Like any other new skier who has taken about a dozen lessons, Danielle Lancelot Watson charges down Marshmallow — a beginner’s run on Mt. Bachelor. But Watson, 29, is not like any other new skier.

She’s paralyzed from the chest down and strapped into what’s called a sit-ski, made for adaptive skiers — people with disabilities.

She’s not like most of the other adaptive skiers, either. Watson hardly acclimated to life in a wheelchair before she got on a sit-ski and braved a chairlift.

It was only nine months ago that Watson plummeted the height of a 30-story building in a rock-climbing accident in Colorado. Something went wrong — she’s not sure exactly what because she doesn’t remember much from that day — and some kind of mistake led to a 300-foot fall onto a solid rock surface. Among other injuries, she broke both of her ankles, her femur, her pelvis and her spine in two places.

But she’s not one to wallow in self-pity.

“I first skied on the six-month anniversary of my accident, on Dec. 2,” she said. “That first day skiing, it was fun and exciting. I was scared, especially when I got on the lift. After being such an independent person, having to put your trust in other people getting you on and off the lift, that was hard.”

She didn’t fear heights before — hence her passion for climbing. But that first ride on the chairlift made her consider how far above the ground she was, and how much farther than that she had fallen in her accident.

Because she lacks sensation in her lower body, she doesn’t describe skiing the same way most of us would. She’s mostly working to balance on the sit-ski.

“It feels hard. It feels like I’m an upside-down triangle trying to balance on a little point. I hope someday I can feel free when I’m on (the sit-ski). I don’t want to be limited to pavement. About skiing now, I love being outside, the sense of community (Oregon Adaptive Sports) provides, and the addictive feeling of challenging yourself physically.”

Oregon Adaptive Sports

Oregon Adaptive Sports, a local nonprofit organization that provides outdoor recreation opportunities to disabled people, has been a huge blessing to her life, she said.

On a recent weekday, two OAS ski instructors, Mark Jarvis and Dan O’Hara, took turns holding the bar attached to the sit-ski to help stabilize Watson as she ripped across the slope in wide turns.

Somere her excitement with.

A handful of volunteers from OAS, called “blockers,” fanned out behind her. Blockers might help pick Watson up if she crashes. Wearing neon orange vests, they also serve to make an adaptive skier more visible to approaching skiers or snowboarders. These blockers seemed to be watching Watson with one eye and scanning uphill with the other. When a skier approached a little too close, a little too fast, blocker Laura Lynch moved her body between the skier and Watson like a protective mother. The other blockers adjusted positions to fill the gap left by Lynch, all working together like a cohesive team.

Watson needed to stop midslope to rest her wrists, forearms and back — the parts that get tired and sore. The instructors talked technique for a minute. Another volunteer, Wayne Smith, watched for a break in the flow of oncoming skiers, called “clear!” and off they went.

Oregon Adaptive Sports, founded in 1996, mostly runs off the generosity of volunteers. The organization has grown over the past three years, just recently establishing its first office and hiring its first executive director, Christine Brousseau. It is funded by private donations, some fees for service, and some grants, which are especially helpful in covering the costs of specific adaptive equipment, such as the sit-ski Watson was using.

She rode in what’s called a dual ski, equipped with two skis under the chair. This high-performance model also has shocks and straps and all sorts of safety- and comfort-related bells and whistles that make it cost about $6,000. Four local skiers with similar injuries are currently taking lessons and vying for the same chair, said Jarvis, the instructor.

How a disabled person skis

To most of us, skiing seems like a leg-centered sport. Lacking leg function, “their butt becomes their boot,” Jarvis said of the adaptive skiers who use the sit-ski. Watson’s upper body moves much like a standing skier’s, though. During the lesson, Jarvis kept reminding Watson how to reach out with her outriggers — like poles with small ski-like attachments on their ends — and to rotate her head to look uphill, which drives rotation in her shoulders and executes the turn. Watson has use of a little abdominal muscle, but most of her effort exists above the chest.

Watson did not appear to fear speed. She skis with an aggressive posture, hinged forward at her hips. “When you lean forward, it’s like putting on the gas,” O’Hara told her.

She’s already dabbling with a tether system, which her instructors said enables her to ski more independently. It’s basically a leash attached to the chair that an instructor holds as an emergency brake while Watson controls her turns and speed.

For a few minutes, using the tether, she skied on a gentle slope between the Sunrise and Carousel chair lifts. Since no one was holding on to her sit-ski, she spilled on a turn toward the end of the run. The volunteers calmly flocked around her, but before anyone helped her up, Jarvis showed her how to leverage her body up with her outriggers. Then he straightened the chair for her with an easy yank.

She was unfazed by the fall.

“I’m happy that I went that far,” she said with a smile and a tinge of surprise in her voice.

A couple of days later, she graduated to a mono ski, a chair with one ski instead of two. Mono skis require less effort to turn, but more balance to stay upright. “It’s way cooler than the dual,” she said.

Jarvis and others say she’s learning quickly.

“She’s athletic, but she’s so new to her injury that she doesn’t know her body that well yet,” Jarvis said.

In his experience, most people with spinal cord injuries don’t start skiing so soon, he said.

“She’s got an unreal drive,” Jarvis said. “She’s looking for that next thrill.”

Watson’s story

Watson grew up in Long Island, N.Y. Her father, Jim Watson, first took her rock climbing when she was 8. She did some snowboarding, some biking and liked yoga. But Jim Watson said his daughter wasn’t particularly into athletics or driven by sports.

