{"id":21837,"date":"2024-12-25T01:36:24","date_gmt":"2024-12-25T08:36:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/?p=21837"},"modified":"2024-12-23T16:38:55","modified_gmt":"2024-12-23T23:38:55","slug":"higher-ground-kicks-off-veterans-snow-sports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2024\/12\/25\/higher-ground-kicks-off-veterans-snow-sports\/","title":{"rendered":"Higher Ground Kicks Off  Veterans Snow Sports"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>BY ISAIAH FRIZZELL<\/em><\/p>\n<p>For more than 25 years, the Sun Valley non-profit Higher Ground has helped people of all abilities deal with trauma and social rehabilitation. \u201cWith recreation, therapy, and continued support, we bridge the gap between disability and belonging.\u201d<br \/>\nKnown as a premier therapeutic support service across the country, Higher Ground has raised the bar for adaptive recreation and psychological support. Offering innovative therapeutic recreation, adaptive sports as well as Veterans and First-Responders Programs, it helps individuals with disabilities reintegrate their body and minds largely using the rigors and challenges of outdoor activity. From scuba, mountain biking, mountaineering, climbing, skiing, surfing, and cycling, their programs run the gamut of what therapy can look like, done in the wild.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Veterans Snow Sports<\/strong><br \/>\nA week ago, HG wrapped its first Veteran\u2019s Snow Sports program of the year with eight veterans and 16 volunteers they\u2019re just getting started on helping veterans win the winter this season.<br \/>\nCertified Therapeutic Recreation Specialist Kristian King is the program manager for the Veterans and First Responders program. He has a master\u2019s in clinical psychology and has worked with HG for eight years. King is passionate, about its ground-breaking work.<br \/>\n\u201cI think what\u2019s great about recreational therapy is that it\u2019s giving people immediate feedback to be able to gain resiliency, adaptability, and flexibility through recreation and leisure,\u201d he said. \u201cSo people are able to kind of widen that window of tolerance, if you will.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Baby Steps<\/strong><br \/>\n\u201cIt\u2019s like they stepped out of their houses to come to our program, right?\u201d King said. \u201cSo that\u2019s a step in itself. And then they actually show up to a novel environment where they don\u2019t know anyone. HG sets a really great tone through our volunteers, our donors, our staff to set that safe environment and container for them to almost kind of fall forward.\u201c<br \/>\n\u201cAs a veteran or a first responder, they\u2019re coming from a field or an operation where there\u2019s not much room for error,\u201d he continued. \u201cSo now they realize, oh, those skills served me once, right, being aware, being cognizant. But now they\u2019re in a space where it\u2019s like, oh, I can make mistakes but this is also serving me. I can fall on my ski run and get back up. It\u2019s kind of like that saying, \u201cIt\u2019s not how you fall, it\u2019s how you get back up.\u201d<br \/>\nTrauma recovery is a beautiful and beguilingly simplistic endeavor. The rigors of service often instill a type of discipline that borders on trauma and HG helps these veterans massage that discipline into physical and psychological socialization through this unique interaction with accompanied outdoor activity.<br \/>\n\u201cIn this most recent program pretty much every single participant was in some form of post-traumatic growth. We had one, she was in the Navy in a top position as an officer and had just got out two years ago. Then we had someone who had gotten out a decade ago, but was a new amputee. It\u2019s like everyone is at a different page in their journey, but I think the camaraderie and unity within having similar backgrounds really set the tone for them to be able to feel supported and in a space where they can actually be vulnerable. That\u2019s another thing: vulnerability within service, like there\u2019s no space or time for that, right? So this gave them space to be able to take their masks off, and it\u2019s like \u2018I\u2019m okay, I\u2019m doing fine, I can push through the pain\u2019 and they realize their problems and issues are valid and they\u2019re able to learn from each other.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Word of Mouth<\/strong><br \/>\nHG runs 24 programs a year across the nation and works with Veterans Affairs to serve veterans through its own grant funding. King leads about eight programs a year, ranging from the Palo Alto cycling program to a SoCal surfing program, ocean sports, scuba and skiing. With three full-time staff members including King, Alaina Wilson, and HG alum Adam Shick their volunteer staff numbers are at 20. A small crew doing brilliant work.<br \/>\nSo how can you attend or refer a friend?<br \/>\nThere are four qualifiers for attending: physical injuries or Polytrauma, Traumatic Brain Injury, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Military Sexual Trauma (MST).<br \/>\nMST is an often misunderstood and shunned condition where both men and women experience sexual assault in the military and often from their superiors.<br \/>\n\u201cIt happens across the spectrum,\u201d King said. \u201cBut with men it\u2019s just way less reported, unfortunately. I would say we get at least two, maybe three participants on every program that have experienced it and you see the same stigma with suicide. People are afraid that if you bring up suicide, you\u2019re going to put it in the forefront of people\u2019s minds, and then it\u2019s going to manifest itself. The research has shown the exact opposite. The more you educate about it, the less prevalent it is.\u201d<br \/>\nHG has a righteous authenticity due to 25 years of therapeutic experience across the country. It works in every season of the year. Relying largely on word of mouth, it has helped more than 1,000 participants while growing to a 28-week-long program year largely through word of mouth alone.<br \/>\nIf you know someone who might benefit, check out HG\u2019s message, speak to a representative and take the first step in bringing someone out of the darkness and into the light.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>BY ISAIAH FRIZZELL For more than 25 years, the Sun Valley non-profit Higher Ground has helped people of all abilities deal with trauma and social rehabilitation. \u201cWith recreation, therapy, and continued support, we bridge the gap between disability and belonging.\u201d Known as a premier therapeutic support service across the country, Higher Ground has raised the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":21838,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,6,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-21837","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-community","8":"category-event","9":"category-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21837"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21837\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21839,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21837\/revisions\/21839"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}