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2015-11-11-Adventure Sports

Seminars@Hadley

Adventure Sports

Presented byLonnie Bedwell

Moderated byLarry Muffet

November 11, 2015

Larry MuffetWelcome to Seminars at Hadley. My name is Larry Muffet. I’m a member of Hadley Seminars Team and I also work in Curricular Affairs. Today’s seminar topic is Adventure Sports. Our presenter today is Lonnie Bedwell. We feel quite appropriately for Veterans Day, Lonnie served in the Marine Corps and is a blinded veteran. He’s also been part of some incredible adventures like kayaking in the Grand Canyon and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. Today Lonnie’s going to share some insights on how to make the seemingly impossible turn out to be possible. Without anymore, a Happy Veterans Day to all you and let

©2014 The Hadley School for the Blind of 35


me welcome Lonnie and we’ll get under way. Welcome, Lonnie.

Lonnie BedwellThank you so much and it’s a privilege to be here and get to talk to everybody today on Veterans Day and very special day to me and for all the veterans out there. I just want to thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart for all the sacrifices and service that you have done. [Got into 0:01:07] my service was from 1985 to 1994 in active duty and then from ’94 to ’97 in the National Guard. I was involved in a hunting accident that took my eyesight in 1997, three years to the day that I got off of active duty and it took my eyesight instantly. Me and a good friend were hunting.

I see nothing at all, total lights out. I refer to myself as LOL, Lights Out Lonnie. I tell people I’m LOL, Lights Out Lonnie, who likes to LOL, Laugh Out Loud with LOL, Lots of Love and I got into adaptive sports, adventure sports, about four and a half years ago when I went to the Hines Blind Rehab Center in Chicago, Illinois.

The VA had tried to get me to go for years to the Blind Rehab Center but I was a single father. I told them I wasn’t going to go until I got all my children raised into high school, and in the winter of 2010, December of 2010, January of 2011 was when I went up to Hines and that’s



where it all started for me with the snow skiing, and then I met some gentlemen up there, about four of them, who lost their eyesight in combat and we were invited to a program or they were should I say, and one of them insisted that I go so that’s when I got involved with water skiing, cycling and sailing and then it snowballed from there to getting into kayaking, mountain climbing, rock climbing, mountaineering, surfing and everything else, so I’ll let you tell me where you want me to go from here, Larry. I can talk forever but I’ll let you give me a little cue here of where you want me to go.

Larry MuffetOh, let’s start off chronologically and let’s talk about some of your initial forays into these type of sports, and certainly we want to hear about your kayaking adventure in the Grand Canyon and climbing. I certainly want to hear about climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.

Lonnie BedwellWell, like I said, I started out at the Hines Blind Rehab Center in January of 2011. They had asked me if I would stick around just a little longer. They said they had never done snow skiing as an outing at that VA Blind Rehab Center, and they said, “Well, would you care to do it and be a guinea pig?” I said, “Well, twist my arm.” So in January of 2011 they took me up to Wisconsin, me and another guy, and started my adventures of snow skiing.



The first they told me, they said, “We’re going to go up this little bunny hill.” They said, “You hold on to this rope and when you get to the top, you just let go and just ski away.”

The one thing they didn’t tell me was where the exact top was, so I just kept ahold of the rope until I hit the pole that the rope was attached to. [laughs] I hit it face on, face [inaudible 0:04:15] the pole and landed up on my backside and I told them, I said, “If that [hit the 0:04:20] Sports 101, you might tell the blind guy when he’s actually at the top so he’ll know when to let go and so we all got a chuckle out of it, and I started skiing and I just started on the bunny hills. That led to me going snow skiing out in Colorado. My first trip was in Breckenridge. After my trip to Wisconsin, I went out there with an organization called United States Association of Blind Athletes, USABA, and I ski’ed there for I think three days.

Then I was invited to a disabled veterans ski clinic in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, so I went and I was skiing out there on the bunny hills and the green slopes. I heard this clicking sound in front of me and I asked the guy what it was, and he said it’s someone just tapping their poles together. I said, “Well, can we try that on the slopes?” We tried it but I couldn’t hear it very well so I tried a whistle. My guide got worn out trying to blow the whistle and I couldn’t echo locate with the whistle very well so then somebody come up with a cowbell, and they started



ringing the cowbell in front of me so I started chasing the cowbell down the hill, down the mountain and I literally went from skiing on the green slopes to skiing on black slopes a day later so the fifth day I was ever on a set of skis in my life, I was skiing black slopes in Steamboat Springs, Colorado chasing a cowbell and for you Saturday Night Live fans, every time I hit a ski lift, someone would say, “More cowbell. I need more cowbell.” [laughs] It’s funny. That still happens today.

