, the independent living movement. My friends, my mentors were Judy Heumann, Ed Roberts, Marilyn Golden, you know, all of these people that were really instrumental in those of us with disabilities having the quality of lives that we do now.   So when I got hurt, you know, I did, I felt like I was never going to be able to be outdoors again, really, you know, and all of the places that I used to go, I didn't feel I could go anymore. So I think moving into a city kind of isolated me a little bit even more. Being outdoors, but I never lost my love for it.   We're really lucky in the San Francisco Bay Area. The East Bay Regional Parks District is the largest regional park district in the country, and there's parks everywhere. You know, and so of course, I started going to parks and finding these places. A lot of them were somewhat accessible, but a lot of them had ridiculous barriers, like a log in front of the trailhead so that motorcycles couldn't get through. That also meant people in wheelchairs couldn't get through, you know, gates that were too narrow for a wheelchair to get through. So when the Americans with Disabilities Act really started saying, you know, it's an imperative to make places accessible, I did start noticing a change. And I was able to get outside more and do more. So now, I spend the majority of my free time as much as I possibly can.   I retired from being a founding member and the artistic director of Axis Dance Company, in Oakland. I had an indoor career. So, when I retired in 2018, my imperative for myself was to get myself in nature more.   When COVID hit, I was able to do the California Naturalist certification online, which made, you know, that possible really. And, so all of this stuff started opening up for me in terms of being in nature.   Bonnie Lewkowicz who is at the Bay Area Adaptive Sports and Recreation Program, asked me if I would start doing accessible nature programming, especially birding. So I started doing that. My life now is really very much focused on being outdoors and making sure other disabled people can get outdoors.   Syren: Yeah, I love that. Do you have a favorite park in the East Bay? It is so beautiful there.   Judy: Well, I have kind of my home patches are Reinhart Regional Park, Oakland Hills. It's part of Redwood Regional Park. And I also spent a lot of time out at Arrowhead Marsh, which is part of the Martin Luther King Jr. shoreline. It's out by the Oakland Airport, and I avoided going there for most of the time I've lived in California. It just seemed too industrial, but it is a jewel of a wetland. So especially in the winter, we have a lot of shorebirds and ducks and other water birds that come in. It's just a wonderful place. I was there last week and there is a burrowing owl there now, which seems really early. But, these are all, these two places are within 20 minutes drive for me. Unfortunately, neither of them are very public transportation accessible.   But then I also have favorite parks that are further south of me, Coyote Hills. I hiked there with my sister one day, who's not disabled, and we were there for six hours. There are a lot of trails that aren't "accessible." But I think my favorite trails are the ones that I call accidentally accessible. They're not the paved half mile loop around the parking lot, you know. They're ones that -- my power wheelchair does really pretty well outdoors. It's not specifically designed for that, it's my everyday chair, it just happens to do pretty well -- So I am able to get around terrain that I might not recommend other wheelchair users try, especially.   But, having a power wheelchair, it just, really changed my life. I'll tell you a story about that.   I used a manual wheelchair when I got out of rehab. I didn't want a power wheelchair because I thought it would make me more disabled, people would think I was more disabled. But we lived on the side of a mountain with a rutted dirt driveway. My barn was down the hill, my arena was down the hill. I was still working with horses and I was teaching lessons and such, but I had to be pushed everywhere. My mom finally got disgusted with that and she stuck my little brother in this portable electric chair that I had and sent him down the driveway to make sure he could do it without killing himself. And she said, you're getting in that. I was so pissed, but that changed my life, because all of a sudden I could get around. Then I got an outdoor, a heavier duty power wheelchair. And I was able to go to the barn myself. You know, we made the gates so that I could open them myself. I was able to go down the driveway. I still wasn't able to go on a lot of the trails that I went on, but it really opened up my life.   So, I really encourage people to get as much assistive technology as they can. Because it does, it changes your life.   I'm not wheelchair bound. This chair gives us, our adaptive equipment gives us our freedom. I really work to change that paradigm. So if people introduce me as somebody who's wheelchair bound, I correct them right away. Being in a power wheelchair allows me to, of course, access the ADA accessible trails. And there are a lot of trails that I can't, but there are so many more that I can do that I didn't expect to be able to.   Now, I'm a bird watcher and I'm a slow birder. I might be out for four or five hours and only go a half a mile or a mile, but for me, that's just being out outdoors. I just find places to sit and see what comes to me. I just notice. And I think doing the naturalist training really changed the way I am in nature. It made me much more observant, much more aware.   I used to want to go hike and go as far as I can, kind of as fast as I could. And that doesn't interest me now.   Syren: Yeah, yeah, I love that.   I went to herbal school for two years and did a lot of, you know, studying herbs and plants and things like that. And also I will hike half a mile and spend all that time just nerding out on plants and seeing who we can see. That's how we do Disabled Hikers does our group hikes, it's a lot of nerd time in nature. It's pretty great.   Judy: And I think, you know, birding really, lends itself to that nature. I'm not one of those birders that has my life list and I'm trying to add species to it all of the time; going as fast as I can to see as much as I can. I love introducing people to birding and to birding in a mindful way.   Syren: So how has, how have your experiences kind of changed over the past, 47 years? How do you think accessibility has improved? Has anything gotten worse? Has it kind of stayed the same?   Judy: I think it's definitely improved. Really, definitely. Are there still things that need to be done? Yes.   You know, I travel some with Bonnie and she does trail assessments and has a wonderful website, Access California, accessca.org I’m kind of learning from her how to assess trails and how to report things that aren't accessible. But there are a lot of things that are still like really simple to fix barriers, but definitely it's improved and definitely there's more awareness.   But I'll tell you one of the things that I don't think has improved as much as I would hope or would have hoped is the number of people that are disabled in wheelchairs that I see out on the trails. So often I'm the only one out there. I get so many people that say, how great it is that you can get outdoors, how wonderful for you. And I always just say, yeah, how wonderful for you too.   But I just am still such a freak out there in nature because people aren't used to seeing, disabled hikers in a wheelchair going up the side of a hill, or being in some rather remote dirt trail. And that to me is, I get so excited when I see other disabled people out there.   So that's what I don't think has changed enough is the number of people who are disabled who know that it's an option to be outdoors, who have a passion for being outdoors because it changes your life. It affects you on, the physical, the spiritual, the emotional, the psychological level. There's a gazillion studies now that talk about the benefits of nature.   And I think people really found that out during COVID. All of a sudden, you know, going to the mall and going to the movie and going to concerts wasn't available. So what happened? People went out. A lot of people. And I see in general a lot more people, but I still don't see a lot more disabled people. And that's what I would really like to see change.     Syren: Do you think that contributes to people's attitudes around disability? How do you think people's reactions and attitudes to you being disabled out on the trail has changed over the years?   Judy: Well, I think disability, visibility, we know has a long way to go. Our culture in terms of media, in terms of the portrayals that we see on TV or the stories that we hear about, in podcasts and stuff, that has a lot of room for improvement.   But I think when people, and I think the same was true when I was dancing and with the dance company, is that when people see disabled people doing something that they don't expect us to be able to do or seeing us in places that they don't expect to see us, I think it can't help but even subconsciously open the mind a little bit and to get people thinking a little bit differently about disability and about ability.   