Track chair gets more people onto Riverside State Park trails

There’s been a new way to get around on Riverside State Park trails over the past few months.

Washington State Parks has been offering people with limited mobility a chance to explore trails on an all-terrain motorized wheelchair, called the Action Trackchair.

Housed at the park’s headquarters near Nine Mile Falls, the chair arrived at the park in November and has been getting people onto nearby trails ever since.

It’s been popular. Rex Schultz, a Washington State Parks spokesperson, said about 25 people have used the chair already, and that the park’s typical Monday and Friday reservations are already booked through the end of April, when the chair is scheduled to leave the park.

They’re keeping a wait list, he noted, and they plan to get as many people out as possible.

“We’re going to call people and find times that work and get the people who want to be able to use it out,” Schultz said. “We may not be able to handle everybody that’s interested, but we’ll do as many of them as we can.”

This winter was a sort of trial run for the chair at Riverside. Washington State Parks purchased it two years ago to launch a pilot program of offering track-chair rides for people with mobility challenges at Lake Sammammish State Park in King County. It’s headed back there at the end of April.

The chair has snowmobile-style tracks for wheels that allow it to handle a variety of terrain. Users get the chair for 90 minutes. They can take it on trails in the Trautman Conservation Area, just behind park headquarters, or they can use it to cruise the Centennial Trail along the river.

“I’ve actually had guys come and use it to go fishing,” Schultz said.

Schultz or another State Parks staffer often accompanies the chair’s users on their trips, at least until they get the hang of driving the chair. It’s run by a joystick and has no problem crushing pine cones or handling any other minor obstacles presented by the trail.

He said people most often tell him the chair could use a stiffer suspension – it gets a little bouncy – but that the seat is soft.

A wide variety of people have come to the park to use the chair, Schultz said, and it’s helped them see parts of the park that might otherwise be unaccessible to them.

“It’s really just to give another level of access to the dirt trails to the segment of the population that maybe no longer has that access,” Schultz said. “This is able to get them back out into the more natural part of the park.”

More information about the program is available by calling the state park at (509)465-5064.