Steve Spaeni
Monica Spaeni can take her pup Ragnar for walks off-road, thanks to an off-road wheelchair and her group, Accesss Ability Wisconsin.
Before the accident, Monica Spaeni was “a very active person,” she says. “We were always biking, hiking, boating, fishing — I just loved being outdoors.”
But that all came to an abrupt end almost 20 years ago.
“I was a parent chaperone for a middle school ski trip with my oldest son’s sixth-grade class,” she remembers. “It was one of those years where we didn’t get a lot of snow, [so the slopes were covered] with mostly man-made snow, which is more icy.”
“It was dusk,” she continues. “And as I went down the slope for the second time, I turned to miss some kids and my ski cut into the side of the slope and I fell, hitting a tree. And that broke my back, paralyzing me from mid-chest down.”
After recuperating in the hospital from her severe spinal cord injury, Spaeni had to re-learn many common tasks, such as getting dressed and using the bathroom.
She tried to stay active, but as a wheelchair user, found herself confined to areas with flat, smooth surfaces. Gone were the days of traipsing through the woods with her two young sons. For years, she says, she “watched others from the sidelines.”
Then she took a UW-Stevens Point class on becoming an outdoorswoman. She started volunteering as a hunter safety instructor, which is how she met her husband, Steve.
Spaeni and her husband would go pheasant hunting, but that was an involved process. Her wheelchair went onto a trailer that was pulled by an ATV. “Sure, it was nice to get out,” she says. “But you’re depending on other people, you’re not doing it independently.”
Then, she met a new friend who also couldn’t use his legs, but had discovered a way to get around in the wilderness without the assistance of others.
He had an all-terrain outdoor wheelchair.
Specifically, it was an Action Trackchair — an apparatus that runs on two large tracks like a tank, instead of wheels. Controlled by a joystick, like other motorized wheelchairs, this outdoor model stands out for its rugged, go-almost-anywhere ability. The vehicle is known for being able to go over obstacles — be it branches or other vegetation — rather than trying to squeeze through or around them.
When Spaeni test-drove an off-road wheelchair, it was love at first ride. “I could go anywhere I wanted,” she says. “I was going through the marsh, I was going through like eight inches of water, I was going over logs and over rocks.”
“It was like I was walking like other people again,” she adds. “This [chair] was my new hiking boots.”
Spaeni immediately began telling her friends about the off-road wheelchair. But at $15,000, cost was a barrier. “My friends wanted to have a fundraiser,” she recalls. “But the more I thought about it, the more I had to think about where I was going to store it and how I was going to transport it.”
She shifted gears: Maybe she could share one with other limited mobility outdoor enthusiasts.
In 2014 she connected with the Dane County chapter of the conservation group Pheasants Forever, and in 2017 formed Access Ability Wisconsin, a nonprofit to provide outdoor wheelchair services to others across the state. Spaeni and her team work to secure grants to fund the group, but also rely on individual donations through their website. The group started with one chair and now has 15.
Cathy Stott
Gary Stott, a veteran with a spinal cord injury, uses one of Access Ability’s off-road chairs to tour the UW Arboretum.
Users visit the nonprofit’s website accessabilitywi.org to find an off-road wheelchair host site near them, and to fill out a reservation form. (Note: A Wisconsin DNR Customer ID Number is needed to complete the form; these numbers are free and can be obtained at dnr.wi.gov/goWild/customerNumber.html.) Reservations require a deposit of $50, which is returned when the chair is returned; the fee can also be donated to AAW.
Once a new user makes a reservation, the off-road wheelchair is delivered by a volunteer.
The learning curve for operating the motorized chair “tends to be about five to 10 minutes,” says Spaeni, who serves as president of AAW. “Most people are familiar with the joystick [used to operate the chair] because they’ve played a video gaming system and know how to use those controllers.”
There are also safety features like a foot strap and seatbelt as well as a tilt switch for adjusting the seat incline when going up and down hills.
Users include “anybody with a temporary or permanent mobility issue,” says Spaeni. “So, it could be someone with COPD, or we had someone who was in an archery league who had ACL surgery recently, so he borrowed a chair every Wednesday.” Users of almost every interest and age group love the chairs, including outdoorsy folks in their 80s and 90s.
“We’ve had the chairs used for school field trips to Devil’s Lake and outdoor weddings, as well as for park concerts and fairs,” says Spaeni. Groups like Easter Seals and the Boy Scouts can also reserve the chairs “so they can make sure that their events are accessible to all attendees,” she adds.
The off-road chairs are most popular when the weather is nice and during hunting season. “During winter, they’re not used too much — maybe a couple ice fishers here or there,” Spaeni says. “But in the spring and the fall, when Wisconsin’s the most beautiful, we have a waitlist at most locations.”
The chairs are quiet enough to not disturb nature and wildlife. “They’re battery-powered and you only go walking speed,” says Spaeni. “One time, a friend and I were walking down their farm road and out popped a buck — there’s no way I could have done that with a regular wheelchair.”
Katie Whitten needs the off-road chair to continue teaching summer nature classes at Silverwood County Park.
Katie Whitten’s students called it “the tank.” “They just thought it was so cool,” says Whitten, who used an off-road wheelchair this summer so that she could continue teaching a summer school program at Silverwood County Park in the town of Albion.
“My knees are bad and I have rheumatoid arthritis,” says Whitten, a 4k teacher with the Edgerton School District. “So I was afraid I wasn’t going to be able to keep up with my kids in the woods.”
Whitten says it was a little tricky learning how to tilt the seat up and down when ascending or descending hills, but she eventually got the hang of it. “Other than that, I really I loved it,” she says. “It went with me every day for those three and a half weeks.”
She used it for the half-mile hike down to the lake where the students like to fish and for walks in the woods with a guest arborist who teaches about trees and the habitat.
Whitten, who’s also vice president of the Friends of Silverwood Park board, invited Spaeni’s group to the park harvest festival last year. “I wanted them to come out so people could try the [wheelchairs] and know that they’re available.”
Whitten hopes Silverwood Park becomes a permanent host site for a motorized wheelchair so that others can use them while visiting the park.
Spaeni recognizes the need and has no plans to slow down: “Our goal is to have at least one chair in every county in Wisconsin and to be a model for other states.”
Go for a spin
Access Ability Wisconsin appears at outdoor events across the state to raise awareness of the program and let people try out the all-terrain outdoor wheelchairs. Check the website — accessabilitywi.org/event-opportunities — for upcoming events.
