Opening Worlds,
Changing Lives

Sun Valley Ski School’s
Program for Disabled Skiers

by Dick Dorworth

Marc Mast is one of those unsung heroes who keeps a community healthy and together, making the world a better place in which to live with a minimum of fuss and a very low profile. He changes the lives of people with disabilities. 

Mast has described what he does as being “committed to opening new worlds to people with special needs, and to build self-confidence through the celebration of outdoor sports and all they have to offer.”

“Marc Mast is one of my big mentors. There’s no way I would be doing this now without Marc,” is how Mark Thoreson describes Mast’s influence on his life.

“It’s wonderful what Marc Mast does. He is doing great things for our community, and he is largely un-recognized for his work,” is what Reggie Swindle says about the effect Mast has had on her, her son, and the larger community of the Wood River Valley.

Mast is a ski instructor who started the Sun Valley Ski School’s program for disabled skiers in 1992, and he has been the inspiration, guiding light and main force behind it ever since. He is also one of the founders and president of The Sun Valley Adaptive Sports Program that has as a mission “to improve the quality of life for persons with disabilities, through sports and recreation. For Mast in winter, that means skiing.

The Sun Valley Ski School’s program for disabled skiers has helped approximately 500 people with disabilities experience the thrills of negotiating snow covered mountains on turned up boards over the past 10 years. Last season about 75 disabled skiers signed up for the program with Marc and the two other instructors, Cara Larocca and Jenn Smith, who work with him. Mast spends 50 to 70 percent of his 400 hours a year of ski school time teaching disabled skiers. His most famous student is Ketchum’s Muffy Davis, who was paralyzed when she was 16 in a downhill training accident on Bald Mountain. She went on to be valedictorian of her Wood River High School graduating class and an honors graduate of Stanford University before Mast helped her to learn to ski again on the seated monoski. She has since won bronze in the 1998 Paralympics in slalom, gold in giant slalom in the 2000 World Championships, seven silver medals during the 2001 World Cup races and silver medals in slalom, super giant slalom, giant slalom and downhill in the 2002 Paralympics in Salt Lake City. Davis has now retired from competition in order to attend medical school.

While Davis has deservedly received a great deal of media attention, most of Mast’s work takes place well below the media’s radar. 

Thoreson, who Mast refers to as “my most inspiring story over the last few years,” was a Sun Valley ski instructor from 1978 until 1995. Tall, blonde and handsome, Thoreson was the prototypical healthy, athletic Sun Valley citizen and an expert skier. He was in charge of the Bald Mountain children’s instruction program and winter sales manager for the Sun Valley Company, in addition to teaching private lessons. In 1995 he had minor knee surgery in Sun Valley. Complications from a staphylococcus—commonly commonly known as staph—infection as a result of that surgery changed his life. He suffered what he describes as “profound bilateral vestibular loss.” That is, the vestibular nervous system of both ears was destroyed. His gyroscope of balance was gone. He suffers from a complete loss of equilibrium and a spatial disorientation. Overnight he went from being one of the best skiers in the Wood River Valley to a man who needed a walker to move across a room.

There is no known cure for his impairment, and he will never again have the natural sense of balance most of us enjoy and take for granted. Needless to say, adapting to his new situation has been neither easy nor enjoyable. Though he has graduated from a walker to using a cane for walking, he is still unsteady and his nervous system cannot tell him where his body is in relation to the vertical and horizontal planes. Thoreson never thought he’d ever again enjoy the pleasures of skiing. Without Mast he would not have even tried, but Mast kept pushing Thoreson, encouraging him, convincing him that his skiing days were not over. 

“I knew he could do it four or five years ago,” Mast says, “but Mark is very image conscious and he was reluctant to start over.” Finally, last season, after he was able to walk off the flat and on the uneven slope of a hill, a monumental task for a person with no natural equilibrium, Thoreson let Mast entice him on to Dollar Mountain. 

