Adventure for All!

Since launching the Miracle Heights Adventures program in 2022, we’ve aimed to offer inclusive, adaptive aerial adventure programming. With Crossnore’s foundation in trauma-responsive care, removing barriers to access was essential.

Once completed, Crossnore will likely have the only Adventure Center in the Triad—and possibly the state—focused on adaptive programming. Over the past several years, we’ve received tremendous support from our community as we’ve progressed through this project.

Equipping Us

Grants from the LAMB Foundation of NC, Inc., Let’s Choose Love, Rotary Club of Winston-Salem, the Luke Garrison Foundation, and individual donors have graciously funded this project. MHA activities and challenges provide high doses of self-confidence, agency, belonging, connectedness, and skill-building to participants (including participants with mental distress and behavioral disorders). With our funders support, we’ve been able to secure almost $12,000 in project funding to help us purchase the adaptive equipment necessary to make those same challenges – providing emotional wellness and the transformative and healing power of connection – available to people with varying physical abilities.

Guiding Us

Our team has consulted with over a dozen Piedmont Triad organizations that serve or are led by people with varying physical abilities, including Solutions for Independence, Lionheart Academy, Winston-Salem State University Therapeutic Recreation Program, IFB Solutions, Winston-Salem Recreation & Parks Therapeutic Recreation Department, and the Centers for Exceptional Children. Our hope is to soon partner with these organizations in serving their clients both adaptively and inclusively.

We also were able to host the Physical Therapist team that serves WSFCS, who helped us brainstorm and identify learning opportunities!

Joining Us

In Fall 2023, a trusty group of volunteers from Sheffield Financial completed a Lighthouse Project. They rebuilt part of our zipline receiving platform to be wheelchair accessible, redirected stormwater runoff with landscaping, and mulched the entire Outdoor Adventure Center. Across a handful of days, this group spread nearly 10 dump truck loads of mulch and wood chips!

Our Next Steps

Creating pathways from accessible parking to the course is our next big undertaking. Paving those paths is expensive though! Thankfully, the folks at Access Trax have created a portable mat solution that is also much more financially viable; these will help get participants from our parking areas to the Aerial Adventure Park, where we can engage in Climbing Wall, Giant Swing, and Zip Line activities.

With technical pieces covered, we next want to collaborate with our partner organizations to provide contextual training opportunities for our guides. We want to be mindful with our adaptive programming, and having direct instruction from our partner organizations on specific facilitation and other considerations for working with various populations will be invaluable for our guides.

Our Insights

This has certainly been a learning process for our team. Some of our greatest insights are:

Adapting equipment

Even though we were able to purchase adaptive equipment specific to climbing and challenge course programming, expanding into adaptive sports is no “plug and play” operation. Beyond basic functional use of the equipment, we found that there’s a lot of variance in application with the specific course and participant needs in mind. This meant we needed more testing and adjustment along the way to ensure our operations were smooth and comfortable for participants.

The adaptive sports community is eager!

There is such an incredible amount of interest in opportunities like ours that bring new and novel opportunities to all ability levels. We were thrilled to table at the Winston-Salem Adaptive Expo, hosted by Solutions for Independence and North Carolina Assistive Technology, last spring and share these upcoming experiences with the community. We ran out of materials halfway through and will make sure to bring extra to the upcoming Adaptive Expo in Greensboro this November!

Partner Organizations are so welcoming!

This shouldn’t be much of a surprise, given the nature of creating accessible opportunities for all, but we wanted to give an additional shout-out because we are blown away. It has been a joy to participate in the Piedmont Adaptive Sports monthly roundtables. From promoting one another’s organizations and events, connecting with grant opportunities, sharing relevant legal and policy updates, to networking and brainstorming ways to increase opportunities and impact within the adaptive sports community, the support has been incredible.

Everything is expensive!

Despite our generous funding, there are still a few additional pieces of equipment and infrastructure that we need before we can launch this project fully. If you’d like to support this project, you can go to our Donation Page. Please be sure to put something in the notes about “MHA Adaptive Adventure.”