Eileen Szychowski: The Mule Ride That Opened Grand Canyon to a Disabled Ranger

Based on oral history interviews that Perri Meldon and Lu Ann Jones of the NPS Park History Program recorded with Eileen Szychowski in January and February 2022, part of the initiative Telling Our Untold Stories: Civil Rights and the National Park Service.

When Eileen Szychowski visited Grand Canyon in 1981, she planned to ride a mule from the rim to the canyon floor. A policy barred people with physical disabilities from the trip. Szychowski, an expert horsewoman who knew her legal rights, asked to speak to management, and left the park with an offer to come back as a seasonal ranger dedicated to access and disability rights.

"How to Develop a Thick Skin 101"

In 1964, at age 11, Szychowski contracted a rare neuromuscular disease. Her family, then living and working on a military base in Germany, flew her to Walter Reed Hospital in Maryland, where she spent several months in rehabilitation, followed by more therapy in California hospitals after the family moved there. The disease paralyzed sensory and motor function in all her limbs. She regained control of much of her body, but lives with residual paralysis and uses crutches, leg braces and a power chair.

Back at school after years in and out of hospitals, she struggled. She was not used to playing with children her age, and both classmates and teachers discriminated against her. In the interview she recalled that there were no accommodations for students with physical disabilities: several teachers objected to having her in class, assuming she would need extra help or be disruptive, and one was upset that the class had not got outside fast enough during a fire drill because of her. Desks and stairs were hard. Her only accommodation was leaving class five minutes early, so she could make her way through the halls before other students rushed through them. These were the years she learned what she calls "How to Develop a Thick Skin 101."

Ranger Eileen Szychowski at Grand Canyon, 1982. NPS/C. Rudd.

College was different. Szychowski found disabled peers, joined the Disabled Students Union, and went on a cross-disability camping trip in California's Sierra Nevada. Those years, and later work at a vocational training center, gave her a first sense of disability pride.

In 1978 she became a case manager at a vocational skills center for people with mental illness and developmental disabilities. In her free time she rode with Josef Rivers, who was also disabled and ran a free therapeutic riding program for people with disabilities using a range of techniques and adaptive equipment. He fostered her lifelong love of riding; she came to ride three times a week and mastered several styles. Impressed, Rivers offered that she could one day take some of his horses and start her own therapeutic riding center. She accepted eagerly, but promised to think it over for a year before committing.

Knowing her rights

In 1981 Szychowski visited Grand Canyon with friends from the center. They went backpacking; she meant to ride a mule into the canyon, a highlight for thousands of visitors. At Bright Angel Lodge, a front desk employee told her she could not ride because of her disability.

Hurt and disappointed, she knew the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended, was on her side. After dropping her friends at the trailhead she went back, waited until the line had cleared, and told the employee she was not there to ask for a ride again, but that the policy was illegal and she wanted to speak to someone about it. The call went up the chain to Jan Cutler, who directed the department that ran the mule rides. Szychowski explained that the act prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability and that a concessioner doing business with the federal government was bound by it, and made clear she was not planning to sue, only that something had to change.

Cutler introduced her to Karen Berggren, the park's special populations coordinator; the National Park Service's "special populations program" was the forerunner of its Accessibility Program. Berggren took her to the Albright Training Center, where instructors invited her to speak on disability and accessibility at a ranger skills course a few months later. Superintendent Richard Marks was so impressed by her knowledge and riding experience that he offered her a seasonal ranger job for 1982. She accepted gladly.

"Just another way of being"

As a ranger, Szychowski worked at the Yavapai Museum of Geology. She and her colleagues soon noticed that visitors misread her crutches, joking that she must have fallen into the canyon. Meeting hundreds of visitors, she used each encounter to change how nondisabled people thought about disability.

In the interview, she said her aim was to get people quickly to the understanding that having a disability is simply a way of being: she was no better and no worse than anyone else. She wanted to move people away from treating disabled people as inspirational, which she called nonsense and deeply harmful to the disability community, because disabled people are just people, some pleasant and some not, like everyone else.

Szychowski speaking to visitors at Grand Canyon, 1982. NPS/C. Rudd.

She often raised her disability herself before visitors could guess or joke about it. When she met resistance or discrimination from some people working at the park, which was rare, she addressed it quickly, and was surprised and moved by how her colleagues backed her.

Tracks by the river

Szychowski also proved her riding to the park staff, on her own horse, Guinevere, who knew her style. Once Guinevere had adjusted to the climate and terrain, the two set off with Eldon Bowman, a friend and outfitter, on a two-day ride toward the Colorado River, which she calls the "beating heart of the Grand Canyon."

Szychowski on horseback in the Grand Canyon, 1982. NPS/C. Rudd.

After a night at Phantom Ranch, she asked to visit the river before leaving. With her companion's help she dismounted and walked to the water's edge, where the wet sand was crowded with tracks she could read: deer, coyote, what looked like lizard, the huge prints of a great blue heron, and many tiny ones she could not name. Standing with her toes and her crutch in the water, she felt deeply grateful to everyone who had helped her and her horse reach that spot.

As they turned to ride back up, she looked over her shoulder and saw her own crutch tracks leading to the river among those of the coyote, deer and heron. She recalled feeling for a moment like the first person on the moon, and then something better: that she belonged there, part of the natural order of things. It is, she said, a moment she will carry to her grave.

After the canyon

The 1982 season transformed her. Szychowski widened access for her colleagues and those who followed, learned natural and cultural resource interpretation, and explored the canyon. But she knew she would not stay: she was ready to take up Rivers's offer.

Before leaving she recommended several people with disabilities to be hired as seasonal rangers, and left nondisabled colleagues better aware of the need for access and less ready to make assumptions about disability and ability. She acknowledges that disabled people and other marginalized groups still face barriers to work and full participation in public spaces, in the Park Service and beyond.

In 1983 Szychowski moved to Phoenix and built a network of disabled and nondisabled allies. She retired in 2004, and her therapeutic riding center, Camelot, still runs, free of charge for every rider.

Szychowski on horseback at Grand Canyon, 1982. NPS/C. Rudd.

Sources

• National Park Service, Grand Canyon National Park, "Eileen Szychowski: Expanding Access at Grand Canyon," part of the series "Whose Story is History? The Diverse History of Grand Canyon": https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/oral-history-spotlight-eileen-szychowski.htm
• The NPS page includes audio excerpts of the 2022 interviews; the interviews will be archived at the NPS History Collection, Harpers Ferry Center.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.