Trailhead updates will emphasize accessible outdoor recreation
Rose Shimberg
(Missoula Current) Sherene Ricci has loved biking since she was a kid. But for the last two decades, she’s had a different experience on the trails— after an amputation of her right leg at age 24, a three-wheeled handcycle is her primary means of transportation.
Although her bike has rugged tires, the tiniest obstacles, like too-close posts designed to keep ATVs out, have kept her from accessing some of Missoula’s popular recreational trails.
Often, she says, the obstacle to overcome is in the parking lot. Beyond that “you have miles and miles of beautiful open space you can enjoy," she said.
Missoula’s Duncan Drive Trailhead will soon address this issue with updates planned for 2025 and financed by a grant from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. The improvements will include a new 1-mile trail, wider gates and interpretive signs designed with accessibility in mind.
Jeff Gicklhorn, Missoula’s conservation lands program manager, said that while parking concerns at the trailhead are also a major driver for improvements, expanded access is one of the project’s main goals. And a few seemingly small upgrades can go a long way.
“The trail needs to be a little bit wider, the turn radius needs to be a little bit larger,” said Gicklhorn, who presented the grant agreement to the city's Climate, Conservation and Parks Committee on August 1. “It's not that different from our normal trail-building process.”
The updates will link the trail to a wider network and add a 15-car parking lot off Duncan Drive. Signs will inform users about the Indigenous history of the Rattlesnake and the storied past of the site’s former intake dam. Together, these additions will complete the Rattlesnake Reservoir Recreation Management Plan, initiated in 2019, that included the dam’s removal.
Gicklhorn said that while the packed gravel trail won’t meet official ADA standards, accessibility can mean many different things. He aims to expand the trail’s use to as many people as possible— from hand cycle riders to the visually impaired.
This emphasis on access is one of the main reasons the trail proposal won the $100,000 grant, said Stephanie Clemen, the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Recreational Trails Program director.
Accessibility issues appear in nearly every conversation, she said. And she has witnessed a shift in the term’s definition in recent years.
“For a while when we talked about accessibility, we mainly talked about … wide, flat trails,” she said. But now there's also a discussion about how [we can] provide better interpretive opportunities to … folks who [have] different types of impairments.”
The Recreational Trails Program is federally funded, allocating grants to trail-building and rehabilitation projects all over Montana. It’s a highly-competitive process and Clemen expects to see hundreds of applications when it opens again in November.
Molly Kimmel, the director of MonTECH, an assistive technology lending library at the University of Montana’s Rural Institute for Inclusive Communities, was excited to hear about the planned Duncan Drive improvements.
Kimmel said MonTECH houses over 3000 pieces of assistive technology that Montanans can borrow at no cost, ranging from iPads to one-handed fishing poles to the hand cycles used by adaptive mountain bike athletes.
One in four Montanans self-identifies as having a disability, Kimmel said, making them the largest minority group in the state and one that deserves to have access to the natural world.
“People in Montana care about outdoor recreation,” she said. “And I do think people are listening and inviting us places.”
Although there’s still work to be done, Ricci has also seen a slow cultural shift as public awareness about disability has grown and assistive technology has evolved, rapidly outpacing the original ADA guidelines. Making a trail accessible, she said, doesn’t take anything away from anyone else’s experience.
"People with wheelchairs aren't trying to pave the world,” she said.