By Mike Savicki
With his rock wall in tow, Mark Wellman, the Godfather of Outdoor Adaptive Sports, teaches, motivates and changes lives one climb at a time.
Mark Wellman is the kind of guy who measures the depth of snow by the foot and the height of a rock face by the coils of rope he needs to summit it. He is a Californian through and through, not so much the So Cal surfing type but the Nor Cal mountain variety. To find him, if you start in San Francisco and head into the Sierra Nevada towards Lake Tahoe, Palisades and Donner Pass, ask when you get to Truckee, he is a high altitude legend.
Let’s start this story with Wellman’s climbing. It was while working as a ranger at Yosemite National Park he first met legendary climber, Mike Corbett. Wellman, who had been an accomplished climber before breaking his back and sustaining a spinal cord injury, was looking for a way to get back into the vertical world. Corbett, who was known as “Mr. El Cap” for his reputation on “the biggest wall of them all,” sat with Wellman and together, sketching on a barroom napkin, the pair developed a never before seen adaptive climbing system which would allow Wellman to climb using only his arms, pull-up after pull-up, using a modified ascender. Leather rock chaps protected his body from the rock.
They then planned a route up the iconic 3000 ft vertical solid granite wall. Wellman’s 1989 climb, all 7,000 pull-ups of it, which was covered nationally by Tom Brokaw, not only earned him an invitation to the White House, it also shattered the perceptions of what a wheelchair user could do in the outdoors.
Reflecting on the busy days immediately after the climb, Wellman, now 63, says, “the next thing you knew, we were in the Oval Office talking about bone fishing with President Bush. That climb really changed my life forever.”
To get a perspective on where it all began, it’s best to go back to his days in California’s Kaiser Vallejo Rehabilitation Center. In the early 1980s, unlike today, spinal cord injured patients spent months in rehab. Those months helped Wellman tremendously. Not only did he learn necessary life skills, he also learned about wheelchair sports and what might be possible. Within months he was in the pool, on the tennis court, skiing and back behind the wheel.
Working with California’s Department of Vocational Rehabilitation, Wellman enrolled in two area colleges both to play wheelchair sports and also study park management.
And it was through voc rehab that he got his first vehicle, a necessity to help him travel to and from school and the national parks in which he was being reintroduced. The full sized van gave him room to stretch and relax on longer trips.
He remembers that first vehicle fondly. It was a 1981 green Ford 150 van which the state found for him sitting in a voc rehab lot near Santa Clara. Wellman had heard horror stories about adaptive equipment failing and drivers being trapped in their vehicles so, instead of a lift, he opted for a system similar to what another para, Bill Bowness, had developed.
“I didn’t want a lift. I knew they would break down. And I didn’t want to have to deal with someone parking next to me. I just wanted to keep it as simple as possible,” he recalls. “So I installed a padded platform behind the captain’s chairs and I would transfer onto it, pull my chair in behind me and scoot over to the captain’s chairs and lift myself up into the driver seat.”
He continues, “Looking back, I think the whole first conversion was $1700 from the padded bench to the captain’s chairs and the hand controls and they even threw in a fire extinguisher.”
Wellman kept that van for 15 years, accumulating more than 130,000 miles on it.
After a short stint with an all-wheel drive Ford Aerostar, Wellman partnered with GM to help promote and market their trucks to the disabled market. For several years he traveled to some of America’s largest car shows demonstrating the capabilities of an S10 modified with an in-cab Bruno swing out arm that collected his folding chair and stored it behind the driver seat, opening and closing a driver’s side suicide door in the process.
And at one point, along with three other high-level adaptive athletes, Wellman became a member of GM Trucks and Chevy’s Barrier Breakers team. He was one of the first athletes with a disability to ink a major sponsorship agreement with a mainstream auto manufacturer.
In 2004, NorCal Mobility (now Mobility Works) installed a set of hand controls in a first then second Chevy Duramax diesel. By now, Wellman was giving adaptive climbing clinics and leading programs all over the country. He towed a climbing wall with him to each event, not only up and down the west coast but also to points east from Florida to New York. For 19 years and 330,000 miles, the Duramax more than did the job.
When the Duramax finally gave out on a driveback from a Challenged Athletes Foundation event in San Diego, Wellman bought a Ford F 150 V6 Turbo with hand controls from Mobility Works. He chose the Ford because he sees extended cabs as being phased out for crew cabs and he felt his choices in trucks are becoming limited.
Reflecting on an industry he remembers starting with paraplegics driving milk trucks and sitting on stools, Wellman still sees a need for change.
“Let’s start with the auto manufacturer’s $1000 rebate towards the retrofit. It has been that amount forever, and while it helped cover services in the past, it’s not doing its job now,” Wellman says. “It needs to go to at least $2500 to cover the newer styles of hand controls. No more lip service.”
And with auto manufacturers now offering a more limited variety of cars, trucks and vans, he hopes conversion companies will begin to work more closely with manufacturers to incorporate more inclusive features much like architects and builders have collaborated for more universally designed homes.
“The mini vans definitely serve a purpose but there are those who want and need something different. A lot of the vehicles they are making, from SUV’s to trucks and even crossovers, are becoming more limited in how they can be modified,” he shares. “Take the Honda Element for example. It was a great car which could be modified in so many different ways and now, like several others, it’s gone.”
In the more than 40 years since his injury and ascent of El Cap, Wellman has impacted the lives of literally thousands of similarly disabled individuals. His book, Climbing Back, and four outdoor sports movies, are fixtures in rehab hospitals across the country. His climbing clinics and adventure camps are over subscribed. It’s safe to say that if there is a pioneering breakthrough in the outdoor adventure sports world, Mark Wellman has something to do with it.
And through it all, driving was, and still is, a lifestyle.
“Driving has opened doors for me. It’s how I get my climbing wall from point A to point B, it’s how I make my living and it’s how I camp,” he says. “I live in a place where we get at least twenty feet of snow each winter – last year we got sixty-three – so you need four wheel drive, you need clearance, you need reliability.”