The dualisms in this passage—cultur

The dualisms in this passage—culture/nature, self-propelled/tech- nology, past/present, movement/stasis—illustrate how the disabled body embodies the opposite of wilderness. The wilderness encounter is authentic only if it involves self-propelled transportation. Movement is vital, and it is as temporal as it is geographical; hence, the nostalgia. But the fact that the disabled body often requires technologi- cal help to perform adventure activities ignores that abled bodies also connect to wilderness in technologically mediated ways. The wilderness ideal body relies on apparatuses of technological support to become purified through the wilderness encounter. Braun calls wilderness a purification machine to expose its artificiality. Technol- ogy is central to outdoor adventure culture. Machines are dismissed as impure, but adventure culture relies on, even fetishizes, its gear. The success of the adventure equipment industry (REI and Pata- gonia, for instance) attests to the technological apparatus of risk culture. Such artificial “extensions” facilitate the wilderness encoun- ter as much as ramps, wheelchairs, walking sticks, Braille signs, and cut curbs—technologies that are associated with disability. But what distinguishes trekking poles, hydration systems, GPS units, or cram- pons—technologies that permit adventurers to encounter wilder- ness—from the technologies that are associated with the disabled body? The former are fetishized as gear, while the latter are stigma- tized as intrusive or “mediation,” as in Abbey’s comparison of a car to the wheelchair. What goes unacknowledged in all these critiques of technology-as-alienation is that adventure activities also require “sets of humans, objects, technologies and scripts that contingently produce durability and stability,” and “leisure landscapes involving various hybrids that roam the countryside and deploy the kines- thetic sense of movement” (Macnaghten and Urry 8). The kinds of technologies that would make wilderness accessible to people with disabilities are only qualitatively different from the kinds of technol- ogies that make wilderness available to people without disabilities, even if we buy the distinction. All relationships with wilderness are mediated by these objects, technologies, and scripts.