Then I just kept getting a little more experience and last year I was skiing in Aspen, Colorado at another disabled veterans clinic, and my guide took me down some black slopes and they clocked us at 60 mile an hour skiing black slopes chasing a cowbell down the mountain so that’s where my skiing started.

Larry MuffetHow did you get started surfing?

Lonnie BedwellWhen I went to the Disabled American Veterans Winter Sports Clinic in Snowmass, Colorado in 2011 also, I met some other folks who invited me to go the Disabled American Veterans Summer Sports Clinic in San Diego, California the following year I believe it was, and while I was out there in San Diego one of the events was surfing and that was pretty cool. You have people out there



around me and they would tell me when the wave was coming in, tell me when to start paddling and as I’d feel the wave, I’d just jump up and under the board and just try to feel my way in and it was fun.

People told me while I was surfing out there and trying to catch some of the waves, there was some seals that were just flying out of the face of the waves right beside me as we were surfing along. I rode a few in all the way, did good and then some of them, I definitely ate the bottom of the ocean and got rolled around a little bit down there.

One of the coolest things while I was out there on the first surfing trip, there was a gentleman out there who was missing both legs above the knees and he comes flying by me on a surf board, said, “Hey, Bedwell, this is how you do it.” My guides told me, said, “You’re not going to believe this, Lonnie but he’s in a handstand, and he’s got his stubs up in the air as he’s flying by you.” It was pretty cool but while I was out there, I got to meet Bo Derek and some other people out there surfing. I had a good time.

Larry MuffetRight, so let’s talk about your being the first blind person to kayak down the Grand Canyon.

Lonnie Bedwell



How that come about was at Snowmass once again. In 2012, I went to the Disabled American Veterans Winter Sports Clinic in Snowmass, Colorado for the second time and while I was out there, me and friend of mine heard about these people having kayaks in the swimming pool so we went to check it out. What the heck? There’s an organization called Team River Runner and they were founded at Walter Reed in 2004, and what they do is take disabled veterans out on the water, whether it be whitewater, calm water, the ocean and kayak and I don’t care what your disability is, they adapt for it.

It’s been amazing, anywhere from paraplegic, quadriplegic, quad amputee, blind and visually impaired. It’s just been amazing but anyway, while I was out in Snowmass, they put you in a kayak in a pool and just had you do basic paddle strokes and you could win a t-shirt if you could do an Eskimo roll, and an Eskimo roll is when you flip upside down in the kayak. You use your paddle to right yourself back up.

The first 180 degrees of that is pretty easy, flip it upside down but using the paddle to get back up, not so easy, but I managed to do it and I won a t-shirt but I thought well, that’s the end of my kayaking career but I got a phone call in, I believe it was probably June of that year, same year and they asked me, “Hey, Lonnie, how would you like to attend an out of site clinic kayaking on the Yellowstone



River in Montana?” I said, “Sure, I’d love that.” While I was out there kayaking, that was my first experience on moving water and then on whitewater, and I didn’t have a clue how to do that Eskimo roll on whitewater so I’d flip upside down and they’d help me do a bow rescue. That’s where they just bump into my kayak while I was upside down. I’d reach up, grab the front of their kayak when I felt it hit mine and I’d flip myself back upright.

Well, after about four days of whitewater out there, we’re sitting at the airport and Joe Mornini, who’s the Executive Director of Team River Runner, asked me, he said, “How would you like to be the first blind veteran to ever kayak the Grand Canyon?” I said, “It sounds like a good idea. Let’s try it.” He said, “Well, there’s your goal. You can work at it.” I think both of us sincerely thought it’d be five or six years down the road before that happened but I [inaudible 0:11:32] Jim, when I met who is a Vietnam Veteran who lives in Kentucky. I come back home. I went to Kentucky for one day in October of 2012 and kayaked down the Russell Fork.

Well, him and some of his friends sent me home with kayaks, spray skirt, helmet, paddle, life jacket. I had it here at the house. I didn’t get back in a kayak until 2013 when I start trying to have a gentleman teach how to do a roll in the pond at – or in a pool at Indiana State University. I just started to learn how to do it when Joe called me and



asked me if I would like to do the Grand Canyon that year in a raft just to get an idea what the Grand Canyon was like. I told him, I said, “I don’t want to do that, Joe.” I said, “That scared the snot out of me.” I said, “I want to do it in a kayak.” He chuckled and he said, “Lonnie.” He said, “There’s no way.” He said, “You’ve got to do at least a thousand Eskimo rolls, and you’ve got to have more experience.”

I said, “Well, all right, I’ll try.” He said, “You really won’t do this in a raft?” I said, “No, no.” I said, “Kayak or bust.” He didn’t know I had all this stuff at the house so I went out that next day, pulled the kayak off the porch, went down to my pond and started trying to learn how to do these rolls and all the failed attempts I did, I did 100 rolls that next day and I called Joe up and I told him, “I just did 100 Eskimo rolls.” He said, “You’re kidding me.” He said, “Well,” he said, “it sounds like 1,000 won’t be a problem but you need more experience.”