“She is an academic, an artist,” he said. “She got a 4.0.” She studied philosophy and art history at New York University. She had casually mentioned, “I worked in a museum once.” Her father proudly clarified that it was the Met, as in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and that was after she had landed an internship at the Guggenheim.

While at NYU, Watson had worked at the university’s rock climbing wall and started taking climbing seriously, even teaching it for a number of years.

“I got progressively more obsessed,” she said. “I left my job in New York, went on the road, traveled, just climbing, for a year straight,” she said.

She wound up in San Diego and went back to school to become a physical therapist. She wanted to help athletes in rehabilitation.

Last June she visited her then-boyfriend in Colorado.

They went climbing.

That’s when the fall happened.

She was rappelling, she said, and it was “probably my error,” although she doesn’t know what really happened. Most of what was learned about the accident came from her former boyfriend, who witnessed the fall.

An article published in the Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine, authored by one of the surgeons who had worked on her, describes what’s known:

“A 28-year old woman was free climbing with her boyfriend near Gunnison, Colorado. Both were wearing a helmet and a harness for safety. The girl had 20 years of experience of rock climbing, being taught early tricks by her father at the age of 8 years. The ascent consisted of three pitches of 90-100 feet … each. The climbing distance was defined by the climbing rope which had been fixed at a defined length. The girl took the lead on the third pitch, to a total height of 300 feet … . After securing the anchor at that height, the rope — which was lacking a security knot — slid through her harness. She then fell a total of 300 feet, with a first impact at 200 feet onto a flat rock surface, and a further fall for about 100 feet. Based on this falling height, the velocity at the time of impact is estimated around 75-80 mph. Her boyfriend witnessed the entire fall, climbed back down and provided first aid at the scene. The patient was awake and moaning, but not responsive to verbal or painful stimuli. She was intubated at the scene and transported to a local level IV trauma center, where she was resuscitated and transfused with 4 units of packed red blood cells.”

Dr. Philip Stahel, the surgeon who authored the article and the director of the orthopedic department at Denver Health Medical Center, said in a recent phone interview that he remembers the case well — mostly just because she survived.

His article had said that in a study of 287 fall victims, falls from eight stories (90 to 100 feet and higher) always resulted in death. So, falling more than 100 feet is generally considered “non-survivable,” he wrote.

“Most wouldn’t make it alive,” he said on the phone. The only reason she survived, he said, is because she landed on her feet. “If she had landed on her chest or head she would have been dead on the spot.”

After the fall

Watson awoke in the Denver hospital paralyzed. She was “out of it” for about three weeks, she said. She remained in the hospital for about three and a half months.

During this period, Watson’s grandfather had approached a woman in a wheelchair in a public place, just to talk about his granddaughter and ask the woman questions. The woman happened to be a paralympic skier, and she also happened to be exceptionally generous.

The woman visited Watson in the hospital, told Watson about all the things she was able to achieve from a wheelchair. She even gave Watson an adaptive bike, which is powered with the arms. Watson said it gave her hope. She started Googling “extreme wheelchair sports,” Watson said, much to her mother’s chagrin.

Stahel, the surgeon, followed Watson’s progress as she moved into rehabilitation. He remembers seeing her smile a lot. He still keeps pictures of her smiling in a file because that’s the most gratifying thing about his job, he said.

Even within a few weeks of the accident, “when confronted with the diagnosis that she’d never walk, she stayed positive,” Stahel said. Recovery works better for patients who can accept their fate and cope with it and make the best of it, he said.

Medical expertise and surgical procedures played a role in her survival, for sure. But “we as surgeons can only do so much,” Stahel said. “Her positive spirit, her personality, family support, I do think helped her get through all of this.”

Her father, Jim, said, “She doesn’t seem angry. She knows life without risk is not life.”

A new life in Bend

Watson moved to Bend last October because her dad lived here and was able to renovate his house to accommodate her wheelchair. She didn’t know anyone else here, and soon recognized that most Bend residents were active and outdoorsy.

“I knew I couldn’t be happy unless I got active,” she said.

By December she was taking adaptive ski lessons on a scholarship that covers the full cost. Jeremy Fox, a program director with Oregon Adaptive Sports, said scholarships are available for people with disabilities who need financial assistance due to economic hardships from unemployment or limited income. “The scholarship committee deemed that in her case, being able to ski for free was helpful and therapeutic for her life,” Fox said.

Oregon Adaptive Sports — the lessons, the experience and the camaraderie — drastically boosts her quality of life, she said.

She’s also grateful for her father’s support.

“I was really fiercely independent before so it’s hard to have to rely on others,” she said. Her father and some hired home-health aides help her in many ways, every day. For example, she can’t yet navigate the kitchen to cook for herself, nor does she have an adaptive car to drive herself around. Her dad shuttles her to the mountain for ski lessons. Her ski instructors help her get her gear on and load her into the sit-ski.

She said she’s been amazed to see how many people are willing to help others. She’s also learned much about herself.

Such as?

“I guess, how strong I am,” she said. “I had all these worries before, and stresses and insecurities and those kind of just dissolved away because I realized what’s really important.” Knowing that a fall like hers is considered “non-survivable” has given Watson “so much gratitude to be alive and that I don’t have a brain injury,” she said.

“Even though this was a horrible thing to happen and to go through, and I wish I could walk again, there have been many positive changes since the accident,” she said. “I feel like I can slow down and appreciate things more, instead of the constant striving that was my life before. I feel my worth now because of all the people that came forward and showed their love for me after the accident, and this helps me to feel calm and confident instead of insecure. I know my strength now. I want to inspire people not to wait until something this tragic happens to them to feel gratitude for all that they have, and to know how beautiful and perfect they are.”