With hiking season in full swing, people across the northwest are planning treks, but for members of the disabled community, it’s not quite as simple as just choosing a trail.
Of the 26 state parks in eastern Washington, the State Parks Department site only lists 10 as having trails meeting the accessibility requirements in the Americans with Disabilities Act.
And it’s possible that number is still too high, according to Disabled Hikers founder and Washingtonian Syren Nagakyrie.
"Even the trails that are often marked as accessible actually are not, whether that's because they were designed too long ago to meet current guidelines or they haven't been maintained," they told SPR News. "So there are now obstacles or barriers on those trails that prevent wheelchair accessibility. So it's very unfortunate."
The Washington Parks Department hasn’t responded to SPR’s request for comment.
Nagakyrie’s organization connects hikers with all kinds of disabilities and works with parks and other groups to create trail guides for disabled hikers with information like route grades or trail surface materials.
They founded Disabled Hikers in 2018 after researching a trail in Olympic National Park to see whether it would be accessible, then arriving to find steep stairs and sharp drop-offs, making the trail inaccessible and dangerous for them.
"Through that experience I said, 'I'm going to do something about this' and went home and wrote up a blog post with a trail guide and called it 'Disabled Hikers,' and it really started from there," they said.
SPR’s Owen Henderson spoke with Nagakyrie about the group’s efforts and some of the barriers they encounter while trying to have conversations about accessibility in the outdoors.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
SYREN NAGAKYRIE: I encounter so many misconceptions about accessibility in the outdoors, and one of the big ones is that we want to quote-unquote "pave the wilderness," and that's absolutely not what we want to do in any way, shape, or form. And it's not even fully necessary to really make things more accessible.
But at the same time, paving a trail does not necessarily mean further damaging the environment. That's another major misconception.
What often happens is that when a trail is paved, it reduces the impact on the surrounding environment. So, it reduces the likelihood that people are going to go off-trail and create social trails and damage that surrounding area more. It also helps prevent erosion and things like that.
I think people also often forget that all trails are built in some way. You know, someone went in there and cut that path through the woods.
We always have an impact on the environment. It's just that the impact that non-disabled people have is considered acceptable and appropriate, whereas the impact that disabled people may have is considered not appropriate or not valid.
OWEN HENDERSON: I read a post you had on the Washington Trail Association's website, and one of the quotes that really stuck out to me was, "If there's one thing I wish all hikers knew, it's that building accommodations and universal access into the community benefits everyone."
When you're having these conversations, how often are you encountering pushback on your suggestions or resistance to the idea of increasing accessibility?
SN: We get pushback pretty often. I think one of the big things we often get, especially now, is lack of funding and lack of personnel to be able to put in these accessibility improvements. Again, making these improvements really does benefit everyone. Disability will impact everyone if you live long enough.
Between one in four and one in five people currently are disabled. When you look at rates of chronic illness, that jumps to over 60% of people. Whether you are disabled or you know someone who is disabled, it really impacts all of us.
There are already accommodations in the landscape. Elevators, curb cuts, all of those make moving through the spaces much easier for all of us. Things like stairs that non-disabled people use, that's an accommodation.
None of us are able to fly through the window of a building. We need some way to be able to access that building, so we put in stairs. Why can we do that but not put in a ramp?
OH: You mentioned one of the big barriers now isn't necessarily that people are unwilling or not interested in this work, but that funding is going away, staff is getting cut at these places that may have been kind of struggling with funding and staffing even before.
Aside from a change at the top, do you see any other way for these organizations to get the logistical help that they need to do more accessibility work?
SN: I definitely think it's going to be hard with losing funding. We have lost funding ourselves and it's definitely a struggle, but I think that that can often sometimes be used as an excuse where I really think accessibility needs to be rolled into everything and anything that we do.
I think just shifting our mindset a little bit from, 'Oh, we have to do the accessibility thing' into, 'Oh, we need to think about this and all of the ways that we do park planning, resource management, personnel management, all of it,' it really needs to be rolled in.
OH: In that post, you walked through some of the changes that you suggested for improving access, so like improved signage, widening trail barriers, noting heights of barriers. Do you mind explaining those a little bit for me?
SN: One of the key things that we can really do to improve accessibility starts with information, and that means providing information around things like trail surface—so whether it's paved, gravel, natural surface; grade, so that's the steepness of the trail; width of the trail is important to know for people who use various types of mobility equipment.
Then having good signage on the trail helps people navigate, and that particularly becomes important for people who are neurodivergent or blind or low-vision. They need tactile and clear descriptions on how to navigate that trail in case we get confused or lost or things like that.
Then having benches and places to rest, I mean, who doesn't enjoy just taking a moment out on a trail to really appreciate this beautiful place that we call home? And having benches and places like that to be able to do that really improves the experience for everyone.
OH: With Disabled Hikers as a group, what kinds of things do you all do in terms of trying to push your mission forward and bring the idea of accessibility more into the mainstream when it comes to the outdoors?
SN: Part of our mission is building a cross-disability community, which means people who have all different types of disabilities and chronic illnesses and neurodivergence to really come together and learn from one another and have those opportunities to build community and peer mentorship.
That's something that the disability community often doesn't have the opportunity to do. We're also entirely disabled-led, so everyone in the organization is disabled, chronically ill, or neurodivergent in some way.
That also makes us really unique. There's a lot of disability service and rec programs that are not led by the community.
Then we work with a lot of parks and organizations to do trail assessments and write guides for the trails to provide that really detailed information.
Then we do group hikes and events and things like that that are by the disability community for the disability community. Those are accessible opportunities that really meet a variety of access needs and provide a space for people to come together and enjoy being outdoors with one another and really help increase that representation and increase that awareness and understanding that disabled folks can be outdoors.
It is something that we can do as long as that information and those accommodations are provided.
OH: One of the other quotes that really landed with me from your post was something along the lines of, the disabled community has a lot to teach people about taking life slow and caring for ourselves and each other. Do you mind putting a bit of a finer point on that for me?
SN: We actually had a conversation on social media about this in our community. People were sharing stories about what it means for them to be a disabled hiker, and very often that means hiking slowly and taking your time, taking breaks, taking the opportunity to really appreciate the small things.
For myself, I may never be able to go climb a mountain or hike dozens of miles into the backcountry, but I can spend hours on a one-to-two-mile-long trail and just really appreciate the birds and the bugs and the fungi and everything that I encounter along the way.
I feel like moving through the landscape that way has really helped me learn to appreciate the land more.
I think in hiking culture that can very much be this idea of like 'We have to go out there and conquer the wilderness and make miles' and all of that. And that's, you know, really a very harmful and hurtful mindset.
I think when we can slow down and take time to appreciate the land, we can be much more respectful to it.