I got back on the horn, called BJ Phillips who was that Vietnam Veteran and I said, “BJ, I need more experience. I need to go kayaking.” I got with him, went down to the Pigeon River in Tennessee and to the Nantahala down in North Carolina. I called another friend of mine who lived in Charlotte and went to the Whitewater Center out there, and while I was at the Whitewater Center in Charlotte, there was a gentleman named Pablo McCandless who



Joe Mornini had taught to kayak and Pablo had became a Chilean Olympic kayaker, and I told him what I wanted to do and he said, “Man,” he said, “I think you could do it, a lot of it.” I said, “You got to call Joe and tell him.”

He got on the phone. He called Joe and Joe, knowing how good of a kayaker Pablo was, he called me on the telephone in June and said, “Lonnie, we’ll give you a chance. If you want to try it, we’ll give you a chance.” He took me back out to Montana, to Yellowstone again and sent me down to the Whitewater Center in Charlotte one more time, and after 14 days of whitewater experience under my belt, I went to the Grand Canyon for the first time.

Larry MuffetWell, please tell us more. How did that go? Tell us about what kind of adventure that was.

Lonnie Bedwell[laughs] My parents, they asked me, they said, “Lonnie, why in the world do you have to do this? Of all things, why do you have to go try to do this?” I knew that trip was going to consist of nine veterans who were all post-9/11 veterans. Six of the nine had spent multiple years in Walter Reed and other various rehab hospitals. My guide I knew was going to be a gentleman who served a tour in Iraq and Afghanistan, one who had served multiple tours



in Iraq and who had PTSD, major PTSD issues and another one who had traumatic brain injuries who served multiple years over in Iraq also, multiple tours, so I told my parents, I said, “Every paddle stroke I make is an effort to pay these young men and women back for all the sacrifices they made for me.” I said, “I have to.” I said, “They’ve done so much for me. I’ve got to give them my best.”

The first time I ever met these ladies and gentlemen was when I went out to Arizona to do the Canyon, met them at the hotel and sat on a kayak on the Grand Canyon two days later, and I thought oh, my gosh, what did I just get myself into? Because the flow of the river out there was 19 to 21,000 standard cubic feet per second, and flows around here on the rivers are normally around two to three hundred and to get an idea what that is, that’s the number of basketballs that flow past a point in a second. We have 200 of them flow – two to three hundred flow across a point here. Out there it was 19 to 21,000 so when I felt that water underneath my kayak, it’s just like wow. This is major pushy. This is something and it’s just squirrely.

I was like wow and the kayak that the gentleman brought me was cracked on both of the cockpit. The spray skirt was old and flimsy and my guide, he was just like, “You got to kidding me. This is what they want you to paddle down this?” I said, “Yeah, this is what I got.” They tried to



do some little patchy repair stuff and off we go, and I can remember getting above the first rapid that we stopped at the day before, the first pretty big rapid at [Soap Canyon 0:17:13] and we’re sitting there just listening to it, and there’s a gentleman there named [Peter Winn 0:17:19] who had been down the canyon over 80 times and he asked me what I thought and I told him, I said, “One of my big concerns is I don’t know if I can roll in this kind of water, do an Eskimo roll.”

He said, “Well, when you get in there tomorrow,” he said, “get halfway through it and flip upside down and see.” [laughs] I’m like, “You got to be kidding me.” He said, “No.” I sat there all night and thought about it and the next we got up. I said, “Okay, I’m going to try it. You guys tell me when I’m halfway through. I’m going to flip upside down and we’ll give it a whirl.” They told me, “Flip it.” I rolled upside down and I was able to do an Eskimo roll and paddle on, and that helped a bunch to give me some confidence.

Then we went on down the next day. The first really big one was called House Rock and it makes a 90 degree dogleg turn to the right, and if you don’t make that turn, you just fly off in to this big hole that can really upset you and eat your lunch. Well, my guide, when he got out to scout he told, he said, “Lonnie, come in with a bow angle pointed at about 2:00. Keep me on your left-hand side



and when I tell you to punch it,” he said, “you just paddle hard and follow me on through the rapid.” I said, “All right, we’ll do it.” Keep in mind, the only commands – we didn’t even know – we had headset radios at this time just to see if it’d work and we were using voice commands, just simple voice commands would say “hard right”, “hard left”, “back paddle”, “stop” or “on me”, “put me in your gun sights and on me” which means just track his voice right in front of me.

