A few words from Simon Skipp, a Royal Marine veteran who attended one of our week's adaptive skiing trips to Breckenridge, Colorado, this February. A beautiful description of the impact of the experience on his mental health, self belief and outlook on life.
When you’re at home alone, standing in front of a mirror, it’s easy to place a grey filter over your life. The longer you stare at the reflection, the darker that filter becomes. As it darkens, it turns into a magnet - pulling in negative energy, feelings, and emotions. The more it draws in, the less positivity remains. The balance between love and hate fades, and slowly, you begin to forget who you really are.
You forget the sparkle and magic you once carried. The days of being the life and soul feel like a distant memory. You forget who you are and who you once became. The moments that shaped you turn into history, and like many pivotal moments in history, the truth is forgotten.
What you forget, while lost in your reflection, is that the image staring back at you - shadowed by that grey darkness - is already in the past. It’s fractions of a second old. And because it belongs to the past, you have a choice.
That choice is simple but powerful: you can let that reflection define you, or you can brush it aside. After all, you are the one who decides which filter you look through.
Staring down the concave curve at the peak of a black run, you have a choice.
What you forget is that to reach this moment -to even stand here - you’ve already made a succession of brave choices.
Those choices often begin as things most people see as small: reading an email, filling out an application form of interest. To many, these are simple steps. But are they really simple when the way you take those steps is different from everyone else’s - when injury or disability changes the terrain beneath your feet?
That application form is more than paperwork. It’s the moment a dream begins to harden into a goal. After all, the only real difference between a dream and a goal is the deadline you dare to set yourself.
Through all the hard decisions along this journey, kindness - a friendly face - has sometimes set that goal for you before you even realised you were ready. And those first steps, no matter how small they look from the outside, can be the hardest of all.
But when you link those steps together, they lead somewhere. They lead you into a room filled with like-minded people. Onto a plane that crosses oceans. Onto a ski lift that carries you across mountains - toward the moment where you stand at the top, looking down, realising you’ve already proven you’re capable.
Travelling up the Kenosha Superchair to the top of Peak Six, you sit before the colossal Tenmile Range in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.
The easy part is standing on the green line, waiting for the next rotation of the chair to come around and whisk you up the mountain. At that point, all risk is taken out of your hands. You rely entirely on the continuous safety checks carried out by the resort staff.
As soon as the lip of the seat hits the crease of your hamstrings and calves, you’re forced to take a seat, and your journey begins. The chair jolts forward and the ascent starts.
At that moment, your filter begins to change. You stop seeing life through a grey tint, and curiosity takes over. You become absorbed by the undulation of the panorama in front of you. You watch people emerge from the various runs they’ve explored - whether from a meandering route cut through the mountain, cocooned in a kaleidoscope of greens, browns, and whites from lodgepole pine, Engelmann spruce, Colorado blue spruce, and subalpine fir - like a river following its own design.
And then you remember who you were, what you’ve achieved, and who you still could be.
It brings back the memory of stepping out of a train carriage onto the platform at CTC, overlooking the River Exe estuary at Lympstone - standing with anticipation and excitement, waiting for the next chapter of your life to begin.
As the lift rises higher, the nerves creep in. Your body becomes a cocktail of adrenaline, endorphins, happiness, and fear. It’s enough to make you need a nervous wee. Nervously, you start talking to the person next to you - going against all the advice your parents gave you as a child about talking to strangers.
But is he really a stranger?
He sat in the same coffee bar as you in Heathrow Airport, waiting to board a British Airways flight to Denver. He was on the same transport from Denver Airport to Beaver Run in Breckenridge. And like you, he had written a cheque for an undisclosed amount - his life - for his country. Through some strange turn of events, for some unknown reason, someone had decided to cash part of that cheque, leaving him viewing life through the same filters you did.
In that moment, you realise that despite not sharing the same cap badge, and despite different lengths of service, you have far more in common than the latte you both ordered at Starbucks.
As the chair crests the summit, the safety bar that embraced you throughout the ascent is removed. You are now left with nothing but your own skill, experience, nerve, and determination to make the descent as safely as possible.
To the right of the lift, you see a blue sign: Kenosha Superchair — 12,302 feet
Awaken your sixth sense.
If nausea, fatigue, and shortness of breath count, then yes - your sixth sense is well and truly awake. The temperature has dropped dramatically. The wind bites into the exposed flesh of your cheeks, cutting through you like a thousand daggers. Instinctively, you pull your snood up over your chin to cover any exposed skin.
Despite the cold, and despite only knowing the person next to you for a short time, they ask if you’d like a photo together. As long as that photo exists, you are now immortalised in time — like Edmund Hillary on Everest or Sir Ranulph Fiennes crossing the Arctic.
The mirrored reflection of the mountains in your goggles hides the thoughts and emotions you’re really feeling.
As you follow the horizon of the range ahead, you begin to feel its healing power - its mystique. Your thoughts start to slow. Stress dissolves. A sense of wellbeing returns. Once again, that grey filter fades.
As you traverse across the track, adrenaline surges. Descending is easy — gravity will do that.
You just have to be brave enough to make the first turn.
At that moment, you feel like your old self again.
Confidence creeps back in - not loud, not cocky - just enough to remind you that you’re still capable.
You’ve been pushed past what you thought were your limits. Past comfort. Past expectation. And you’re still standing.
By the end of the day, it isn’t the mountain that stays with you.
It’s the human moment.
A warm, almost motherly hug. Kindness from a complete stranger who genuinely wants to know how your day was - not out of politeness, but because they mean it. No agenda. No judgment.
There aren’t words for that kind of gratitude. Not really.
Only the quiet understanding that you were invited into something rare. Something that doesn’t happen often.
A once-in-a-lifetime moment — and somehow, you were there for it.
Thank you.
