With at least 4,000 IDF soldiers now officially recognized as disabled – tragically, since Oct. 7, that number keeps growing – many more Israelis have become wheelchair users. Until recently, that meant an end to treks in nature, especially on sandy or rocky trails.
Thankfully, that is no longer true. As a result of the efforts of Omer Zur – a veteran and son of a wheelchair-using retired IDF officer – paraplegics can participate in hikes that go off-road, even venturing into rough terrain.
Zur’s dream of opening the wilderness to wheelchair-bound people bloomed following his post-army grand tour. After completing his IDF service, Zur spent three years exploring the world. On one of Tibet’s most breathtaking peaks, he thought about how unfair it was that his father, from whom he inherited his love of nature, could not join him due to his disability. Zur’s father, Shmulik, became paralyzed from the chest down during the Yom Kippur War.
Back home in Rosh Pina, Zur decided to find a way for his father to hike in nature. His first move was to find a wheelchair suitable for hiking. He acquired a French wheelchair, the industry leader that had been on the market for several decades, and coaxed his father to try it out.
That proved to be a colossal failure. After a short ride in the family garden, Shmulik was ready to bail out. “This chair is a death machine,” the elder Zur told his son.
The problem was that Shmulik didn’t feel safe, says Michal Raicher, operations manager at Paratrek, the company Zur eventually founded to create a better alternative.
“The chair sat high above the ground and had only one wheel below the rider, so that he felt no control,” she says. “He needed to feel involved and in control.”
After a long conversation with his father, Zur contacted a mechanical engineer, a product designer, and then a metal shop to retrofit an existing wheelchair for off-road use.
By adding shock absorbers and adjustable tires – extra-large for rocky terrain and small for narrow passages – and creating a slight backward tilt to position the rider’s center of gravity so that the people pushing the chair wouldn’t feel te person’s weight, Zur and his team created the Trekker, a wheelchair Shmulik could ride in while feeling safe and also engaged with the terrain.
The Trekker: Letting the wheelchair-bound go hiking
Now it was time to take the Trekker into the field. In 2008, Zur, his father, and a team of friends debuted the Trekker on a challenging Turkish hiking trail called the Lycian Way, which skirts coastal mountains and features many rises and dips that challenge even experienced hikers. The friends were needed because pushing the Trekker through rough terrain can require as many as five people.
They were joined by a camera crew, which filmed their journey for the popular television program Ulpan Shishi. The segment was called “Four-Wheel Dad,” or in Hebrew, “Al Arba.” Excited as he was, the elder Zur was also hesitant. “At first, Shmulik wouldn’t let anyone help him. The dynamic between them grew so unpleasant that Omer was ready to leave,” says Raicher.
But after two days of resisting help, Shmulik made a mental switch. “He realized that he could accept help and come out empowered,” she says.
That first trip was a great success. “We realized that the Trekker was a durable tool that makes it through all obstacles and challenges of the terrain, ” says Raicher. Zur and his buddies had packed 40 kilograms’ worth of replacement parts, none of which were needed. Over an entire month, the only adjustments needed were five flat tire fixes. Zur also understood that hiking with a wheelchair-bound person is life-altering not just for the rider but also for those pushing him.
After that trip, Zur recognized that he needed to make his invention available to others. And he would need to train the pushers.
“The biggest part of the training is soft skills communication on how to make inclusion impactful and worthwhile,” says Raicher. “We teach people to treat the rider as a person rather than a burden.”
Paratrek’s clients include the Education Ministry, which uses them to include wheelchair-bound students on class trips. Paratrek has run integrated hiking tours to destinations such as Mount Sinai, which is no longer accessible, and to Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and Spain’s Camino de Santiago trail.
“The helpers get to understand people in wheelchairs,” says Steve Bloomberg, an England-born engineer who has used a wheelchair since he was wounded in a terrorist shooting attack in Samaria in 2001. Bloomberg has been a regular participant in hikes sponsored by the terror victims support organization OneFamily.
“As soon as they announce the date [of the hikes], I put it down in my diary. I get to enjoy seeing views and breathing air I could never reach in my own wheelchair; I come away feeling that there is no terrain we can’t conquer,” says Bloomberg. He also describes the trip’s effect on the pushers. “Before they come on these trips, they [the helpers] think that people in wheelchairs can’t think or talk, but they see that we are perfectly normal,” he observes.
After Oct. 7, many of these trips stopped, but Paratrek has now begun working with the IDF.
This past winter, Zur ran a workshop for an army unit that had just left Gaza following a tour in which the team commander and two other team members were killed and three soldiers lost their ability to walk. Taking the group to a rough spot in the Jerusalem Forest, Zur helped the team cement their bonds and consider their future in light of what they had gone through via the shared experience of riding in or pushing the Trekker. “They had to learn to trust each other and to create new bonds,” says Zur.
“To see these guys, who thought everything was shattered, rebuilding something together was very moving for me.”