Well, we get into it and the radios aren’t working. I somehow get to his left side, instead of him being on my left side. He tells me to make a hard right. I flip. I roll back up and I can feel this pillow wave all the way up my side, going all the way up the side of my left arm, up the side of my face, on the left side of my head and I got sucked into it, and the guys told me that wave was literally about 12 feet above my head and I got sucked into it, rolled into that hole, up in to the top of the pillow wave and I somehow managed to roll off the back side of that and paddle on down the river, and we made it through that first rapid and I was just screaming and hollering.

We were on such a high and they asked me, “How in the world did you do that?” I said, “I don’t know.” I don’t know [laughs] but we managed to do it and the radios, they just crushed at that point, didn’t work anymore so we just threw them away, and we wasn’t sure that we’d actually



be able to hear over the sound of the roaring of the rapids going down through there and it was a big thing because you could literally hear some of those rapids a mile away starting to build and when you get closer to them and get closer to them, you can just hear them just thundering down through there and I got used to the point after a while of telling how loud it was, knowing where I was at or how big of a rapid it was going to be, and I can remember some of the rapids, Hance and Crystal, some of these big rapids, Joe had told me before I went, he said, “Lonnie, you’ll have to swim several times and you’ll have to [potty 0:20:38] around some of these rapids, you’ll have to raft them, Hance and Crystal, Granite and Lava and some of those that he said that about, and I did not know it at the time but he told Alex, “Lonnie will want to run them but don’t let him do it.”

Well, we got to Hance above it and we scouted it. It was one of the biggest rapids on the river and one of the longest. It’s got a great big ledge hole right on top of it. It could swallow a couple of Greyhound buses and we was making a right to left move under that hole and Alex told me, he said, “When we do it, Lonnie,” he said, “whatever you do don’t get squirrely on me here and don’t roll into that hole.” What does Lonnie do? He rolls into the hole. I roll up out of it and managed to be just along the side of it to where I was able to actually punch my way out of the hole, and I was in perfect line to go on down the rest of the



rapid but once again, I had someone looking over my shoulder helping me on that.

We ran on down through there but I can remember getting flipped in the rapid called Granite, and when I was upside down I was getting worked like I was upside down in a washing machine on steroids in an agitation mode, just getting violently worked back and forth. I knew I couldn’t roll but I was running out of air and it’s cold. The water temperature at that point was 47 degrees, and I remember trying to do a roll. I thought to myself okay, I got to try a roll just to get air so I pulled as hard as I could. I felt the water break at my chin, got a gasp of air, back under I went, sitting there hanging out, trying to feel for a roll and I’m like come on. Give it to me. Give it to me and I thought there it is and I finally did a roll.

Up I went and paddled on but I took my first swim on a rapid called Upset and I think it was somewhere around Day 13 in there somewhere, and what a fitting rapid to be called Upset. My spray skirt, that imploded on me and when it imploded, it filled my kayak full of water. I had to end up taking a swim and then my second swim and last swim was on Lava Falls which is the biggie that everyone always talks about. I can remember seeing on Wide World of Sports back in the early ‘70s and ‘80s, this great big raft going through Lava Falls and flipping end over end and people flying out of it. The gear flying out of it and I



was getting ready to drop in to it and anyway, we did a right to left move again under the ledge hole.

I got sideways in squirrely water, flipped, rolled back up and my line was a little off to the right. I remember getting flipped again and it imploded my spray skirt again, only it jerked me out of that kayak so violently that I literally thought it took my legs off. They told me my kayak went flying in the air 20, 30 feet, doing flips and spins and somersaults, and I was under the water doing helicopter spins and flips and managed to hang on to my paddle and popped up and they got me over to the raft and got back into my kayak and we camped for the night.

Then another rapid that’s very memorable was Rapid 205 at Mile 205 at the 226 miles and it was a smaller rapid. It only had 12 foot waves in it, instead of 25, 30 foot waves and I had a perfect line in it but the wave broke back over on itself just as I was going over it. It smacked me in the face so hard it snapped my glasses in half and just held on one side of my face and one part on the other side by the band that went around behind my glasses, and it literally launched me up in the air and back-flipped me.

My guide behind me told me, he said, “It was so funny because,” he said, “I saw your back, saw you launch in the air. I saw the back of you. Then I saw the top of your head. Then I saw you looking at me upside down in the



air, facing backward. Then I saw the bottom of your kayak and then you landed and rolled over. Then you flipped up and here your glasses are, hanging off of both sides of your face and you’re laughing.” He said, “What in the world are you laughing about?” I told him, I said, “I’ve never been back-flipped in a kayak before. That was pretty cool.”

Then the last really memorable moment on the water was when we got to the last four miles of the river, the support rafts were flying the American flag off the back of them with a little pole, a little PVC plastic pole about three foot long and the flag off of it. It took one of the flags off the back of one of the rafts and it stuck down my life jacket, back of my life jacket and I paddled the last four miles of that Grand Canyon with all those veterans and that flag flying off my back, and that was very humbling. I’ll never forget it and I can remember when we got to the end, I just yelled. I said, “We did it. We did it.”

