kindness
Zion is the first park with a free all-terrain wheelchair
One chair. First come, first served. A mother saw it and cried.
Zion National Park is now the first in the U.S. national park system to offer an all-terrain wheelchair, free to any visitor who wants to reach the canyon trails. The chair arrived in July of last year, purchased with donated funds through a nonprofit called 2Live4 and built by the manufacturer Extreme Motus. Co-founder Ryan Grassley spent seven years developing the model while taking a friend with cerebral palsy, Sam, to nearly every national park property in Utah. Grassley remembers the delivery day best. "We were standing in front of the visitor center and telling the rangers how to use the chair, and a family walked by," he told KSL. "They had a child that used a wheelchair, and the mom was like, 'What is happening right now?'" Then she started crying. There is only one chair, available first come, first served. It has already outlasted every excuse.