As the body is challenged, nature empowers the soul
Racing on a downhill skiing course at fifty miles per hour, sixteen-year-old Olympic hopeful Marianna Davis missed a turn. She flipped over a fence, smacked into an aspen tree back-first, bounced off it, and hit a second one with her head. Her helmet and back shattered.
The hospital radiologist, Robert Davis, would call it the worst back injury he’d seen in someone who was still alive. The X-ray showed vertebrae so crushed that they had to be vacuumed out of her spine. For the radiologist, the name on the corner of the X-ray was more crushing: Marianna (Muffy) Davis was his daughter.
Now, eighteen years later, Muffy Davis leans forward in her wheelchair on the fourth floor of the Salt Lake City Public Library.
“This may sound strange,” she says, “but I consider my disability a blessing.”
What happened in between is as much about the healing power of nature as it is about the strength of the human spirit. For Davis, nature was her source of strength in dark times. On bad days after the accident, she would get in her hand-controlled car and drive to Galena Summit, north of Sun Valley, Idaho.
“I would look out over the Stanley Basin and watch the sunset,” recalls Davis. “That’s where I would find my peace again. That’s where I would grieve, and that’s where I would heal and get the strength to go back at it again.”
She would need that strength over the next four years, because her journey back to skiing was anything but direct.
“I originally said I wasn’t going to ski unless I could ski on two legs,” she says.
But when her legs had not responded after two years of therapy, she decided she didn’t care how; she had to get on that mountain.
“I was a skier,” she says. “That’s where my identity was.”
That realization was the easy part. What followed were years of frustration and pain. First came equipment problems: In 1990, adaptive equipment still had a long way to go. There was no adaptive equipment designed for her high-level injury.
“They basically would sit me in a foam-padded bucket mounted on a ski,” Davis says. “Then a guy would ski behind me with a tether. I had no control. Any time I got on an edge, I would fall. At the end of the first week, I looked at my mom and said, ‘I don’t know why they call this skiing.’”
Another problem: few then knew how to teach this new approach to the sport.
“We were trying to reinvent the wheel, with nobody to tell us how,” Davis says. “But I wanted to be on that mountain.” She kept trying, instinctively heading for her favorite Sun Valley ski hill, Bald Mountain.
“I would inevitably go to the top of Baldy, because that’s what I had always done, and I would be way over my skill level. And I’d end up falling and the ski patrol would have to take me down—so many times that they stopped strapping me into the toboggan. They knew when I came to the mountain that they’d eventually get a call from me,” she says.
After one too many humiliating rides in the ski patrol toboggan, she’d had enough. Abandoning her dreams of racing, she went to college. But while in California at Stanford University, she discovered an adaptive ski program at Lake Tahoe’s Alpine Meadows Ski Resort, and a dedicated instructor.
“Marc Mast went way above the call of duty,” she says of her new teacher. “He got me dialed in to the right equipment and helped me with lessons and training camps.”
At a training camp in Colorado, they finally found equipment that worked.
“Marc got me into a whole different type of monoski. Suddenly I was linking turns and skiing well; I was able to go down racecourses. Once I got hooked up with the right equipment for my disability, things started to take off.”
Her journey back to skiing eventually led her home to Baldy and Sun Valley.
“I’ll never forget that day. I drove to the mountain myself. I pulled my ski out of my truck by myself. I put my ski together, got into it, and skied all day long by myself. And that was like … yes! That was the day I knew I had come full circle. I was free again, and I was a skier and I was Muffy again and I was empowered. Because I knew I could do it by myself.”
Davis found a kindred philosophy in the programs of the National Ability Center in Park City, Utah. Husband-and-wife team Meeche White and Pete Badewitz had founded the NAC in 1985 as a ski school for people with disabilities. White, a recreational therapist with a degree from Florida State University, and Badewitz, a Vietnam veteran and below-the-knee amputee she met while teaching skiing in Colorado, decided Park City would be the place. That first year, with a $5,000 grant from the Veterans Administration, they taught 45 adaptive ski lessons. In 2006, the NAC provided 24,000 lessons in everything from adaptive skiing, kayaking, river rafting, and camping to hippotherapy—the use of horseback riding for physical and emotional therapy. Park City’s NAC is considered one of the leading year-round recreation centers in the world for people with disabilities, as well as a center for training world-class Paralympic athletes. Their stated mission was—and still is—to provide opportunities to discover abilities.
With the NAC’s support, Davis returned to racing, winning silver medals in the 2002 Paralympics in Salt Lake City; a bronze medal at the Paralympics in Nagano, Japan, in 1998; a World Championship in 2000; and more than 25 World Cup medals. In between, she climbed California’s Mount Shasta on a hand-cranked machine called a SnowPod and made it to the top of Colorado’s Pikes Peak in a wheelchair. In 2005, she embarked on a world tour with her husband, Jeff Burley, a recreational therapist she met in 2000 on a National Ability Center river-rafting trip down the Colorado River. They spread the word about accessible recreation to countries like Vietnam, Ghana, South Africa, and China.