Larry MuffetWow. Wow is all I can say. David has a great question. He says, “I’d love to do all this but how do you pay for all of these great experiences?

Lonnie Bedwell



It has been very humbling also for me. A lot of these organizations are nonprofit organizations, and honestly, being a veteran helps tremendously because there’s a lot of these organizations that will help to find veterans to do this but for me personally, it started by me being a little bit successful skiing and kayaking.

I get asked a lot to go to a lot of these events as a mentor for other blind and visually impaired people, veteran and/or nonveteran and not only just the visually impaired but those who are in wheelchairs or missing limbs and paralyzed, so it’s very, very, very humbling for me to get asked to go to a lot of these events to do this and to go speak and stuff like that so that’s how I do it. You can find a lot of programs out there that will help, especially veterans, they’ll help fund the fund for the program and/or provide scholarships.

Larry MuffetI would love to hear about climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. That’s pretty recent as I recall.

Lonnie BedwellMy phone just started ringing so you’re going to hear it ring one more time and then it should quit. I’m sorry but Mount Kilimanjaro all kind of started once again, by me meeting some of these people doing the skiing and kayaking. They asked me if I would go mountain climbing



and stuff, so I started climbing out in Colorado with folks and then it led to me having the opportunity to go and climb Mount Kilimanjaro and I was really climbing it in support of another blind veteran, a friend of mine by the name of Aaron Hill I mentioned to you earlier there.

Aaron lost his eyesight in Afghanistan in 2010 I believe and was going to climb it, and I was going to go in support of him and a week and a half before we got to do this climb, Aaron came down with spinal meningitis as a result of the injuries he received in combat and it took his hearing, so he’s now totally deaf and totally blind but I contacted him before I did it and he told me, he said, “Go climb it and climb it for me.” He gave me a little extra motivation to do the climb but on that climb there was several people but there was also several – I think our group consisted of 25 people.

There were I think seven veterans, four of them combat injured veterans, one missing a foot. One was a Navy Seal with 26 years who was climbing in support of some fallen buddies who had wanted to do the climb, one with a traumatic brain injury and one with PTSD, but the hike of the climb was 19,341 feet. The highest mountain in the lower 48 is approximately 14,300 feet, so we took five and a half days to get to the peak, one and a half days to get down and one of the big tricks of climbing, mountaineering like that is once you get to elevations of about 11 to



12,000 feet is taking your time to acclimate. That’s why we took five and a half days to go up.

We took about a day to get up to – I think the first night we camped at 9,500, the second day at 12,000, the third day at 13, the fourth day at 14. The fifth day we camped at 16,000, and then that night of the fifth day we went to the summit early. We headed out just about 2:00 in the morning, and we summited at about 10:00 the next morning and then we came down to 12,000 feet I think the day six to camp again and then come down off the mountain, but it was so cool because it was a Cadillac of climbs. We had porters carrying all of our gear and tents, and we actually had a port-a-john that they was carrying up. They’d put in the tent so we were on a Cadillac of climbs. The only thing I had to carry was a small backpack with snacks and rain gear or clothing that I wanted to wear that day and just a long hike.

It’s funny to me climbing like that and running and riding bikes on long distance bike rides is a mental game, much more of a mental game for instance, in my opinion than snow skiing or kayaking because you’re on an endurance thing and not being able to see to think okay, I just got to go to that rock. I just got to go to that tree. I just got to make it to that point. It’s kind of break the elephant down in my mind. That’s difficult so I got to try to focus on okay,



how do I just climb for an hour, climb for the next hour, the next hour.

We would climb sometimes eight to nine hours and I think the longest time was eleven hours in one day, and I would just follow the footsteps a lot of times. They’d just make noise following their footsteps and on some of the more technical stuff, they’d tell me a little bit of, “I’m going to be making a move here, making a move there, making a step here.” One lady wanted to tell me every single step she made, and I finally got her to stop doing that because it was sensory overload.

Just let me feel it and I would literally have a trekking pole in each hand following the sound and just feel where I was going to put my foot, and then if it would get super technical or I had to move fast, I might just reach out and put my hand on their backpack, and I’d literally just feel the motion that they would make and get an idea okay, that’s how high I have to step or I got to step a little to the left or a little to the right and I’d just feel with my feet as I’d make a step, so my legs I think would tend to get more tired than the average person because my legs are always engaged. Not only am I stepping with them, I’m feeling with them so I don’t get that little rest step in between, but we literally just stepped our way up the mountain, stayed at night, break in, eat dinner.



