🦽🌳 The outdoors are for everyone

Welcome to The Driving Range👆, a series of trails running through the backcountry of Vermont full of lush tree cover, bridges, streams, and stunning mountain views. 

The trails have just finished being reworked thanks to the help of Greg Durso, a mountain biker who hits the trails on his adaptable three-wheeled mountain bike. 

• The biker suffered from a spinal cord injury and is paralyzed from the waist down; he's passionate about leading an active lifestyle, however, and found mountain biking a few years ago. 

But as Greg continued learning about biking, he noticed many of the trails he would tackle were too narrow for his adaptive bike.

• “I was on some really narrow bridges that looked pretty sketchy,” he said of a group ride he took once. 
• As Greg approached each bridge, the entire team would have to stop, dismount, and carry him and his bike across the bridge before continuing their ride. It was frustrating and dehumanizing – and thus, his mission towards more adaptable trails was born. 

Berne Broudy, who rode often with Greg, took on the mission with him. She noted that there are so many problems in the world that we can’t necessarily fix. But, she says: “We can have an impact here. We can change this.”

Greg and Berne got together with a couple hundred volunteers and did something that had never been done in Vermont – and possibly the country. With the help of several nonprofits and 256 acres offered up by a Bolton landowner, they built the Driving Range trail network that was fully accessible to adaptive mountain bikes. They finished it just last week. 

👀 Looking ahead... Greg had the honor of test riding every single trail to give it his stamp of approval before opening them to the public. “The bike riding is great, but this place transcends the riding, right? It becomes this identity or vibe, or whatever it is to you," he said. "And it's bringing so many adaptive people together to have that. And that's just so hard to actually articulate and provide. But it gives that sense of normalcy back to people that don't know what that feeling is anymore.”