The 2023 Accessible Trails Team was created as part of the University of Oregon's Environmental Leadership Program as an initiative to provide more information about accessible hiking trails. In the United States, over 25% of the public is disabled and might experience inaccessibility in outdoor recreation. Specifically, the lack of information regarding accessibility features, amenities, trail conditions, and sensory experiences prevents many disabled people from having positive experiences outside. 

In an effort to reduce the barriers to outdoor recreation, our team collaborated with community partners, Travel Lane County- Eugene, Cascades, and Coast and The Willamette Valley Visitors Association (WVVA), to gather data on accessible amenities at trails throughout Oregon's Willamette Valley. We collected quantitative and qualitative data on accessibility from twelve different trails, surveying trail characteristics such as slope, cross-slope, tread surface, and trail width, in addition to documenting amenities and obstacles. 

Our understanding of accessibility was based on an individual’s interpretation of which activities feel compatible with their abilities. Our team and community partners believe that information is a powerful tool for users to determine if an activity is accessible to them. In the end, we provided our community partners with valuable information to disperse to the public so that community members themselves can determine whether or not a trail is accessible to them based on their personal access needs before visiting. 

As students, researchers, and members of the environmental community, the Environmental Leadership Program team is committed to fostering justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in every aspect of our lives and work. Throughout this project we aimed to work with accessibility and equity in mind as we evaluated various trails. We were cognizant to not make any decisions or assumptions for or about different types of trail users throughout our project. However, we recognize that these intentions can be obscured by the fact that the majority of our team does not have lived experience with the accessibility challenges we assessed, which made us liable to prioritize the criteria based on our own experiences. To remedy this, we practiced an iterative process that required listening. We continually listened to the consultation of outdoor recreation specialists in the disability community and asked ourselves who we are serving to ensure that our data stayed inclusive and focused on accessibility without defining it. 

The University of Oregon is located on Kalapuya Ilihi, the traditional indigenous homeland of the Kalapuya people. Kalapuya people were dispossessed of their indigenous homeland by the United States government and forcibly removed from the Coast Reservation. To learn more, please visit the University of Oregon's Land Acknowledgement Page.

[Image Description: Green text reads University of Oregon with their logo, a large green "O," to the left].