What started as curiosity for a former Okotokian has morphed into an initiative breaking boundaries in adaptive sports.
Tyson Rettie’s Braille Mountain Initiative is weeks away from its inaugural adventure, bringing four visually impaired individuals the opportunity to ski freely in B.C.’s backcountry as part of a seven-day journey.
“I’m hoping that at the end of this trip that it’s not the one time they’re out in the backcountry,” he added. “Hopefully they fall in love with the sport and seek ways to get involved with their local ski touring communities and hopefully this becomes a bit of a proof of concept where we show this can be done safely.
“That this is something they’re more than capable and that they won’t necessarily need Braille Mountain Initiative to continue on with the sport in their own area.”
For Rettie, the goal is to set the skiers off on a new path for this type of activity right from the first run, hoping they recognize the sense of freedom and accomplishment he’s experienced in the backcountry as a visually impaired person himself.
Rettie, a Foothills Composite graduate in 2009 who now calls Invermere home, continues to ski despite losing central vision in both of his eyes over the past three-plus years due to a rare genetic condition.
Growing up on an acreage just south of Okotoks, Rettie developed a passion for all things alpine resulting from frequent trips to the family cabin in Windermere, skiing at nearby Panorama and Fairmont Hot Springs resorts.
At the age of 19, he began working for a catskiing company in Rossland, B.C. and crafted a career as a ski guide and avalanche professional. Rettie was part of a group of three to launch a catskiing and heliskiing operation in China, the latter the first of its kind in the country, in 2017.
One year later, in late 2018, Rettie began to quickly lose vision in his right eye over a two-week period.
“It went from having a little blurriness to having a very substantial central blind spot where I don’t see anything at all as well as a deterioration of my peripheral vision,” he said. “And it takes a little bit of time to adapt to not being able to see out of one eye, it was a bit of an adjustment, but I was able to continue on with a very normal life.”
Rettie continued to work at Great Canadian Heliskiing that year blind in one eye and passed his final ski guide exam and continued living life as he had.
The vision problems then began to take hold on his left eye in the early summer 2019.
“That is a huge, huge change – the big difference between being blind in one eye and blind in two eyes,” he added. “There was a period where there was no real clear answer as to why the vision loss had taken place, there was a lot of time seeing various different specialists and chasing down that answer.”
Rettie, who later that summer recovered some of his peripheral vision, would be diagnosed with Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy, a rare genetic condition, that filled in the blanks for a number of other health issues that had arisen.
“I got some testing results back from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester (Minn.) and that indicated I had a mitochondrial gene mutation,” he said. “It answered all of these things, they’re all tied together, essentially this mutation has caused the vision loss, the kidney disease, the weight loss and digestive system issues.
“However, through all of this I was very confident that I was never going to give up skiing. I was already aware that some blind people were skiing at resorts.”
With the vision loss, Rettie would have to shelf his career path as a heliskiing guide, but in looking up opportunities for backcountry skiing for those visually impaired he discovered a need that hadn’t been filled.
“When I started looking into how I was going to be employed and be involved in the industry I thought there’s got to be some sort of adaptive snow sports program that was providing backcountry skiing to the blind,” he said. “When I spoke to a few adaptive sports programs they said ‘no that’s not something we’ve considered offering, issues with liability.’
“I just thought that seems bizarre. I’m still skiing in the backcountry with friends, it’s definitely something that can be done. So I thought here’s a deficit in the adaptive snow sports world.”
From there the non-profit Braille Mountain Initiative was born in May 2020 and word quickly spread of its concept with Rettie’s story attracting media attention at the local and national level.
“It shows that there is real interest and support for this out there, this is all funded by donations from like-minded people,” he said. “It’s been really amazing, I haven’t really had to do a lot to spread awareness on my own, I’ve had individuals reach out.
“It also shows the level of interest amongst the public with the way it has taken off on its own.”
Within a year of launching Braille, its first trip will take place when four visually impaired skiers as well as their sighted guides will descend upon the Sorcerer Lodge for a week-long backcountry trip on British Columbia’s Selkirk Mountain Range.
The participants range from former Paralympians to a 20-year-old ski racer with albinism and resulting extreme light sensitivity - representing the highly variable degrees of vision loss out there.
The off-the-grid skiing adventure is ideal for its access to massive open alpine terrain, giving the participants the most free and open experience possible.
“We can set our skiers up and say you’ve got nothing to hit for 4 or 5 hundred metres,” he said. “Just ski as fast as you like and we’ll meet you at the bottom and they won’t need to be micro-managed around other skiers.”
The growth of the initiative in less than a year has been a truly rewarding experience for the 29-year-old Rettie.
“It’s been a way for me to continue to be involved in the industry, which is important, and some of the conversations I’ve had with blind people, they’ve been waiting for these types of opportunities and to be able to provide that for them is very rewarding,” he said.
“And as the word continues to spread, the phone calls keep coming in, we have a wait-list for more backcountry ski programs and we’ve had people express interest in other backcountry mountain sports.
“It is cool to think that we’re, it sounds a bit cheesy, making dreams come true.”
For more information, to purchase Braille merchandise or to make a donation to help offset the costs of the inaugural ski trip in April go to braillemountaininitiative.com.