One of the reasons that I started, that I was really excited to start organizing nature programs and accessible birding was because I would see all these things and I still see them, this hike or that naturalist talk or, this birding event, and they don't say anything about accessibility, or they don't say enough that, I feel like, okay, I can show up there comfortably.   So that was a real impetus to doing my own programming and, getting other people, like more experienced birders, involved as leaders so that I could also learn, and I think over the last four years -- I'm pretty active with Golden Gate Bird Alliance, which used to be Golden Gate Audubon, but one of the organizations that changed our name specifically to become more welcoming --   But anyway, I've gotten more involved in that and I have seen more field trips starting to talk about the language, more accessibility language, you know, describing the the terrain, describing the slope, describing the length, that kind of thing. I know that people in Golden Gate Bird Alliance are more used to seeing those of us with disabilities birding, because of the trips that I've been able to organize.   The more of us who are disabled, who have the ability to get outdoors and to access nature and to get involved in things like hiking groups and birding groups, and show up at events, the better it's going to be for all of us in the long run. But change is slow, and, disabled people have not traditionally been seen as, the users of the outdoors. It's the mountaineer, mountain biker, backpacker, long distance hiker, you know. So changing that idea about who is in nature is one of my passions.     Syren: What's your vision for the next 50 years? What do you what would you really like to see change in terms of disability access, you know, and the outdoors?   Judy: I would love to see the outdoors survive and to see nature survive. And right now, that's not a guarantee, especially under the regime that we're living under. My first hope is that nature can survive this period of time and that, you know, human beings will wake up en masse and decide to do something about climate change and the loss of biodiversity.   In terms of access, assistive technology has gotten so much better. We have track chairs, we have terrain hoppers, we have these other powered mobility devices that allow people to get out in nature. I hope those become more readily available.   And I hope that, here we're lucky to have urban parks and urban open spaces that you can get to by public transportation; a lot of them you can't, and we know transportation is a huge barrier for especially physically disabled people, and especially those who use wheelchairs. So, seeing improvements in public transportation. I'd like to see more people being able to get the places that they want to go.   And I'd love to just know that in 50 years, every disabled person is going to know that it's an option for me to be outdoors. And “wow, the outdoors is really awesome. Oh, I feel so much better when I'm out here.” It's my happy place is being out in nature. I would like to know that every disabled person and every disabled kid is going to be able to partake in it.   Syren: I love that vision. I think it's so important. And I think too, as we're thinking about, yeah, how to really bring people together to, you know, en masse to really address these climate issues that we're experiencing. I think the disabled community has such a powerful role in that, and I think the more that we can help folks really get out there, and know that this is an option, and share our stories, I think we can really help move that.   So I really appreciate you for spending some time with me and sharing your story with the Disabled Hikers community and thank you for all your work over the years.   Judy: Well, I really appreciate the work that you do too and we just, we need to keep pushing and we need to keep getting more people involved and being more visible, not that anomaly.   End Transcript

Cover of The Disabled Hiker's Guide to Norther California: outdoor adventures accessible by car, wheelchair, and on foot by Syren Nagakyrie. The top is a yellow background with black text and the FalconGuides logo on the left. The bottom is a photo of a boardwalk trail with a bump out at a sign surrounded by towering giant sequoia About the Book The Disabled Hiker’s Guide to Northern California: Outdoor Adventures Accessible by Car, Wheelchair, and on Foot is a trailblazing guide that removes one of the barriers to access in the outdoors by providing detailed trail information written by a disabled person, for disabled people. The book features over 40 scenic drives and viewpoints, verified wheelchair accessible trails, and foot trails for disabled hikers. The trail guides provide a step-by-step or roll-by-roll description of what you will encounter on the trail, including obstacles like roots and rocks, steep sections, and places to rest. Public transit and driving directions, detailed maps, and hundreds of photos are also featured. The book covers the northern region of California, from Monterey to the Oregon state line, and offers options that meet a variety of accessibility needs to ensure there is something for everyone. This guide includes: Drive-up Adventures: Places that can be reached via car or accessible transportation that offer sweeping views or beautiful surroundings without having to go out on trail. Where trails that meet the guidelines are also available, they are also referenced and a trail guide provided. Wheelchair-Accessible Trails: Descriptions of verified wheelchair accessible trails. Trails are reviewed for adherence to accessibility guidelines and inaccessible features are noted (this is a fairly common occurrence). Descriptions of trail surface, grade, and detailed directions are also be provided. Wheelchair users need more information than simply listing whether a trail is "wheelchair accessible" or not and this guide provides that detail. It also expands the definition of wheelchair accessibility to include wheelchair hikeable trails. Hiking Trails: Foot trails for disabled hikers are included to suit a wide variety of accessibility needs. Trails are rated according to the Spoon Rating, a system created by Syren Nagakyrie. There is a mix of trails located in cities, developed recreations areas, and backcountry or wilderness areas. A map of Northern California with numbered dots representing trail locations in the book. Links in the book Trail Updates Updates about trails in the book will be posted here when available. Please contact us if you find any closures or major changes to the accessibility of a trail!

Disabled people are being targeted. Here is what you can do to help. Disabled people’s rights are under attack on multiple fronts. Here are two major issues with serious consequences. We will update this post with other issues as we are able. Section 504 In Texas v Becerra , 17 states are suing the Federal government to declare Section 504 unconstitutional. Section 504 is a law which protects disability rights in education, healthcare, and more. Section 504 is a foundational civil rights law; if it were to be struck down, it would set the stage to end the ADA and more. One of the challenges directly attacks transgender people via gender dysphoria as a protected disability. Regardless of your opinion about gender dysphoria as a diagnostic category or disability (and opinions on that range even among trans community) it is obvious that this is a part of ongoing attacks on our communities. Again, if Section 504 was declared unconstitutional, it would end civil rights protections for people with disabilities in all settings and institutions that receive federal funding, especially education and healthcare. That includes support for disabled children in school, requirements that doctors not stop treating patients because of their disability, sign language interpreters, and more. The 17 states are: Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, West Virgina. Please contact the attorneys general of these states, especially if you are a resident, and demand that they withdraw from the lawsuit. Resources and contact information are available on the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund website Medicaid Republican officials want to make drastic cuts to Medicaid; they want to cut $2.3 trillion, 20% of the budget, to pay for tax cuts that benefit the wealthiest Americans. Over 80 million people, including 23 million adults and children with disabilities, use Medicaid to pay for healthcare, mobility aids, in home care, and more. Cuts to Medicaid would leave millions of people without access to medical care and the support they need to survive. Contact your Congress person, whether they are a Republican or Democrat, and tell them to protect Medicaid. Tell them any kind of funding changes, work requirements, or caps are not acceptable. If you have a personal story about the impact, you can share that but we need everyone to speak up! Resources and contact information are available on the DREDF website .