You’d eat a big dinner to try to get all your load of calories back in that you’d spent that day and wouldn’t eat a lot during the day because it’d tend to make you sick, and then once you got to higher elevations, sometimes eating can make you nauseous but out of our group of 25, there was only four of us that did not have to take any kind of medication to get to top, and I think there was four out of our group that didn’t make it to the summit due to various reasons and there was one area there where we had to scramble up a rock wall and go across little ledges about two, three foot wide and if you would have fallen off those ledges you would have fallen about 400 feet probably, and we were not roped up at any time on this climb but it was cool. It was a very neat experience and to get to the summit with those guys, it was just awesome.

Larry MuffetA couple of things I want to touch on here before we open it up for questions is one, what are you looking at next? I know you got something in the pipeline. I know you got something you’re thinking about doing next, so what’s the next big adventure?

Lonnie BedwellWell, I tell people the twofold answer on that. One, just doing something, just as long as you do something, take a step, keep moving, keep going is the key. You don’t have



to outdo the next thing because to me, it’s not a competition that way. It’s just that you do something.

You continue to live life if you will, but to answer your question specifically, I want to climb Chimney Rock which is out in Wyoming, Nebraska area. I think it’s 900 and some feet vertical climbing, so that’ll be top roping because I remember seeing it when I had my eyesight and would drive back and forth across the country from Idaho, so that’s probably going to happen within the next year and then I would love to go try to kayak the Zambezi River in Africa which is really big water, kind of makes the Grand Canyon look like some of the rivers around here from my understanding, so those are two of the big items on my list now and then possibly climbing Aconcagua down in South America which is 23,000 some odd feet. It’s the highest peak in South America.

Larry MuffetOutstanding. All right, my second thing I wanted to ask you or ask you to talk about is something that we as the lead-in, where I talked about making the seemingly impossible possible so could you talk to people about giving them some inspiration to get out there and try some of these things or just some inspirational things to get people out of their comfort zone and to try some things they haven’t tried before?



Lonnie BedwellI talk about three things that I think people need to overcome. One is their foolish pride. Secondly is fear and the third is pity and when I think about pride, I think we all need to have some of things that we do in life, but we need to get rid of that foolish pride where we feel like we should be able to do it on our own, everything on our own. Well, if we all stop and think about that, we have never been able to do everything on our own. Throughout our lives we’ve always had to have help, guidance, teaching, a hand or something to do things, so just because we’re visually impaired or whatever the case may be, why is it any different?

I focus about that a lot every day. Should I be a little frustrated at a time like man, if I could just see I could. Then I pause and think well, Lonnie, when you could see, a lot of this stuff you still couldn’t do so swallow that pride and get a little help at times, and then secondly, I think about fear, F-E-A-R. I like to say False Evidence About Reality, F-E-A-R, False Evidence About Reality and I also like to think of the fact of the Roosevelts. Eleanor Roosevelt, when she was losing her eyesight, she made a comment. “I thought the world was coming to an end that day or had come to an end until I took a step and it was still there.” How true so she made the comment, “You don’t have to have courage. You just have to act courageous and then see where that takes you.”



Then in thinking about her husband when he made the comment, “The only thing to fear is fear itself.” I really think about that. Most of the time when we get out here, we psych ourselves out of doing things. I’m not saying that you’re never afraid but yet do not walk outside the door because you think okay, if I walk outside there’s going to a dog biting me. Well, is there really a dog out there to bite you every time you step outside? You can’t think that way. You’ve got to get past that and I think a lot of people don’t do things because they’re afraid that they’re going to get made fun of.

They’re afraid that they’re not going to succeed or “reach the pentacle” or more often than not, they’re afraid of things other than just being afraid of getting hurt, so I think if you can take that fear and just realize that it’s real. There’s things you can be afraid but do you need to be afraid of your own shadow? I’m blind now. I can’t see my shadow following me. It’s there but why be afraid of it?

To move on and then I’d like to talk about pity, P-I-T-Y. I like to say Poor Information to Yourself, P-I-T-Y, Poor Information to Yourself. Oh, I’m useless anymore. Oh, I’m not good enough. Oh, I can’t. Oh, whatever those reasons are that you’re feeling sorry for yourself, and once again, pity’s a real feeling, but it’s a mind thing so you take pity, you take fear and you take that foolish pride and



realize they’re real but you set them aside if you can. You control your mind. Don’t let your mind control you. These things happened to you. They’re a part of you but you cannot let them define who you are, who you’re going to become or what you’re going to do in life so you put them aside. Otherwise if you live in fear and pity you go nowhere. You put them aside and you just live.

Larry MuffetLonnie, Norma has a question. She said, “What kind of work do you do that allows you to take so much time off to do all these various adventures?”

