Opening Spaces: A Hike for People with Visual Disabilities at Knox Preserve

Story and Photos by Elanah Sherman

When people linger after a party, the event is considered a success. The same applies to a hike.

Avalonia’s hike for people with visual disabilities and their friends, held on September 22, 2024 at Knox Preserve in Stonington, was a collaboration with the South East Connecticut Community Center of the Blind, an advocacy and social group. In its planning and structure, the hike exemplified several goals of Avalonia’s accessibility initiative:

1) Provide good descriptions of trail conditions so people can make up their own minds about visiting;
2) Work in conjunction with people who have many different kinds of disabilities and the organizations that represent them; and
3) Avoid making assumptions about the preferences, interests, and capacities of any person with a disability. 

This approach has yielded great fruit over the past several years as Avalonia has established beneficial relationships with disability rights groups and has pushed forward on plans to establish at least one trail within the next two years that meets the stringent Forest Service Trail Accessibility Guidelines. Our hikes are now amplified with portable equipment. We offer a Braille brochure. We provide sign language interpretation upon request. We hold public forums on our accessibility initiatives. We regularly revise our action-oriented Accessibility Statement to reflect recent achievements and new aspirations. Recently, we purchased an accessible picnic table at one of our newer properties.

In our planning, we always ask: How can we, within the limits of affordability and feasibility, best provide maximum equal opportunity in everything we do and on every property we conserve?

The September hike, covered by The Day, had its origin in an interchange I had a while ago with a friend who is blind. I wanted to photograph him at a preserve and was mulling, out loud, which site might be easiest for him to traverse. He quickly put an end to those ruminations by informing me he often found rocky trails easier to navigate than city sidewalks. That got me thinking: Let’s organize hikes based on people’s own ideas of what’s accessible to them.

Voila! The Center for the Blind was on board. Avalonia’s brilliant and irrepressible volunteer naturalist, Bruce Fellman, signed on as leader. We all set about to organize a hike that was multi-sensory in approach and richly descriptive in narration. Numerous Avalonia volunteers, convened by volunteer extraordinaire Beth Sullivan and including staff of Mystic Aquarium, pruned and mowed the trail.

At the event’s conclusion, no one wanted to leave. Instead, we all enjoyed the refreshments brought by always-resourceful (and socially- skilled!) Avalonia staff member Mary Anne Sherman, and celebrated the communicative powers of touch, smell, sound, and word. The Day reporter stayed for an additional hour to interview participants in depth. Bruce extolled the mutual learning that, like the refreshing Fall Equinox air, had infused the morning. 

“Avalonia is telling the world that the Connecticut woods, fields, and marshlands are open to everyone, including those who are blind or have vision loss, to come and take in the miraculous beauty of creation. Further, they have afforded us the opportunity to learn from naturalists and others who study the flora and fauna of these hills and coastlines to more fully embrace the role that we two-leggeds play in a world filled with beauty. It is a world too often overlooked.”  Kevin Harkins, hike participant

Successful events are never endpoints. Rather, they act as springboards to new ideas and broader collaborations. There will always be more to come in our efforts to respond to our ever-widening community.

Elanah Sherman is a member of the Avalonia Board of Directors and is the accessibility point person on the State’s National Heritage, Open Space, and Watershed Land Acquisition Review Board.

Featured Image: Naturalist Bruce Fellman (back to camera) leads a hike in Stonington’s Knox Preserve for hikers with visual disabilities and their friends.