Cover of A Disabled Hiker's Guide to Five Washington State Parks. Background photo of a boardwalk deck overlooking a creek. Accessible Adventures is in a yellow banner in the center, with five icons representing various disabilities. The park names are listed at the bottom: Lake Sammamish, Flaming Geyser, Federation Forest, Saltwater, Dash Point A Disabled Hiker's Guide to 5 Washington State Parks provides detailed information for five state parks in the King County area: Lake Sammamish, Flaming Geyser, Federation Forest, Saltwater, and Dash Point. This fully accessible, downloadable PDF is the first of it's kind in the Washington State Parks system, and expands on the ADA information that state parks already provide. Each park guide includes an overview of the park, suggested activities, and information on the accessibility of many features in the park. Features are broken out into sections, and include parking, restrooms and facilities, picnic areas and shelters, trails, campgrounds, and more, with detailed information and directions. We hope this is a useful guide to planning your accessible adventure in Washington State Parks, and an example for park agencies on how to provide better information for disability communities. The assessments and guide were created by Syren Nagakyrie of Disabled Hikers, with funding and collaboration from the Washington State Parks Foundation. We hope it is the first of many more projects to come! Download your free copy of Accessible Adventures: A Disabled Hiker's Guide to Five Washington State Parks The PDF is best viewed on a desktop for accessibility, which includes a linked table of contents, tab functionality, alt-text, and image descriptions. View without downloading here .

Disabled Hikers partnered with San Juan Visitors Bureau and Washington State Tourism to create this guide to accessible recreation in the San Juan Islands. Syren visited all three of the main islands - San Juan, Orcas, and Lopez - and nearly every park to assess the accessibility of the trails and facilities. The guide includes detailed descriptions for 25 trails across the islands with dozens of photos, information on what makes a trail accessible and for whom, and accessible travel tips. Download the Free Disabled Hiker's Guide to the San Juan Islands Additional Resource: Coast Salish Place Names of the San Juan Island is an ongoing project with a present day look at historic Coast Salish locations throughout the San Juan Islands and Straight of Georgia

Naomi Ortiz and Syren Nagakyrie discuss Naomi's books Rituals for Climate Change: a Crip Struggle for Ecojustice and Sustaining Spirit: Self-care for Social Justice. How can disabled people and activists lean into place and self-care? How can we experience nature and witness changes in the environment and ourselves? Naomi responds to these questions and more while "expand[ing] on and complicating who is seen as an environmentalist and what being in relationship with the land can look like." Naomi Ortiz is a Poet, Writer, and Visual Artist whose work explores the cultivation of care and connection within states of stress. Their current focus is on climate action, self-care for activists, disability justice, and relationship with place. They are a highly acclaimed speaker and facilitator with a leadership style emphasizing inclusion and spiritual growth. Syren Nagakyrie is the founder and director of Disabled Hikers, a cross-disability led organization building disability community and justice in the outdoors. They are the author of The Disabled Hiker's Guide to Western Washington and Oregon, The Disabled Hiker's Guide to Northern California, and many other guides and itineraries. Learn more about Naomi and access more recordings of their work from their website. Order Rituals for Climate Change from Punctum Books Follow Naomi on Instagram Interview Transcript Syren Nagakyrie: I am Syren Nagakyrie. I'm the founder and director of Disabled Hikers and the author of Disabled Hikers Guide to Western Washington and Oregon. And we're here with Naomi Ortiz, who's on our board, and also a fabulous activist and advocate and author and poet. And I'm just really amazed by all of the work that you do. So thank you for, for being here. Naomi Ortiz: Thanks for inviting me. My name is Naomi, and I am joining you from the current and ancestral lands of the O’odham, as well as the contemporary settlement of the Yoemem, the Pasqua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, which is this region is also part of the Sonora Desert, which I love. I honor the land and the sky and all the practices of listening. And I am a Reclaiming the Border Narrative Awardee, grant awardee, and then also a Disabled Features Fellow. And as you mentioned, a poet and an artist and a writer. Syren Nagakyrie: Wonderful, thank you. So I'm really excited to kind of share about your work with our community. I think there's a lot here that is just so meaningful and things that we really need to have more discussions about, so I'm really excited to share this with everyone. One of the things that really strikes me is that themes of ceremony, place and justice really weave through your work. Rituals for Climate Change and Sustaining Spirit really compliment each other so well, but they also seem to complicate each other. How can we as disabled people and activists really lean into place self-care and ceremony when so much of the land is inaccessible to us and is also suffering? Naomi Ortiz: Hmm. Yeah. Big questions. I think a lot about the ways that disabled people survive in a world that just doesn't consider us, our survival is not easy. And yet we offer tremendous examples of creativity, slowing down and grappling with contradictory needs and how those things can actually work in real life. In my first nonfiction book, Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice, which is behind me here. [image description: the book cover is a woman of color looking down at a flower in a meditative state. You can see the actual painting behind me, above my head.] I was really curious about how self-care could be a response to toxic community organizing and nonprofit culture. Not in a way where we go and withdraw and replenish and then just like jump back in - I don't think that that's incredibly useful, but in a way we’re challenging the nature of what, how we do this work. I was really interested in that. One of the things that was interesting is I interviewed a bunch of people for that book, people doing all different kinds of social justice activism from the US. I interviewed folks from Nicaragua and Mexico, and one of the interesting commonalities was that we are all existing in a state of overwhelm. It's like, how do we participate in collective liberation if we're in a tapped out state of urgency, it's hard to be creative if we don't have capacity. So when I think about what it's gonna take for collective liberation within social justice and environmental sustainability, creativity is a huge part of that. Right? So that's why I was starting with this question around self-care. How do we develop and use this as one tactic? Self-care is one tactic to develop our own capacity. And one component of self-care that exists is finding support outside of people. For me, that support comes from land, specifically from the Sonora Desert, the mountains, the soil. I have lovely friends and loved ones, but you know, they're