An Open Letter to Sen. Jacky Rosen, Tommy Caldwell, the Lake Tahoe Summit and Our Community
For 30 years, the Lake Tahoe Summit has carried an extraordinary promise: a place this precious deserves attention, investment and care.
However, we must ask: Who gets to experience—and help shape—the Tahoe we are working so hard to protect?
More than one in four American adults lives with a disability. Some disabilities are visible; many are not. Disability exists in every community. Anyone can become disabled. Everyone ages. Bodies, minds, and needs change. Yet Tahoe can still feel designed for a narrower version of humanity.
Enjoy the beach—if you can reach the water. Explore trails and snow—if access has been built in. Attend an event—if you can navigate crowds, noise and communication. Request an accommodation—only to hear it framed as a caveat, then be asked to prove why you need it.
Accessibility is more than ADA compliance, ramps, bathrooms and parking spaces. Access means designing places and experiences that consider physical, sensory, communication, cognitive, psychiatric and non-apparent disabilities from the beginning.
Last year’s Summit honored the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who spoke of bicycling around Tahoe as a child. Her story raises a question: As we age or our needs change, can we return to the places that shaped us—with a wheelchair, walker or white cane?
This is the Tahoe that accessibility makes possible: a universally designed Tahoe for the reality of human lives.
Earlier this year, the Lake Tahoe Documentary Film Festival screened The Paradise Paradox, exploring mental health, addiction, recovery and suicide in a place celebrated for beauty and escape. I understand that paradox personally. I am a disabled physical therapist and community advocate, and suicide has been the deepest struggle of my life.
It has taught me that extraordinary natural beauty cannot substitute for human connection. Access to a place is not the same as belonging within it.
Yet I often hear there is not enough capacity, not enough funding, or accessibility is not within an organization’s mission. But disabled people are already part of every community our institutions serve. Accessibility cannot remain the responsibility of those most affected by its absence. Businesses, tourism organizations, schools, nonprofits, public agencies and community leaders, and individuals all have a role.
Accessibility is the difference between saying, “Everyone is welcome,” and creating a place where people believe it.
And accessibility belongs in the sustainability conversation.
We can restore forests and protect water, but protecting Tahoe also means protecting the people who love it. If future generations cannot reach Tahoe, experience it, or see themselves in its future, we preserve only part of what makes it worth protecting.
Access creates belonging. Belonging inspires stewardship. People protect places where they know they belong. Accessibility is sustainability in its most human form.
Tommy Caldwell, broaden our imagination of who gets to experience the outdoors. Sen. Rosen, please make accessibility part of Tahoe’s future—in conversation, policy and funding—and at the Tahoe Summit, consider “Accessibility and Sustainability” as a future Summit theme.
Ask who is missing. Notice the barrier. Extend the welcome. Change what you can. Thanks to everyone who is already doing this.
Let’s create access in Tahoe for all.
Angie Reagan, PT, DPT, is the Founder of Access Tahoe and Peace Love Tahoe.