Lonnie BedwellI build houses. I didn’t do home construction until I lost my eyesight, and I needed a little bit more to do so I got in to home construction so for about the last ten, eleven years I suppose, I’ve been building houses, anything from framing, sheeting, wiring, roofing. As a matter of fact, I was on a roof earlier this morning, finishing up the decking on a roof so we could paper it, put the shingles on it tomorrow just before this phone call and it’s all volunteer. I’m on disability.

These people around here, they just have me help and so my income is disability-based which I’m very fortunate to have that, but all the volunteer work is just that. It’s just volunteer so any time I need to go do these adventures, I



tell these people, “Hey, I’ll be back when I’m back.” But I definitely try not to put them in a bind and leave whenever we have a roof open or something critical like that.

Larry MuffetAll right, I’m going to release the microphone here, and let’s see if we have any questions for Lonnie. Go ahead and feel free to jump in and ask some questions for this fascinating man.

SheilaHi, this is Sheila. My question is what does your family think about this kind of stuff? Because some of the stuff sounds very interesting to me, not that I would want to do it but I would love to go biking and that kind of thing and do other things, but my husband gets so scared about me doing things that I just decide it’s not worth the pain of trying to explain that I’m not going to get killed or I’m not going to have a problem.

Lonnie BedwellI love that question and I thank you for it. I’m going to answer this in a long roundabout way with a few stories added because they’re glad that I do it now but yet they’re still apprehensive, and I tell this story here in my book as a matter of fact. It was about three months after I lost my eyesight that I was standing outside. I managed to get myself outside with a broomstick, had no mobility training



and I somehow found my barn with a broomstick, so I’m only about 200 feet from the house and weeds were up to my chest and I turned around and I walked back up toward the house, and my youngest daughter at the time was five.

I called her Bug. Her name is Taylor and she looked up at me and she said, “Daddy, what’s wrong?” I told her, I said, “I’m just a little,” at first I told her, “nothing, Bug.” She said, “Yeah, there is, daddy. What’s wrong?” I said, “I’m just a little frustrated.” I heard her stomp her foot, deepen her voice and said, “Daddy, why are you frustrated?” I said, “Well, Bug,” I said, “if you got to know, I can’t get in to my barn without walking through chest-high weeds and I can’t see to mow them.” She stood there for a minute and she said, “Well, I’ll help you.” I said, “What?” She said, “Daddy, I’ll help you.” I said, “All right, girl, if you got the guts, lead me to the garage to the mower.”

She did and I’m going to cut this story short but needless to say, she got me out to the barn, found the lawnmower. She got off and I mowed three laps around that barn by myself on the riding lawnmower, touching the barn with my hand and then the broomstick. It was after that that my – about ten minutes later my dad pulled up and he asked, “Who mowed around the barn?” I had Bug tell him and he got furiously mad. He told me just like your husband, “I told you if you ever need anything done around here, you



let me know, and I’ll do it or I’ll find someone who can.” I told him, I said, “No, dad.” I said, “Do you realize what just happened here?” He said, “You mowed around the barn.” I said, “No.” I said, “It’s much more than that.” I said, “See that little girl right there.” I said, “To her and her two sisters my name is still daddy. It’s not changed. To her and her two sisters I still can. To her and her two sisters I’m still the man.”

I felt so powerful in that moment that it made me realize I’m still the same person. I just can’t see. I still have worth. I still have value and I still can. I said, “Dad, that’s what it’s going to be. I’m going to keep going.” I tell people all the time in my opinion, this is the second time the good Lord sent a child to save me. That’s just my personal belief but I distinctly remember going on from there and while all the adults were telling me no, no, no, my kids, my two younger daughters, especially my two youngest ones, were helping me do things, and then the adults finally figured out they needed to jump in line because we’re going to do it one way or the other so it led to us continuing on and now I tell people all the time, I describe this stuff as walls.

When I’m talking to the caregivers and everybody, I say, “You know we feel like we’ve been dropped in behind a bunch of walls in a prison that we see no way over, no way out, under, around or through. We’re stuck.” I said,



“Then along comes somebody with a vision of what’s on the other side of those walls called Life, and they put a door in it for us and they lead us through to the life we thought no longer existed.” I tell the caregivers, I say, “What right do you have when I’m shown a way out to shut and lock that door? Are you shutting and locking that door for you or are you doing it for me?” They know the answer. They know the answer.

They cannot keep us in a bubble because they’re not letting us live. Sure, things can happen but can’t every one of us get off of here today, walk out the door and get struck by lightning or get in an automobile accident. Something can happen to anybody at any time, but we have got to be afforded the right to live and do what we can do and if they’ll just jump on board and help us, I understand the word disabled. I understand it, appreciate it, respect it but in a lot of ways, I don’t like it because it means not able. I prefer to say I’m differently abled. We can figure it out. We just got to do it a different way. Help me do it and let’s do it and we can accomplish so much.