also working at capacity. They're also burned out. There's only so much support we can provide each other, that's just reality. So I get that support from place, and yet I was noticing changes in the desert as it's been getting drier and hotter. The land is changing. So I got really stuck, you know, I launched Sustained Spirit, and I was talking a lot about all these different elements of self-care, which relationship with place is one piece of it. And yet I was like feeling really challenged in my own relationship with the land because of witnessing these changes. And I got really stuck in trying to figure out how to love place as a disabled person who can't do a lot of the traditional environmental justice work, things like going hiking and picking out invasive grasses, things like that. I wanted to figure out how to love place and to be in relationship with it as these changes were unfolding to evolve in the land. Not just supporting me, but also supporting the land. So, grounded in the fear and despair I was experiencing, as well as this question of how to support the land is really where the work for Rituals for Climate Change came from. Disabled people you know, we have to be part of re-imagining a more sustainable society. Syren Nagakyrie: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that reciprocity component is so important. In Rituals for Climate Change: A Crips Struggle for Ecojustice, in Interlude One, you share a story about visiting an observatory and encountering incredulousness from the guide and an inaccessible facility. You say "sometimes ableism smacks into a lifelong dream that has a coupon." I laughed so hard at that, it really reminded me of all the times that I have been so excited for something that seemed to be a less remarkable experience for the more abled and financially privileged people in the group, and how that definitely can cast a shadow on the experience and definitely impact that. Later on in the piece, you talk about how you have also been unimpressed by everyday miracles and feel most centered in the spaciousness of the universe. I think we all need perspective sometimes, for sure. What do you think about these kind of peak experiences, whether it's, you know, staring at a galaxy that's light years away or sitting on the top of a mountain. What role do those kind of experiences play in a crip struggle for eco-justice? Naomi Ortiz: Oh, man. I think, for Crips, you know, sometimes these experiences are so rare, these like peak experiences, but also if we redefine what peak experiences are, I also think that we can access them so much more easily sometimes.  So for example, because I go slower [and] a lot of my experiences with places are like sitting on the edge of a parking lot or at the beginning of a trailhead, I bring a little bench or I have my chair, my wheelchair and I'm just chilling out, watching, observing, doing my thing. But I'll watch people with their backpacks, you know, march along the path and they're like at a good clip. I can imagine that that would be incredible to get to a summit and look down and see this huge swath of land in front of me. It could be magical. But I think because I go slower and can't do that marching down the trail, in this spaciousness of observation, I get to witness beauty in a much more deep and impactful way. So I think finding peak experiences for me is watching a lizard jump from a rock several feet up onto a big boulder. It's totally amazing, these teeny little legs, somehow they spring, like you imagine a squirrel or something. I don't know how they do it. Or  watching a mother hummingbird feed a baby hummingbird. These things that I get to just observe because I'm slow and I'm sitting there and I'm paying attention. So, because sometimes I get to witness these magical things at a picnic area or the side of a parking lot, I am able to hold a deeper value for land and animals and plants that are everywhere instead of being solely focused on the value of, "wild and pristine spaces." So because I'm seeing life and all this magic happen next to what we consider not wild spaces, I know that it's everywhere. I'm truly aware that it's outside my doorstep or even underneath the concrete of my house or where I'm living. Syren Nagakyrie: Yes! I love that. I love watching, like you said, the lizards, or even a cat jump from the top of a bookshelf to the floor, I'm like, that is like 50 times your height. How did you just do that? Naomi Ortiz: I know! Syren Nagakyrie: It's amazing. I really love how you talk about nature as everywhere in Nature Defined another section in the book, you say that "nature is in the edges between this world and the next, the cusp of human-dominated and wild. And in the relationships between one living thing and another." Do you experience nature as a borderland? Naomi Ortiz: So as a child of formerly undocumented indigenous and multiracial people, I have always been emmeshed in a political reality of being in between. That political reality is even more embodied as I navigate society, as a disabled person living next to a militarized border and driving through checkpoints that are set up, you know, five to 25 miles away from the actual borderline is part of my everyday life. But borderlands are constructed, they're created by politics and militarization. They create a false sense of separation. And I often think the ways we think about nature are also being falsely constructed. So nature is everywhere, but as a society, we create boxes where it's acceptable to view land as nothing more than a resource. Growing up on the US-Mexico border, I'm intimately aware of the impacts of militarization and fear when it comes to relating, not just to a sense of place, but to family and to culture. I hold this knowing in the same crip hand and need for others to grow my food, for electricity, to charge my scooter for concrete, to help me ease and, you know, to move around and be part of community. I don't know if I experienced nature as a borderland as much as allowing myself to witness and love the soil, plants, animals, and the way that I am impacting them by what I need. It's touching something that's so complicated while also holding a lot of grace. Borderlands are constructed to delineate between what's ours or not ours. And being in relationship with nature is different. It's about consistently being in the challenging perspective of how we are sharing what exists. For me, that means challenging myself to think more deeply about what I need or do not need to contemplate this, while also understanding that for climate change to be addressed, systems need to be responsible beyond individuals too. Syren Nagakyrie: Yeah. I think there is such a false binary between built and natural and what is considered natural and environmental and what is not. So, I appreciate that discussion and that consideration and wrestling with that in your work. Naomi Ortiz: Yeah. Even with what’s okay and not okay, you know, we like to make these boxes to kind of let ourselves off the hook sometimes. It's not that we shouldn't use any land at all, of course, we have to in order to live, but it's being in that question and the discomfort of that. Whew. Yeah. That's the work. Syren Nagakyrie: So we receive a little bit of your personal story of disability in Ceremony as Medicine, another entry in the book where you talk about undergoing surgical procedures that you