“It has been an interesting ordeal for me,“ Thoreson says of becoming a skier again. He progressed from skiing Quarter Dollar to Half Dollar to Dollar Mountain in a few days. After he got his skiing legs back, Thoreson went to Bald Mountain. 
Mast describes what happened to the man who needed a walker, and who still needs a cane to walk, with these words: “Let’s put it this way: If I could ski as well as Mark Thoreson, I’d be happy. I think he could teach again if he wanted to. He looks fine and does fine while he’s moving, but he gets a bit disoriented when he is standing still. He’s an exceptional skier even with no vestibular equilibrium.” Thoreson skied on Bald Mountain 10 to 12 times last spring.

“I managed to ski last season with outriggers, and I’ve kind of broken the world record for people with my condition,” Thoreson says. He is back working part time in Sun Valley’s sales and marketing department. “I’m excited to ski this coming season. I thank Marc Mast for that and for much more.”

Grant Swindle of Hailey is a freshman at Wood River High School. He was born with Down Syndrome, an incurable chromosomal disorder. Approximately one in 800 children born in the world has Down Syndrome. Not all of them live. About 1,000 children a year are born and survive with Down Syndrome in the United States, and today there are some 250,000 families in America with a Down Syndrome family member. 

The condition is named for the 19th century British physician John L.H. Down and is characterized by mild to severe mental retardation, weak muscle tone, a low nasal bridge, and epicanthic folds at the eyelids. 

Swindle started skiing with Mast five years ago. According to his mother, Reggie, Grant was “a little anxious” at first, but he had always wanted to ski and he has progressed to the point where he can ski Half Dollar on his own, without being tethered to Mast or his mother.

“This program is wonderful,” says Reggie Swindle, “because there’s no way I could have taught Grant to ski on my own. Initially we had to hang on to him with a tether, but now he can function on skis by himself. We’ve always tried to integrate Grant into everything with his peers, because we all learn from our peers. Grant really likes it, in part, because he gets to go skiing ‘like all the other kids.’ This season we hope to get up on Lower River Run. That’s our goal.”

These are just two stories of the hundreds of people who have been able to experience the enjoyment of skiing because of Marc Mast and the Sun Valley Ski School’s program for disabled skiers. Mast envisions the program growing to no larger than five instructors working half time with disabled skiers and half time with able-bodied skiers. 

“You have to be a good instructor for able-bodied people before you can be good with disabled skiers,” Mast says. “And you learn a lot, especially about biomechanics and psychology, from disabled skiers that you can apply to able-bodied skiers. So we need to do both. I can’t overemphasize how good Cara and Jenn are, and how much they contribute to what we do. I couldn’t do this without them. Nor would any of this happen without the financial contributions we get from the community. This community is the best; we are very grateful for the support the people give us. We don’t want to get too big and become a factory. Sun Valley is known for the quality of its skiing experience, and we want to maintain that in the disabled-skier program.”

Mast sees more potential for growth with the cross-country program. He hopes Sun Valley can become the development center for the U.S. disabled cross-country ski team.

The Sun Valley Ski School charges disabled skiers half price, except during high season, Christmas and President’s Weekend. Mast is quick to point out that the Sun Valley Adaptive Sports Program has scholarships available for those who can’t afford to pay for instruction. What he is less quick to mention is that he works on commission and is paid half as much for teaching disabled skiers as when he is instructing the usual ski school clients. His work is a labor of love, and, like many other ski instructors, 
he works in construction all summer in order to labor for love in winter.

When asked about the physical and mental challenges of teaching the disabled to ski, Mast replies: “It is often physically exhausting. Sometimes you must load your students on and off the lifts, and you help them up whenever they fall, which is often. Much of the time you have them on a tether while they are going down the mountain. This means that sometimes you are holding them all the way down the mountain.”

The instructor of a disabled skier is also an anchor and literal safety strap, for it would not do for a beginning paraplegic skier on a monoski to get out of control and careen down a crowded mountain.

For all that he helps his students and brings to the community, Mast maintains that he gets more out of the equation than anyone. “When you deal with people with disabilities you learn to be far more tolerant than you might be otherwise, and you really appreciate your own good health,” Mast says. “We all have such an easy time of life on so many levels compared to someone like Grant or Muffy or Mark. I feel really lucky to be able to do what I do. Though skiing with people with disabilities can be physically tiring, mentally it is easier to ski with them than with some able-bodied people. I mean, 99 percent of disabled skiers never say ‘I can’t.’” •