Larry MuffetLonnie, David and I are thinking along the same lines of when are you writing a book?



Lonnie BedwellWell, my first book is already out. The title of it is 226 which is the number of miles down the Grand Canyon, and you can get it through Amazon, on Kindle version and/or in hard print right now. I am hoping by Thanksgiving to have it out in audio form, and you can also buy it at Barnes & Noble and some of those stores.

If they don’t have it in stock, they can purchase it, and it’s very humbling because it became a national bestseller here about a month and a half ago and I was out in Hollywood and received an award for that but that book is just a little brief autobiography of my life as a kid, talks about the hunting accident, the recovery and the trip down the Grand Canyon so whoever’s listening to this has heard some of what’s in the book, but I’d love to maybe someday write another book that might lead a little more toward inspirational stuff. I don’t know.

Larry MuffetThere was a question. Marty wants to know will the book be available through BARD or NLS?

Lonnie BedwellI do not know at this time. Like I said, I just got to get it out in audio form first, and then I will have to see BARD or NLS will pick it up. I don’t know if they’ll do so and my guess is, if there’s enough people make the request, it



probably will be made available. I would like to have it available.

Larry MuffetRachel has a question. Do you do speaking engagements and what is your web address or email? I guess I’ll ask if you want to give that out, or if you have one for your business obligations but what about speaking engagements?

Lonnie BedwellI’ve just started doing some speaking engagements on a bigger scale here within the last year. I was speaking at local schools and organizations, churches and civic [sense 0:50:41] organizations for several years now but just started speaking at colleges and conventions within the last nine months to a year. My website should be launching hopefully soon. It’s going to be www.lonniebedwell.com.

My Facebook page is already out there. It’s under Lonnie Bedwell and people have been contacting me through that Facebook page to do speaking engagements by messaging through that Facebook page, so that’s pretty much how I’ve done it at this point and then I can give out my email address. It is Lonnie, L-O-N-N-I-E, dot R, dot Bedwell, B-E-D-W-E-L-L at att.net, Alpha, Tango, Tango, dot net, [email protected] and I will not open an


mailto:[email protected]

http://www.lonniebedwell.com/


email, unless it’s got a very good description in it because I’m afraid of viruses.

Larry MuffetGot time for one more question before we start wrapping up here today so any other questions for Lonnie?

SheilaHi, this is Sheila again. Of all the things that you’ve done, what was your favorite?

Lonnie BedwellAs far as adaptive adventures go, I love the rock climbing, the sheer face rock climbing, straight up climbing, top roping and the kayaking. Those are by far my favorite but I always will say the pentacle of anything I’ve ever achieved in my life is being a single father raising my three daughters, and all three of them are becoming pretty good young ladies.

Larry MuffetGreat answer. I want to let everyone know that this seminar, like all of Hadley Seminars, will be archived on our website and available for your use anytime around the clock. Also, each Hadley Seminar is now made available as a podcast which you can download to your computer or mobile device. If today’s seminar has you interested in



this or related topics, please check out the seminar archives and Hadley’s course list.

Lonnie and I both thank you or your participation. Your questions were outstanding and greatly contributed to the value of this seminar. Hadley values your feedback. Please let us know what you thought about today’s seminar and please give us suggestions for future topics. One way you can do that is by dropping us an email to [email protected]. That’s F-E-E-D-B-A-C-K, the @ sign, H-A-D-L-E-Y, dot, E-D-U.

Another way to share is to by completing a short online survey I’m going to post as we conclude today. I’m going to turn the microphone back over to Lonnie one last time to see if he wants to make any final closing comments. Lonnie?

Lonnie BedwellYes, I want to thank everybody once again for participating and listening and Hadley for giving me this opportunity to speak on Veterans Day. To all the veterans out there once again, thank you for your service, for your sacrifices and for those who are currently serving or family members who are serving, my deepest gratitude goes out to you and to everybody out there listening, please take the time and really live your life.


mailto:[email protected]


I love to describe life as a river. It’s always changing. It’s always bending. Sometimes it’s calm. Sometimes it’s turbulent. Sometimes you need to jump over in to an eddy where it’s calm and survey how you’re going to go on down this river of life, but you can’t just stay in that eddy because it becomes stagnant and poison. You’ve got to jump out in the flow and go with it and live it and just that, so thank you all so very, very much.

Larry MuffetThank you, Lonnie. That was fantastic, very inspirational and I was getting goosebumps listening to some of those stories in the Grand Canyon so just fantastic, and thank you for your service to this country and thank you for being an inspiration to all of us. I want to personally thank all of you out in the audience today for taking the time to be part of this and your participation and your questions and again, Happy Veterans Day to everyone and appreciate this very much, and it was really enjoyable for me to be a part of this today and I want to thank you all and goodbye for now.

[End of Audio – 0:55:21]


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