weren't allowed to consent to and spending time in bed while mending. I really related to your description of the desert being a slow, yet consistent and reliable place of change when your body did not feel that way. I have felt that way with my own landscapes of sanctuary when I wasn't able to really rely on my body in a certain way. So that was really meaningful to me to read. You also speak to the ways that you feel both called to and repelled by the desert. With the ways that places are losing that kind of reliable and consistent change as the climate crisis escalates, how do you think this relates to disability? How can we witness each other, people and place? Naomi Ortiz: Yeah. In Rituals for Climate Change, I have several conversations with the land that are threaded through the book about what it means to witness - if witnessing can be not just solidarity, but an action. In my experience, witnessing is grief work. And I'll say, as a disabled person, I have a lot of practice with grief work with figuring out what's in my control and not in my control. It's extremely humbling. And climate change, you know, is also humbling. It's bigger than any one person or one community can tackle alone. We need systematic support to survive and in order for ecosystems to survive. I think about how as a disabled person, I need one-on-one support. Interdependence is key to my survival, yet that systematic support has to be there in order for me to actually live. It's more than the individuals in my life can do or can provide. And so I think it's like holding this book, and we need our own individual practices of witnessing and doing this grief work, while at the same time being part of the conversations that are happening at a systematic level to think deeper about what we can do, how do we move forward together? Syren Nagakyrie: Yeah. You write a lot about that, about vulnerability and interdependence, especially in Sustaining Spirit. What does this mean in the context of disability and climate change when our interdependence can feel so vulnerable? Naomi Ortiz: Yeah. I don't know how you feel about this, but to me, disability is just confrontation with vulnerability all the time. You know, one definition of ableism that I really like and I use a lot to explain the ways that disabled people are discriminated against and excluded, talks about how vulnerability is a foundational part of why that happens. A fear of vulnerability is a foundational part of why that happens, because people in general, of course, do not like to confront what makes us feel vulnerable. But as disabled people, we don't have an option to not confront the ways that we are vulnerable in society, in our homes, in our lives. And we're very often alone in the emotional and social and spiritual grappling with ways that we are vulnerable because people are afraid to acknowledge that their own potential futures of disability for their bodies, and climate change makes us vulnerable in such a tangible way. And it's something that a lot of people can't turn away from. Here in Arizona, even though people try, our water future is very much in question. And yet our state government refuses to touch it, like really refuses to grapple and ask the hard questions with it because they're afraid of that vulnerability. As a disabled person, I'm pretty much on my own to plan and think through changes that happen for my body and what having more defined limits means. In society, respecting our body's capacity or even developing a relationship of what our capacity is, is challenged, and I would even say vilified. Capacity is treated like failure. In one of the poems in the book, Epicenter, I share a few lines that begin the poem that say: "body ground zero for how we are instructed to control the world." The body can be an entryway into thinking about capacity and our limits, and we need an embodied sense of our limits in order to respect and truly understand the limits and capacity of the places we live. It's like this knowledge in our body also translates to a desperate knowledge we need about how we relate to where we live. Syren Nagakyrie: I think that's so powerful. And it makes me think too, you know, I have been accused of being too confrontational at times, and I'm like, well, it's because I've had to be, I've had to move through feeling overly vulnerable into that space of having to confront these issues on a daily basis. I don't have, you know, the privilege of not doing that. So, I think it is very often vilified, but there's a lot of power in that too, being able to embrace that. Naomi Ortiz: Yes, absolutely, and I think people really react to the confrontation that happens around capacity. And in that same way that we react to our fear of vulnerability, it's all related. So how do we unpack that and start really challenging and working on that within ourselves? And that's really why I wrote both the books I did, because these are the questions I'm asking for myself, and I wanted to share how I move through things and invite people to accompany me as I accompany them in this work. Syren Nagakyrie: Yeah. That's incredible. Well, these books are both such a gift, really. They sit out on my table and I pick them up pretty often and just flip through and say, okay, you know, what can I read today? Naomi Ortiz: Thanks so much, Syren. Syren Nagakyrie: Well, is there anything else you would like to say? How can people learn more about your work, order the books? Naomi Ortiz: So you can find information about the books on my website, which is my name, NaomiOrtiz.com. There is the ability to get Sustaining Spirit in a bunch of different ways. The publisher [of Rituals for Climate Change] part of what they do is the print book, but you can also download a free PDF version of the book from the publisher's website. So professors or teachers out there, or folks who wanna use this work for discussion, you know, it's something that people can access for free too. Syren Nagakyrie: Nice. And I know you ensured that was screen reader accessible for PDF? Naomi Ortiz: Yes, I did try to work with that, what was that confrontation thing again? But my publisher actually was super; they stepped up and did it. And so we worked in partnership on it, so it was great. Syren Nagakyrie Great. Well, is there anything else you'd like to share or do you have anything exciting coming up that you'd like people to know about? Naomi Ortiz: Ooh, I feel like I've just come off this huge a few months of doing all these book events and stuff, so if you're interested in hearing some from the book - I really love story time personally, like I feel people are just reading to me - I also have videos on my website of talks and readings I've done from the book, so people can access those on my website as well. If you're interested just in learning more, hearing some directly from the book. Syren Nagakyrie: This is a good season for story time too. Well thank you, for sharing a little bit about your books and your work with us. I'm really excited for the community to get to know a little bit more and to find you and all the places. I know you also have an Instagram as well, right? Naomi Ortiz: I do. It's @NaomiOrtizWriterArtist is my Insta. Syren Nagakyrie: Great. Naomi Ortiz: Thanks so much Syren, and thanks for all the amazing work that Disabled Hikers does. Syren Nagakyrie: Thank you. Yeah, I'm honored to be in it with everyone.

