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Hiking the W Trek trail in Torres del Paine National Park is a rite of passage. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
Mark JohansonMarch 2, 2022
A hike through Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park on the W Trek (a particularly difficult hiking trail) takes you through tall granite spires, rugged steppes and large glaciers sitting in gem-colored lakes. It’s considered a rite of passage for athletic Chileans to complete all five days of this iconic Patagonian trail in the southernmost Andes. It was also a childhood dream of Alvaro Silberstein, who spent his youth as one of Santiago’s most promising rugby players.
That dream changed in 2004 when a drunk driver hit Silberstein’s car and left him paralyzed from the chest down. In the years that followed, he came to view the W Trek as a symbol of what he’d lost.
“For many years, I saw it as an impossible dream,” Silberstein recalls in his office in Santiago, just one block from where the life-changing accident occurred. But, a decade later he started to test the limits of his abilities and regained confidence in his body. That’s when Silberstein and his childhood friend Camilo Navarro began searching for a way to make that impossible dream come true.
“We realized nobody had done the trail in a wheelchair before,” Silberstein says, “so we decided to transform that trip into a project.”
The goal was to help Silberstein become the first person with quadriplegia to complete the W Trek. Silberstein and Navarro raised money to purchase a lightweight, one-wheeled hiking wheelchair, designed by the French company Joëlette, that can traverse rough terrain with the help of two people.
In 2016 they completed the hike, a feat that was documented by a camera crew in the award-winning short film Adventure Is for All. Silberstein and Navarro even trained local tour operators how to use the wheelchair, leaving it behind after they were done.
“That trip totally changed my perspective and my confidence on what things I could achieve,” Silberstein says. It also made headlines in California, and soon queries came pouring in from families wanting to replicate the adventure.
“We realized that there were a lot of people also wishing that the travel industry would be more inclusive and more accessible for people with disabilities,” Silberstein says. So, in 2018, he and Navarro co-founded Wheel the World, now the world’s largest adventure travel company for thrill-seekers of differing abilities. Their goal? To make the planet’s wildest places more inclusive for the people who are most often excluded.
It’s an unseasonably warm day in August, which is winter in Chile, when Silberstein drives me in his hand-controlled SUV through the snarled traffic of Santiago’s eastern suburbs to the trailhead for Cerro Las Varas, a 4,000-foot summit in the Andean foothills just outside the city. Here, we meet a Wheel the World support team who are already busy assembling Joëlette hiking wheelchairs for their boss and two guests: Dani, a 50-year-old woman with quadriplegia, and Sami, a 10-year-old boy with cerebral palsy. Today is the first adaptive hike for them, and the excitement is palpable.
Soon, three teams are rolling the wheelchairs along a rugged trail. I offer my help as the front-end support person for Dani, while her adult son takes the rear. Together, we try to maintain Dani’s equilibrium while powering the chair forward as one collective unit. Condors circle in the sky overhead, and as we climb toward them, Dani tells me of all the hiking trips she and her son used to take, before she lost her ability to walk about a decade ago. “I can’t tell you how special it is,” she says, “to do this again, with my son by my side.”
Mountains like this are not made for wheelchairs—no matter how all-terrain the equipment may be. Our three-person unit must be deliberate and methodical. The rutted path requires careful route planning that other hikers who pass by never have to consider.
On one particularly steep hill, the entire support team has to work together to ensure a safe summit for each wheelchair user. Operating in pairs on either side of the chairs, we push from below and pull from above to hoist them up the rocky, near-vertical slope. One small slip from anyone on the support team could send all of us tumbling down. I can see why the wheelchair users wear helmets.
Facing and overcoming these challenges, however, builds a strong sense of community among the support team and the hikers. In particular, Silberstein notes that the experience helps those in the wheelchairs build confidence and trust, as they have to be willing to put their lives in the hands of the people to their front and rear.
When we arrive at the hilltop lookout after the 90-minute ascent, there’s a feeling of collective pride. We stand around gazing at the skyscrapers of Santiago as the setting sun bathes them in an amber glow. Sami peers over the ledge with a grin. “El cabro lo está pasando chancho,” whispers his proud father. Literally, this translates to “The goat is going pig,” but in Chile’s animal-heavy slang it means, “The kid is having an amazing time.” This is Sami’s first time seeing the city glisten from the hills above, and the joy he exhibits is so raw it spreads throughout the entire group.
As Silberstein takes it all in, he tells me how much impact an experience like this can have on people like Dani and Sami. “They realize that they shouldn’t limit themselves, and that they can accept the tough things they have gone through in the past and turn them into a learning experience,” he says.
Silberstein is motivated to help others have experiences like these, in part because of how much his own excursions aided in his recovery. Following his initial trek in Patagonia, he led trips into Chile’s Atacama Desert using hand-cranked bikes (for those who may have spinal cord injuries) and recumbent bikes (for those who may have had a stroke). He also brought equipment to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and trained local guides in how to lead adaptive bike trips to the island’s monolithic moai statues – and even adaptive scuba dives with amphibious wheelchairs.
“We all deserve to have access to recreation, to adventure, and to nature,” Silberstein says.
Silberstein’s personal crowning achievement was tackling the Inca Trail in Peru. He calls the hike “the best experience of my life,” although the undertaking was so arduous that he deemed it unsafe to promote through his business. But that didn’t stop him from starting a program at Machu Picchu, equipping tour guides with adaptive wheelchairs and giving them the necessary training to make the famed ruins accessible for the first time to people with disabilities.
Since then, Wheel the World has expanded to 98 destinations in 26 countries, adding adaptive activities such as kayaking in California, surfing in Maui, caving in the Yucatán Peninsula, zip-lining in Costa Rica, going on safari in South Africa and paragliding along the Chilean coast.
The company is also expanding beyond adventure, into leisure travel and hotel bookings, crowdsourcing data on its new Accessibility Mapping System to provide travelers with information they won’t find on traditional booking websites, such as the width of doors, height of beds and types of showers available, as well as noting whether or not the staff have received any training to prepare for guests with disabilities.
“This will not be a sprint,” Silberstein says. “It’s a marathon that we will continue doing to allow people to find their accessible experience anywhere they want to go – anywhere in the world.”