From the San Francisco Chronicle. In the picture, veteran John Botts (left), of San Antonio, Texas, gets lessons from Adaptive Snowsports instructor Bill Bowness (following him on a mono ski) at Alpine Meadows Ski Resort. Botts was injured in Iraq and Bowness was injured in an auto accident.TAHOE CITY -- Andrew Bradley gazed down the beginner's slope at Alpine Meadows Ski Resort through a mask of trepidation.
The 20-year-old soldier never skied before. Had never really seen snow, save the icy inch that occasionally gathers around his Texas home.
Oh, and Bradley's right leg was blown off just two months ago by a roadside bomb that struck his patrol in Iraq, a fact that he seemed to consider no greater a challenge than slick snow and gravity.
"I know it's weird, but it really never bothered me," he said Wednesday. "It's just finding ways around things."
Finding a way around obstacles can be more important than reaching a destination, as any skier knows - and a lot can be discovered along the way.
That's the idea underlying the mission of Disabled Sports USA Far West, which worked with the nonprofit Wounded Warrior Project to bring 20 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan to Tahoe City last week.
"Society automatically says, 'You can't.' We say, 'Yeah, you can. And we're going to show you how,' " said Doug Pringle, president of Disabled Sports USA Far West, who like Bradley is also down one leg - his lost to a rocket-propelled grenade in Vietnam.
Adaptive skiing dates to World War II, when disabled veterans invented some of the earliest equipment and went on to train the next generation of veterans.
"I thought they were nuts when they came to the hospital," said Pringle. "We want you to ski on one leg!' Yeah, right."
Pringle went on to learn to ski in 1968 and to become, in 1972, one of the first amputees certified as a professional skiing instructor.
Therapists at the Department of Veterans Affairs increasingly have embraced outdoor adventures as a part of rehabilitation. VA-sponsored adaptive basketball began after World War II, and the VA today sponsors or partners in clinics year-round and across the nation in an array of sports, including sailing, cycling, scuba diving, fencing, golf - and skiing.
"These patients change and transform in the eight days they are with Disabled Sports USA ... in ways they did not change in six months of hospitalization," said Susan Feighery, a lead recreation therapist with the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. "It's reintegration of who they once were."Reintegration seemed to be happening quickly at Alpine Meadows on Wednesday, the first day of a four-day visit for soldiers and Marines from the Bay Area, Southern California and as far away as Texas.
The veterans, who are recovering from physical, mental and emotional injuries, spent the morning figuring out equipment, deciding which prosthetic hand could best grip a ski pole or choosing between a wheelchair-like mono-ski and a typical single stand-up ski with twin handheld mini-ski outriggers. After that they hit the slopes, progressing rapidly from brief, uncertain glides of a few feet to long, swooping runs down the beginner's slopes.
"In many ways, it's an honor to be working with these guys and gals," said instructor Len Belasco, who was training Bradley on a single ski with outriggers. "I owe them - we all owe them. I mean, how do you repay half a leg?"
There was plenty of falling, some bruised backs and embarrassing spills.
But that's the great thing about skiing, said Sandy Trombetta, director and founder of the National Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic; everybody, regardless of ability or injury, needs special equipment to ski, and everybody falls at first.
"When you see somebody participating in adaptive sports, you don't think of them as somebody with a disability," he added. "You see them as somebody participating in a sport."
The physical conquest of sport, according to therapists and instructors, can have a profound impact on young people who are grappling with the loss of a limb, one of the signature injuries of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And it can have an equally positive impact on those with other signature injuries: traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress, which make it hard to even leave the hospital, much less conquer a mountain.
"These trips really allow these warriors to be ... human again," Feighery said.
Army Pfc. Drew Goin, 20, a San Diego native, was injured in Iraq by a bomb that exploded near his head in August. He is now blind in one eye, has a bolt behind the other and suffers from both traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder - wounds making everyday life and relationships a struggle.
Yet on Wednesday, he was energetically leaping on a snowboard with an agility that belied his injuries.
"When you're in the hospital all day, you're with injured people," he said. "All you talk about is what you did in Iraq, who you killed. Here it's just you and the mountain.
"I don't think about my flashbacks, I don't think about my injury. It's just - beautiful."
The skiers will return to their hospitals and bases to serve as models and mentors for troops still in earlier stages of recovery, said Sgt. Michael Dowling of Richmond, a section leader who accompanied a group of Marines and soldiers from their San Diego hospital to Tahoe.
Therapists say recreational accomplishment can encourage patients to pursue other goals in life.Marine Capt. Derek Liu, 27, of Mountain View is eyeing a job at Northrop Grumman Corp. despite the lingering effects of a heart attack after his return from Iraq that put him in a coma for two months.
"I didn't ski before the injury. I just never wanted to ski," he said. "But ever since, I've wanted to do things I couldn't do before."
Bradley, who has yet to be fitted for his first prosthetic leg, is considering a higher degree in history.
And Lance Cpl. Ufrano Rios Jimenez, 19, a Fresno native who lost a foot to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan in July, hopes to stay in the Marines, maybe even returning to infantry. That ambition, he said, was fueled by his time on the slopes Wednesday.
"You get injured like this, you tell yourself you'll be OK, but deep inside you know there are limits," Rios said. "But doing something like this, you realize there aren't as many as you think, if you put your mind to it."
By midafternoon Wednesday, Rios was snowboarding so easily that his instructor, Travis Weaver, briefly forgot that his student was carving up powder on one prosthetic foot. At the foot of the slope, Weaver eyed his charge.
"Wanna take that break we talked about?" he said. "Or you wanna take another run?"
"Well ..." Rios paused, appraising the looming white mountain. "Might as well take another run."