by Chrys Lyn Furrer I wonder if I am “disabled enough” to write a disability hiking story, while also wondering if I am strong enough, able enough, to hike my favorite trails post-surgery. My body occupies a space of liminality that sometimes feels like I don’t belong fully to either community, disabled or non-disabled. I don’t always appear disabled, though in the sociocultural context of ableism, I often have to wonder if I am able enough to participate in the activities I enjoyed before my surgery. I wonder if my leg, forever altered by illness and recovery, is able enough to carry me up the ridge. I wonder if my voice, forever altered by reconstructive jaw surgery, could carry if I needed to call for help. But I wander anyway. I find myself at Black Swan Preserve, in a remote part of a rural mountain county. I find myself, preserved. The land is bathed in the greenness of spring, restoration, return. The shimmering water of the reservoir is already receding from the lack of rain. It’s only March. It has only been six months since my mandibulectomy and fibula free flap reconstructive surgery to treat a massive tumor on my jaw. Half a year since the health care system sought to cure me by removing most of my lower jaw, harvesting soft and hard tissue from my leg, and rebuilding my jaw from fibula bone. Now I walk with my cane and my service dog, remnants of mobility aids that I cling to after re-learning how to walk. I walk with my pain. It is quickly becoming an old friend, even as my body feels new to me – an altered landscape, unfamiliar terrain. My body is not unlike the physical place it moves through. We – me and this land – have been forever changed by kissing death; remade by the hands of a necrophiliac industrial machine. For me, it was the medical industrial complex that re-made me. For this place, it was the mining industry. We both bear the scars of our encounters. I wear a scar at the crease where my neck and jaw meet, nearly ear to ear. I wear a scar at the site of my tracheostomy, where a plastic tube was placed to help me breathe. I wear a scar from my ankle to my knee, where bone and flesh were harvested to re-make my face. It looks a lot like a sprouting seed. The land wears a scar of exposed cliffs and unnatural waterways, where winter rains accumulate and erode ever deeper into the landscape. It wears trails like desire lines through its dense oak woodland – I wonder if these are also tender like the scars that mark me. Before my illness, I had always hiked solo - without worry, but not without caution. Solo hiking now terrified me. At least in part because my experience with illness made me entirely, utterly reliant on others for my survival, for a time, and I now wished to fully extinguish the myth of rugged individualism. So why was I trying to prove my independence now, hiking alone? What if I got hurt? And couldn’t reach help? What if the pain was too great? What if the fear overwhelmed me, pushed me into panic and anxiety so thick I couldn’t breathe? As I step onto the trail, awareness floods into me. I am re-membered by this place. I suddenly know I’m not alone, and that there is no such thing as hiking solo. My service dog, who has been with me through it all, is still with me, faithfully by my side. The serpentine soils and granite outcroppings are with me. The oak trees, crooked and still mighty, are with me. The scrub jays, the nearby grazing cows, the bees. The yarrow, mugwort, sage, and sticky monkey flower. The meandering streams. The endless blue of sky. All of us merging. Surgery cut me open and made a wound that cannot heal; that I would not heal. It dissolved a boundary, made me porous, and eroded misguided beliefs about separateness between self and nature, life and death, beauty and pain – all of these co-existing within my body and the land. Surgery cut away, but it also made space for me to forgive systems of healing that also harm. It remade the ecology of my body, and in doing so, allowed me to re-entangle myself into a web of life so much larger than my self. This ability is a gift granted to me by my so-called disability. Despite all I have endured, or rather, because of it, I feel a greater sense of belonging, reverence, and reciprocity with the natural world. My illness was a sprouting seed – rooting me deep in this place - and I wouldn’t change a thing. I continue to wonder and wander, but never alone. BIO Chrys Lyn Furrer (they/them) is a white, disabled, genderfluid femme, and an artist, naturalist, and poet in love with the world. Their work explores themes of grief, kinship, and belonging. Their hope is that their work prompts questions within their readers, like: what does it mean to be alive at the end of the [modern] world? What is our responsibility in attending to personal, political, and planet-scale tragedies, ever unfolding within and around us? What role can storytelling play in restoring (“re-storying”) right relationship between people and place? LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT This story features the so-called “Black Swan Preserve” in Nevada County, the unceded and ancestral homeland of the Nisenan people. Many Nisenan people were forcibly and violently removed from this land in order to develop the gold mining industry in this area – an industry that has done, and continues to do, untold damage to this land and its Indigenous relatives. The Nisenan people are alive and still gathering today, continuing their fight for federal recognition of their tribe. To learn more about their work, please visit California Heritage: Indigenous Research Project (CHIRP) at https://chirpca.org/. If you live, study, or conduct business on ancestral Nisenan land, please consider making a monetary donation to the Ancestral Homelands Reciprocity Program: https://chirpca.org/ancestral-homelands.

For neurodivergent urban dwellers, the remote wilderness provides much-needed relief from noise pollution in large cities. By: Desiree Lopez *Note: I make a conscious choice to use identity-first language as opposed to person-first language in this article. I find comfort and empowerment in using identity-first language to describe my unique experiences and the shared experiences of disabled persons. Content Note: neurodiversity, noise pollution and sensory overload, wilderness “Why am I dreading going back to the city?” Della, my partner of over 4 years, settles into the passenger seat while I pull onto the road. We’d just spent an entire day in the Sonoran Desert, about an hour drive from the occupied Kumeyaay land of San Diego, where Della has grown up her entire life and where we currently live together. We regularly take these kinds of day trips out into the wilderness. It started during the lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic, when outdoor recreation was the only option for us to safely get out of the house. Della is new to our nature hangs, but I’ve always been an avid fan of the outdoors. Going outside was a favorite pastime of my family when I was growing up, as it offered a budget-friendly way for my parents to entertain me and my siblings. I grew up in the mountainous desert of the Inland Empire region of Southern California, and remember summer days spent playing in the riverbeds of the San Bernardino Mountains, and Sunday mornings walking the trails of Mt. Rubidoux in Riverside. By the time I was a teenager, my parents had the privilege of accumulating enough savings to take us on trips to parks like Yosemite, Sequoia, Bryce Canyon, Joshua Tree, and the now Instagram-coveted Zion. We also took advantage of the Access Pass offered through the National Park Service. This resource offers free lifetime access to national parks and federal recreation sites to U.S. citizens or permanent residents who have a permanent disability. The desert is by far my favorite type of outdoor landscape. I always enjoy the long drive out into the seemingly endless expanse of land, and the feeling of both awe and relief I feel to be so far away from everything. It feels as if I can finally exhale fully. Everything is still, calm, and most of all- quiet. It is for this reason that the Mojave and Sonoran deserts that I have the good fortune to call my backyard will always be close to my heart. It gives me both a place to retreat and a vast landscape to explore. It is somewhere that I can get lost over and over again. Della’s favorite landscape is the forest. Our first trip out of the city together was to the forest of Alpine Valley, about an hour east of San Diego. Della still remembers that day vividly, and the deep sense of calm she felt being surrounded by nothing but trees. Della was eager to go back to the