The True Mission of Challenge Aspen

June 19th, 2007 at 10:44am Jessica Andrews 393

After a freak skiing accident left her paralyzed fifteen years ago, all Amanda Boxtel did was found Challenge Aspen and become a motivational speaker who never tires of telling her story. That story includes her trip now underway to India in hopes of recovering function from experimental embryonic stem cell research therapies banned in the United States.

“I met Amanda back in '93 after her skiing accident,” said Challenge Aspen co-founder Howard Cowen. “We worked together on the slopes to get her skiing again despite her disability.”

Cowen said, the two came up with the idea to create a year-round organization aimed to help disabled children and adults around the valley do things that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to. Challenge Aspen was ultimately founded in December of 1995 and has since helped thousands of handicapped locals and visitors ski and snowboard in the winter and raft, rock-climb, horseback ride, and hike in the summer.

“Amanda has always been the true mission of Challenge Aspen,” Cowen said. “She lives each day with the motto: ‘If I can do this I can do anything.’ You hardly ever notice her wheelchair.”

Though Boxtel is a paraplegic and confined to a wheelchair, Cowen and others who have been touched by Boxtel hope that that will all change after her months abroad. Cowen said Boxtel left Challenge Aspen two years ago to speak to all sorts of audiences around the world about her experience and her unrelentingly positive attitude towards her disability. Now he and the rest of her admirers can only wait for word from India.

Entry Filed under: Health, Fitness, Snowboarding, Snowmass, Aspen, Colorado, Con Games, Travel, Women, Aspen Life Post