That July, it was time for our fifth No Barriers Summit. This one was just an hour from my home, in Winter Park, Colorado, and it featured all kinds of new technologies: a vehicle with tanklike tracks for paraplegics to access the deep backcountry; a kayak that enabled quadriplegics to paddle; a power-controlled wheelchair that a person with severely limited mobility could operate with his or her tongue; and I showed the newest version of BrainPort.

On the first day, I was introduced to a twenty-five-year-old guy in a wheelchair, Kyle Maynard. I reached out to shake his hand and felt a callused stump at the end of a short, powerful arm that was as hard as a baseball bat. Kyle told me he was born with a rare condition called amniotic band syndrome (ABS). He was a quadruple amputee, his legs ending above the knees and his arms ending above the elbows. Kyle had recently heard about me and No Barriers and wanted to push himself and test his boundaries. “I’d especially like to join your hike in the morning,” he said.

For a moment, I was speechless. The hike was up a nearby twelve-thousand-foot peak. We had all kinds of folks signed up—blind people using trekking poles and amputees using high-tech hiking crutches—but I wondered how a guy without arms and legs was going to hike a mountain. Countless times, though, people had asked a similar question of me, so I pushed my doubts away.

“That sounds great,” I finally replied. Besides, we are No Barriers, I thought. If this idea was real, we had to find a way, and we didn’t have much time. That evening, I assembled a team to figure out how we were going to help him pull this off. Kyle seemed incredibly strong. His buddy Dan told me he was a champion weight lifter, pulling off twenty-three repetitions of 240 pounds to win the GNC’s World’s Strongest Teen competition. But climbing mountains required moving up steep, jumbled trails, through mud and snow, over giant piles of boulders, and across loose scree slopes. Kyle would essentially have to crawl, moving over the landscape like a crab. We scratched our heads, brainstormed, and schemed.

Finally, we went to our hotel rooms and snagged a bunch of bath towels of different sizes. We went to the front desk and sweet-talked the clerk into letting us have a few rolls of clear packing tape used for mailing Lost & Found items. Last, we found a number of plastic grocery store bags.