forest, so we did a trip to the Santa Cruz Mountains for their birthday, and we’ve got another trip to the Pacific Northwest planned this summer. When I asked Della to describe what if feels like to be in the forest, they replied one word: “Freedom” Now when we pack up to drive back to the city after a trip, Della is the first to groan. “Back to the jungle!” We often joke. It has taken us both some time to explain the deep feeling of relief we feel in the wilderness, but I started to put the pieces together last year when I began to identify as neurodivergent. Neurodivergent is rooted in the term Neurodiversity, coined in 1988 by Autistic Sociologist Judy Singer. Neurodiversity is defined as “a biological truism that refers to the limitless variability of human nervous systems on the planet, in which no two can ever be exactly alike due to the influence of environmental factors”. Neurodivergent is not a medical term. Rather, it is a political term that I use to describe the clear differences in the way that my brain experiences and interacts with the world around it compared to the majority of the population. I myself identify as neurodivergent and have not pursued any formal evaluation or diagnosis, though I experience signs of both Autism and ADHD. I am still undecided on pursuing a formal disability diagnosis, as this can have its own pros and cons due to discrimination in multiple settings such as healthcare, employment, and education. Despite not having a clinical diagnosis, I’ve always known that something about me was different. Family parties were often overwhelming, too loud and crowded for my senses. Fluorescent lighting is fatiguing, and can give me an instant headache. Sometimes the world around me simply feels like too much to take in. With that said, I have also been identified as exceptional by teachers and professors, who have praised my ability to retain information and understand complex concepts. I was fast-tracked to academic success, and still lean heavily on my academic abilities in my professional life. My brain gives me treasured gifts, and also makes my experience of the world quite challenging at times. Research shows that the autistic brain generates up to 42 percent more information at rest. It’s no wonder that I love silence! My brain is already producing more than enough information as it is. The ways in which I struggle have continued into adulthood. I’ve learned to carry noise-canceling headphones with me as a small piece of armor which protects me from the sensory overload around me. Such tools are especially necessary as a person who has lived their entire adulthood in densely populated cities. There is a term that describes this heavy load of noise in urban environments- noise pollution. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines noise pollution as noise exceeding 65 decibels in the daytime and over 30 decibels at night when residents are sleeping. People in cities are regularly exposed to noise levels above 65 decibels. A vacuum cleaner is about 70 decibels, while city traffic is about 85 decibels. Even the hum of a refrigerator is 40 decibels, just above the limit of what is shown to be conducive to a good night’s sleep according to the WHO. In 2021, the American Public Health Association declared noise pollution to be an immediate public health hazard. The general population faces increased risks of sleep disruption, heart disease, and cognitive and mental health concerns due to the level of noise in many cities. Constant noise can wreak havoc on our nervous systems. With this information, let us also consider our urban residents who have heightened sensitivity to sound due to neurodiversity. Research shows that autistic people may have increased auditory perception, and this may also be true for people with other neurodevelopmental conditions such as ADHD and other Sensory Processing Disorders. What does 30 decibels sound like to them, and what implications does that have for the impacts of noise pollution on their health? For me, this has meant that I regularly find ways to escape the sensory overload of city environments by heading out into the wilderness landscapes that I am lucky to live only a short drive from. In the wilderness, I can toss my headphones aside with reckless abandon and take in the silence around me. For me, it’s far better than music to the ears. As I write this love letter to the wilderness, I would also like to acknowledge that even protected areas such as National Parks are also having to grapple with noise management. A 2019 study showed that, while  US national parks are some of the quietest areas of the country, one-third of national parks face noise pollution in about 2% of their total land area. While this sounds like a small percentage, this still has negative effects for the wildlife in these areas who need silence to hear their prey and communicate with their pack. When you disturb animals, you also disturb plants which depend on small animals to distribute and plant seeds. The study identified the most common sources of this noise pollution as aircrafts and vehicles, respectively. So, how do we reap the benefits of nature without harming it? This is a delicate dance, but one worth doing. High levels of traffic can exacerbate noise pollution, so we can help spread the noise out by visiting the less popular parks that don’t get as much love. When we’re in the wilderness, remember that we are guests. We should avoid revving our cars, avoid playing loud music that can easily be listened to via headphones, and utilize traffic-reducing transportation methods such as shuttles. We can also get involved with or donate to environmental advocacy organizations. Here are a few: National Parks Conservation Association: a national organization that is actively petitioning the Navy to stop flying growler jets over Olympic National Park. Hawaii Island Coalition Malama Pono: a Hawaiian organization fighting against helicopter tourism. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility: a professional organization that supports employees who are demanding better environmental accountability from their employer. Quiet Parks International: is working to formally recognize certified quiet parks to promote noise management. Let us remember to do our best to protect nature from the effects of industrialization as we engage with it for healing and restoration of our bodies and minds. Better yet, let us resist the harm that continues to be done to us and to the planet by corporate and governmental giants. BIO: Desiree Lopez (pronouns: She/They) is a queer Chicana living in Southern California. Desiree currently works in higher education and is passionate about mental health, disability justice, and equitable access to education. In her spare time she enjoys hiking, drag shows, collecting crafted jewelry, and being a cat mom. You can follow them on Instagram, X, and Tik Tok at @death_rayy References: Reflections on Neurodiversity. Judy Singer. Accessed 3/30/2024. Noise. World Health Organization. Accessed 3/30/3024 Decibel Level Comparison Chart. Yale Environmental Health and Safety. Accessed 3/30/2024. Noise as a Public Health Hazard. American Public Health Association. Accessed 3/30/2024. A sound advantage: Increased auditory capacity in autism. Remington & Fairne, 2017. Accessed 3/30/2024. Accessibility. National Park Service. Accessed 5/6/2024 Cleary, M., West, S., Kornhaber, R., & Hungerford, C. (2023). Autism, Discrimination and Masking: Disrupting a Recipe for Trauma. Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 44(9), 799–808. https://doi.org/10.1080/01612840.2023.2239916 Case Western Reserve University. (2014, January 31). Autistic brains create more information at rest, study show. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 6, 2024 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140131130630.htm Front Ecol Environ 2019; 17(10): 559–564, doi:10.1002/fee.2112 Listening to Silence: Why We Must Protect the World's Quiet Places Morber, 2020. Accessed 5/6/2024.

This free PDF guide provides accessibility overviews for eleven redwood parks and four giant sequoia parks in California. Syren Nagakyrie created this guide with Save The Redwoods League. Syren conducted in depth reviews using ADA/ABA guidelines and personal and professional experience. They visited eight featured redwood parks and conducted thorough research on seven additional parks. Download the Free Guide The guide features a variety of accessible recreational opportunities, including scenic drives, camping, and hiking. It provides accessibility information for physical, visual, hearing, sensory, and intellectual disabilities.

