Located north of Montesano, Washington, Lake Sylvia State Park is a quiet, peaceful retreat surrounded by forest. The Park began as an old logging camp in a wooded area halfway between Olympia and the Pacific shore. The lake was formed by damming up Sylvia Creek for the purpose of log ponding and power production.

In 1936, the town of Montesano donated the land to the State parks Commission for conservation. Additional lands were added to the park by a trade in 1985.

How do you caption a moving amusement ride? Use technology. That’s what the folks at Walt Disney World Resorts did.

Effectively communicating the story and message of moving amusement rides has long been a challenge for the amusement park industry. In many moving narrative attractions, such as Peter Pan’s Flight, it’s a small world, Pirates of the Caribbean and Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin, fixed captioning systems are not always effective as the ride is often moving too fast to read the captions. So the Disney engineers put wireless technology to work and developed a synchronized handheld captioning system.

Mission San Luis, a National Historic Landmark site located in Tallahassee, Florida, was one of more than 100 mission settlements established in Spanish Florida between the 1560s and 1690s. Between 1656 and 1704, more than 1,400 Apalachee Indians and Spaniards lived at the mission. San Luis was a principal village of the Apalachee Indians and home of one of their most powerful leaders. San Luis was also the Spaniards' westernmost military, religious, and administrative headquarters. In 1983, the State of Florida purchased the property where the mission was located and began the research necessary to begin to present its story to the public. This story has been developed by painstaking archaeological excavations as well as through the translation of 17th- and 18th-century documents from Spanish archives. San Luis is the most thoroughly documented and archaeologically investigated mission in the Southeast.

Previous accessibility standards such as the Uniform Federal Accessibility Standards (UFAS) and the Americans with Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG) address the built environment, "the bricks and mortar." These guidelines do not transfer well to the natural environment. The built environment is open to manipulation. For example, if there is a hill where someone wants to build the parking lot for a store, then a bulldozer is used to level the area. In contrast, the natural environment includes factors, such as the weather, that are out of human control. The natural environment is part of the experience people wish to enjoy on a trail.  

by Tip Ray, M.Ed., CTRS

We know through research, anecdotal evidence, and personal experience that people with disabilities benefit greatly when they participate in community recreation programs and settings. Like their peers who may not have disabilities, they learn how to make choices, take turns, follow directions, and share and perform as a team. They learn the same leisure skills and behaviors-although sometimes at a different pace and in a slightly different way. From their peers, they gain respect, are appreciated, are accepted, and, oftentimes, become friends. They learn how to play and have fun in the same activities and places where their peers hangout, and play and have fun.

Outdoor environments offer unique psychological, physiological and spiritual benefits to users. According to the National Survey on Recreation and the Environment (Teasley, et al., 1998), 78 percent of people polled in the United States actively pursue outdoor activities, with camping being identified as one of the most popular.