“EVERYBODY HERE HIKES. EVERYBODY GOES OUT INTO THE WOODS.”


jennifer crowell, age 31, and laura clark, age 30 H Greenfield, New Hampshire


Laura’s accident was first, in 2003. She was driving on a country road and the moose came out of nowhere. The crash left her a quadriplegic. She’d been studying to become a nurse and was only a year away from an RN. Instead, for the next five years, she was a patient. In 2008, Jenny was working as an elementary school


teacher in Michigan. It was a hot summer; the lake was shallower than it looked. She dove. After the spinal cord injury, she moved back home to New Hampshire. Laura lived just down the road—though the two women had been practically neighbors as children, only now did their lives converge. “I helped her figure out this new life she was about to have,” Laura recalls. “We’ve been best friends ever since.” In New Hampshire, the mountains are everyone’s playground. “It’s part of the culture of this area,” says Laura. Her dad taught her early to appreciate the beauty of the outdoors, to bask in the awesome silence of the woods. “Everybody here hikes. Everybody goes out into the woods,” she says. “When I was injured, it was like another part that got taken away.” But Jenny and Laura happen to live near Crotched


Mountain, home to a 60-year-old foundation that runs rehabilitation and educational programs for people with disabilities. With help from The Trust for Public Land, Crotched has built and protected the nation’s longest wheelchair-accessible mountain trails—a two-mile loop of


40 · LAND&PEOPLE · SPRING/SUMMER 2014


hard-packed gravel pathway and boardwalk that circles a wetland, and a shorter, steeper trail that gradually ascends past wild blueberry fields and open grasslands to a knoll that affords panoramic views of the mountains nearby. Jenny and Laura were two of the first to hit the trails


when they opened in 2011. And at least once a week, they still do—usually around midday, when they can bask in the sun with a picnic lunch. In places the trail is wide enough for them to roll their motorized wheelchairs side-by-side; Jenny will often go in reverse so they can talk face-to-face. It’s a chance for them to take their friendship out into the fresh air, to escape the constant “nagging” of their well- meaning caretakers and the feeling that they’re always in people’s way. The trail is their turf. “It’s independence,” Jenny explains. “In situations like


ours, depression slaps you out of nowhere. It’s really hard to avoid. When we get out on the trail, that bummed-out feeling is gone.” Above all, Jenny says, the trails provide her and Laura


with a sense of normality and a chance to do something that anybody else would do. It’s a place that’s accessible to them without feeling especially adapted to their disabili- ties, a middle ground that can be shared with and enjoyed by their able-bodied friends and family, too. Which is important, Jenny says again—because in New Hampshire, everybody hikes. “Here we get to join.”


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