Written By Sarah Capdeville Across the roadbed, three prints press into a scuff of snow. I recognize them right away—snowshoe hare tracks, two hard-nailed hind feet in front, tailed behind by a single print where smaller front paws overlap nearly one on top of the other. The rest of the roadbed is marbled in packed ice, scribbled in boot prints, dog tracks, squirrel bounds. The snowshoe hare prints hop off the path into a copse of dense firs, the needled ground bare and brown. I keep walking, metal tips of my hiking poles jabbing into the hard ice of the path. It’s only a couple days after winter solstice, and the low sunlight wraps around a steep ridge to the south. I pause again, notice the way the light turns the distant firs and pines into amber feathers. I’ve always felt like my first language was landscape. And specifically these landscapes of the Intermountain West, places with ridges and gulches and saddles, creek beds thick with willow and cottonwood, mountainsides evergreen with ponderosas and firs and lodgepole. The pace that I’ve moved through these landscapes has varied over my life—a curious meander as a kid, long trail runs, the slow and deliberate slog of backpacking with a fifty-pound pack. And, in the past years, a slower pace, milder changes in elevation, more old roadbeds than switchbacks. For a long time, I wasn’t okay with that. I grieved the absent weight of my backpack, the ease of bagging peaks, the runner’s high that sloughed away for good one July day. I used to frame my experience of chronic illness around that day, a hard-edged before and after. But as time passed, the landscape unfurled again. Illness and disability settled into the ecosystem of my new reality, into the ways I moved through the land. Last year, we had five straight months of winter. It snowed the first week of November, and then didn’t seem to stop until the end of March. But this winter has swung in the opposite direction, a temperate autumn that has continued through the end of the year. Inversions pooled damp fog in the valley, while above the sky stretched uncharacteristically pale and cloudless, long and warm stretches between snowfall. In the creekbed where I’m hiking today, the steeper mountainsides mean more of this snow has stayed, though in crusted patches at the base of firs and well-shaded slopes. Up ahead, my dog trots with her nose to the ground of a game path, probably on the trail of another snowshoe hare. I wonder if she can smell how it’s faring this mild winter. I wonder if the low snowpack is a benefit to the hare, meaning more access to forage, or a disadvantage, their white winter coat glaring against the brown earth. The question rests on my tongue, pluming out into the cold air: Is a snowshoe hare disabled in a snowless winter? White-coated animals like snowshoe hares or polar bears against a bare backdrop are a clearcut visual of how climate change kicks ecosystems out of balance. But as I look up at the slopes above me, rocky outcrops and assorted age classes of conifers, I realize there’s another reason why I gravitate towards these landscapes, especially when my own bodymind is in turmoil. Disability is written all across the ecosystem. I used to work in capital W wilderness. Words like pristine, untouched, and untrammeled made up a large part of my lexicon. The framework of the Wilderness Act erects hard binaries between humans and nature, props up wilderness as the ultimate apex of this spectrum. And as my chronic illness caught up with my long and wild miles, as fatigue demoted me to light duty, I started to see the construct of wilderness clearer, started to see how this supposed epitome of the outdoors served as a metric of able-bodiedness and another tool of ableism. This was probably the hardest thing for me to communicate with other people, let alone process myself. Pushing your body to its limits is a hard rule in outdoor recreation and work, and I had over two decades of that to unlearn. It was one thing to pull it apart within the industry; it was a different animal altogether to untangle those worldviews from my own connection to place. But it turned out the land had my back. I wasn’t running a dozen miles in one morning anymore, wasn’t backpacking and setting up camp three days away from any road. Instead, I was rediscovering what Forest Service lingo deemed as front country—recreation areas and trails near town, easier to access. And I was rediscovering them, I realized, because this was how I spent my childhood, wandering across landscapes that were equally spellbinding as they were scarred and changed by decades of settler colonialism and environmental exploitation. As a kid, these places didn’t feel any wilder because I knew where the foxes denned, didn’t feel any less wild as I scampered down clefts gouged into the earth by hydraulic mining. The land was just the land, in all its elegant pines and dynamite-torn outcrops and sentinels of mullein stalks. I picked this particular trail because of its slow rise along the creek. My near-constant fatigue is even heavier today, muscles wobbly and achy. I hike at the pace my body needs, my dog ever-ahead and on another trail of smells. Just across the stream is a dirt road, and up ahead I can see the bright yellow marker of an underground petroleum pipeline. Spotted knapweed, an invasive plant, thatches the ground. Whitetail deer tracks spear through the snow. I never would have called this place anything but wild. It’s just that I might have denoted other places as more wild, like the mountain range to the north outlined by a capital W. I would have seen the knapweed and mellow path and mossy old stumps from when the mountainside was clearcut as checkmarks away from a true wildness. And I would have framed my body’s own capacity around that wildness, my strength distilled from extremes and not balance. Today, though, the land is as wild as that wilderness to the north. Kinnikinnick splashes green across the forest floor, reminding me it’s alright to take the seasons at a different pace. I don’t like the petroleum pipeline that bisects the creek just as much I don’t like that my immune system could decide to destroy my kidneys, but neither have the power to negate wildness, negate my wholeness as a person. In the same way that I’ve shaped my identity as disabled in a political sense just as much as an individual one, I see these landscapes as disabled. Firs hunched by mistletoe, hillsides carved by backhoes, rivers silted by heavy metals, traditional ecological knowledge stripped away from Indigenous people, western larch dropping their needles every autumn, the whitetail buck with nubs of ears from frostbite, and the pipeline snaking downslope, shushing with oil that will be burned, churned as CO2 into the atmosphere, and someday drip that much snow away from where the snowshoe hare in their white coat tries to make it through the winter. What I struggled so hard to articulate to myself about a diagnosis of lifelong chronic illness was that this somehow made me less connected to nature. Because I couldn’t access the same places, those demarcated as the most pristine, I felt I’d lost that wildness in myself. But the double-tracks told me otherwise. There is no right kind of wildness, just as there is no right kind of body. I pause again, take a deep breath of the winter air. The early-setting sun hinges on the steep ridge ahead of me, so that a couple steps forward brings my view of the land into light, a couple steps back into shadow. It’s a sunrise and sunset that doesn’t have to be chased, an elegance I’ve found again and again by embracing the messiness of disability, not fighting to overcome it, as I move through this equally messy and beautiful world. The tips of my hiking poles twist into the ice below me, two more points of contact with the ground in the same way the snowshoe hare, bedded down nearby in a hidden copse, can bound across snow with their wide and furry toes. I give the hare a nod, wherever they are, and step forward into the golden seam of winter’s sunset. Land Acknowledgement This essay takes place in an area now called Deer Creek, east of Missoula, Montana. To the Séliš and Qlipsé people who have lived in these landscapes since time immemorial, it is the area between Slo?té, Valley Where Two Ravines Meet, and Naaycčstm Sewlkws, Bull Trout’s Waters. This creekbed sits in the midst of networks of trails that connected the homelands of the Séliš, Qlipsé, and other tribes, from rich fisheries to camas and bitterroot digging grounds. In 1855, tribal nations met with United States government officials to negotiate the Hellgate Treaty, which established the Flathead Reservation north of what is now Missoula, ceding much of the land to the south but maintaining hunting and gathering rights. Today, Séliš, Qlipsé, and other Indigenous people continue to live in and maintain relationship with these landscapes. To learn more about the history of the Séliš and Qlipsé people, you can visit https://plateauportal.libraries.wsu.edu/digital-heritage/bitterroot-valley-and-place-names-lesson-séliš-u-ql̓ispé-curriculum Bio Sarah Capdeville is a queer, disabled writer and hiker who lives in Missoula, Montana. She worked as a wilderness ranger in western and central Montana for five seasons before shifting to communications in the domestic violence field. Sarah is a lover of books, crosswords, crochet, community care in an ongoing pandemic, and, of course, spending as much time outdoors as possible. She is the author of Aligning the Glacier’s Ghost, an essay collection on solitude and landscape, available from University of New Mexico Press.