Public parks are leaning into the magic of technology to make nature more accessible for individuals with disabilities. 📷: Courtesy of Aimee Copeland Foundation
Copeland Mercier’s dream is to have enough adaptive equipment, and a specialty van to transport it, to service every park in the state. The response to All Terrain Georgia has been so positive that she’s been in talks with organizations in neighboring states about using her program as a model. Back in February, she presented a webinar open to the entire Park Service on the basics of all-terrain mobility devices and best practices for using them in parks.
This expanded park access for people with disabilities has meant parks across the country having to rethink what “accessibility” means. “We’ve been focused on park accessibility since the late 1960s,” says Buzzell. “What that accessibility always looked like was modifying the environment to make it more accessible.
Buzzell says this had boiled down in practice to providing better information on park and trail conditions to people with disabilities so they can make their own decisions. “It’s more about understanding the variety of technology that might be coming to the parks and what it can do,” says Buzzell.
For now, people like Oxley are plenty impressed by what they can do in an ATC. “Just because you have a disability, it don’t mean nothing anymore,” says the Georgia native. Oxley is heading out this weekend to use a Trackchair at. He hopes to fish, which he hasn’t done since he was 6. “I noticed a fishing pole holder on some of the chairs,” says Oxley. “Now that I can get to the water, my buddy was like, ‘Let’s take a break and do some fishing.
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