Known for its pine trees, big blue lake, and miles of hiking/biking trails, Tahoe is a beautiful outdoor recreational playground that draws people near and far. These Tahoe nonprofits are paving the way for making the outdoors accessible for all: 

Achieve Tahoe

Around since 1967, Achieve Tahoe has been providing winter and summer sports instruction for adults and children with disabilities for more than 50 years. It was the founding chapter of Disabled Sports USA Far West, founded by World War II veteran Jim Winthers on the Soda Springs summit. 

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Achieve Tahoe started its Sierra Summer Sports Program in the 1990s, providing participants and their families with canoeing, kayaking, jet skiing, paddleboarding, and tubing activities on Donner Lake, guided by experienced Achieve Tahoe staff. It even works with Wake Island Waterpark in Pleasant Grove just north of Sacramento to offer adaptive waterskiing. 

“Five to ten years ago, we made an effort to host as many summer [participant] days equal to the number of winter snow sports days, and added hiking, archery, sailing, climbing, and adaptive horsemanship (hosted at Tahoe Donner’s Alder Creek Adventure Center),” says Achieve Tahoe Guest Services Director Marina Gardiner.  

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Achieve Tahoe has also added an Adventure Camp combining hiking, climbing, and archery in a full day of activities hosted at Palisades Tahoe. 

Achieve Tahoe has around 800-900 participants in a fiscal year between both its summer and winter programs. Most participants come from the Bay Area, Sacramento, Tahoe, and some from Reno, utilizing both Achieve Tahoe’s summer and winter programs. Fifty percent of its participants are new, the other half returning. 

However, there are waitlists, likely due to its legacy and solid word-of-mouth. 

Gardiner says in the last 5-8 years they’ve seen exponential growth, the demand significantly outstripping the supply “because we have so many people talking about it,” she adds. 

“Right now, we would like to train more volunteers to be able to lead lessons,” Gardiner says. “The last thing we want is for people with a disability to come to Tahoe and not know we’re an option for them.” 

For more information about Achieve Tahoe or to volunteer, visit https://www.achievetahoe.org/. 

Access Tahoe

Its mission seems simple—Access Tahoe wants to remove physical barriers for anyone wanting to enjoy South Lake Tahoe’s outdoor recreation opportunities—but getting the equipment, funding, and support to make that happen is a different story. Formed in 2023, though, Access Tahoe and its founder Angie Reagan are making strides in South Lake’s accessibility. 

“My dream is to have a gear library where people can rent out equipment. It’s a need here—an equipment exchange,” Reagan says. 

She looks at the City of Reno’s Adaptive Cycling Center as a standard for what could be possible in the Tahoe basin, which is considered a hub for beaches, bikes, and hiking trails. 

“The City of Reno’s cycling center is a good model; for us it would take space, legwork, and funding [to get it off the ground]. But South Lake is desperate for this,” she says. And while entities like High Fives and Achieve Tahoe do a good job of covering North Lake Tahoe, Access Tahoe says with the south side’s population, their residents are just as deserving. 

However, in the short time the nonprofit has been around, it has been making headway. Access Tahoe has collaborated with community partners such as Clearly Tahoe to promote the Mobi mats it installed down to the beach, so individuals with assistive devices can get safer access to the water. It’s identifying and sharing beach wheelchairs available, and advocating for fitness equipment such as trikes, hand-pedaled bikes, and adaptive kayaks. Access Tahoe promotes special events such as special adaptive climbing nights hosted by Blue Granite and PeloDog. 

“Things are happening,” Reagan says. Then in the fall of 2024, Angela Dugan and her active family moved from Denver, Col. to South Lake, and found Access Tahoe. 

“I’m excited about the contacts we’re making and having advocates like Angela appear,” Reagan says. 

Dugan has a teenager who has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, and in the spring of 2025 shared their Huckleberry Cascade Cart with the community. 

“We own a Huckleberry and have let a few families rent it out. We’ve had it for a year now. It’s a mountain bike, recumbent style with a specialized seat and pedals,” she says. 

In their few months of being here, the Dugan family has already formed quite a network. 

“I didn’t think in moving here how quickly we’d become connected to Tahoe. I’ll meet someone who will say, ‘Oh, I build a ski’, or a mom will say, ‘I can write a grant’. Angie has shared people who are putting Mobi mats out and chairs that can get people in the water, ones that can get fully submerged. 

“For people with disabilities who can’t go on the beach…it breaks my heart you live here and can’t go down to the water with your kids,” Dugan says. 

While adaptive recreation isn’t as prevalent in Tahoe as it is in Denver, Dugan says, 

“We’re lucky we have people here in Tahoe willing to look at recreation creatively. I want to give this town a lot more options; I want our friends to come visit and take them to the beach. I want to find some cool equipment and make it easier. I want families to know it exists and come out and use it.

“We’ve got a lot of ideas and want to get more kids out on the trails.”

For more information about Access Tahoe and its upcoming events, visit its Instagram page, sign up for its email newsletter, or visit the Access Tahoe website at https://www.accesstahoe.org/ . 

High Fives Foundation

Partnering with healthcare and providing human care as well, the High Fives Foundation exists to give hope and resources to athletes who’ve sustained life-altering injuries. High Fives support their journey in getting them back to the outdoor physical activity they love, whether that be snowboarding and skiing to surfing, mountain biking, and beyond. 

Founded by Roy Tuscany, High Fives has been around for 16 years now and continues to grow. “It’s been really wild,” Roy Tuscany says of High Fives’ journey. “When we started, we focused on getting winter athletes back to the snow but now we’ve expanded into five verticals: bike, surf, snow, fish, and dirt,” he adds. 

As far as summer activities go, High Fives held its first surf trip (at the Dog Patch in San Onofre) in 2012 and its first fishing trip in Dillon, Mont. in 2015. In 2021, High Fives absorbed Return to Dirt, an adaptive motorsports program that puts disabled individuals behind the wheel of their own adventure.

“Every three years we tend to add a new sport,” says Tuscany. He adds he’d love to find other nonprofits to be able to partner with and expand to get more people into the outdoors. 

Last year, High Fives helped 938 individuals with grants to help them recover or get adaptive equipment. They hosted around 600 individual camps and activities, nearly half of the nonprofit’s offerings related to summer sports. 

Thanks to a partnership with Mastercraft, High Fives had 141 hours of adaptive wakesurfing boat hours last season on Lake Tahoe, getting 99 people out on the water for their first time. 

“We’ve created a lot of our own prototypes,” Tuscany says about the wakesurf boards. “Some people want to lay down, kneel, or stand; we have a lot of boards that can fit their needs,” he adds. 

In 2024, High Fives partnered with Boreal/Woodward Tahoe to have “Play Forever Fridays” in which disabled persons can use the mountain and Woodward bunker (with support) on select Fridays in the summer and a part of the ticket sales goes back to the Foundation. 

“We have a veterans program, bring groups, and modify activities for people,” Tuscany adds, mentioning activities such as having access to adaptive dodgeball, the trampolines, foam pits, and Boreal’s skatepark. 

They also have a few adaptive bike days coming up at Northstar Tahoe and Sky Tavern this summer. 

With more than $10 million in monies dispersed to athletes since its start and close to a million dollars put towards empowerment camps, grants, and adaptive events across North America in 2024, High Fives shows no signs of slowing down. 

“Like what Wayne Gretzky says, ‘You can’t score goals without shooting.’ We shoot. We throw ourselves out there and see what’s possible,” Tuscany says. https://highfivesfoundation.org/ 

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the Summer 2025 edition of Tahoe Magazine.