Uninhibited

Kimberley Barreda loves when the trophy sitting behind her catches a bit of Montana’s afternoon light, casting a small rainbow across her living room. “It’s heavy,” she says, offering it up to hold. “You’ll need two hands.”

The trophy is, indeed, worthy of two hands — fitting for an award honoring a lifetime’s worth of work bringing outdoor opportunities to disabled people. The 2018 Outdoor Inspiration Award, presented by Outdoor Retailer at a ceremony last month in Denver, goes to a woman with one of the most multi-hyphenate careers in the Flathead. Actor, dressmaker, agent, writer, marketing expert, website designer, business consultant, disability advocate, adaptive skier — Kimberley Barreda has about five too many careers to fit on a standard business card. So, in her typical do-it-yourself fashion, she made a better card. “Kimberley Barreda, Marketing Genius, Boss of it All” it says, with an addition, lest you think her life in a wheelchair is somehow less than: “My life is better than your vacation.”

Where others see weakness — or, as she says, “a diagnosis” — Barreda sees strength. In her 35 years as a working woman, she’s turned “disabled” into an opportunity for herself and others — building communities through her websites, www.unlimbited.com and www.adaptiveskiing.net, writing for “Disability Today” magazine, representing disabled athletes and performers as an agent, and connecting disabled people in the Flathead with outdoor equipment.

Her life today, full of connections and activity, is a far cry from the future she imagined as a little girl in Canada. Originally from Windsor, Ontario, Barreda grew up “in and out of the hospital” as doctors tried different tests, diagnoses, and procedures that resulted in progressive amputations of her legs. She didn’t dream of a big future. “I was a disabled kid. That wasn’t something that you really looked at. You were more focused on the immediate what’s happening...that sort of looking forward didn’t exist for me.”

Focusing on the immediate did, however, help to develop interests early on. She acted in plays put on at her Shriner’s Hospital and learned to sew “horrible” 1970s-style striped caftans on donated machines. When the Olympics came to Montreal in 1976, she was inspired to take on athletics. She began with swimming, then moved to track and field. Already years deep in fashion, acting, and sport by her late teens, she was able to take advantage when opportunities arose for “everything to fall into place.”

She learned marketing, networking and the ins and outs of disabled athletics through working on the board of her local disabled sports program. During college, she interned with a dressmaker, then worked for designer Franco Mirabelli in Toronto. She started writing when an old sports friend formed “Disability Today” and asked her to contribute. When she learned another friend had a casting agent, she cold-called her and set up a meeting. Two weeks later, she was in a nationally-run ad for Kellogg’s corn flakes. She continued to act, model and write for several years in Canada and Seattle, before moving to Whitefish in 1994 on the recommendation of some friends. “I came to Whitefish, and it was completely peaceful,” she says. “I totally loved it and just said that this is the place I want to be.”

Her many career threads began to weave together after the move, when she founded unlimbited.com as “a vanity project” and finally tried skiing.

Though skiing was a lifelong dream, Barreda’s first attempts on the slopes were less than stellar. “It was horrible. It was terrifying. It was embarrassing,” she shakes her head. The ski didn’t fit her (“imagine skiing with the wrong size boots”) and the edgework was wholly unfamiliar. “I think I went about 30 feet,” she says.

Nevertheless, she persisted; over the years, she’s acquired a couple custom-fit skis, taken lessons and dealt with a lot of weird looks. Now, she’s a Whitefish Mountain veteran with at least one season of 85 ski days under her belt.

Part of her life’s work is sharing that love for skiing to other disabled people. One of the biggest barriers for adaptive skiers is equipment, which is why she personally acquires, maintains, and loans adaptive skis and other outdoor gear. Letting people develop their skills through proper equipment, she says, means “more people skiing in a different way — not a program way, not a charity way, but actually getting out and learning how to ski.” Through donations and funding, she pays for disabled skiers to go to ski school and have an assistant accompany them on the slopes. Her house is full of equipment for loan — adaptive skis, of course, but also a hockey sled, camping gear and an accessible tent.

The more disabled people taking on the outdoors, the better. “Part of the goal is to change how disabled sports and disabled consumers are seen,” she says, noting that disabled people are “the largest visible minority consumer group in North America.”

Visibility and accessibility form the bedrock of Barreda’s efforts — why she writes, tweets, skis, and connects brands with disabled ambassadors. “The more often you see somebody doing adaptive (skiing), the more natural it is...and then as it becomes more normal, it becomes less expensive,” she says.

Whether it’s getting adaptive skiers on the hill of juggling careers, clients and sponsorships, Barreda rarely takes no for answer. Her challenge, she says, isn’t balancing all those career hyphens, but battling assumptions of what she can and can’t do. “My biggest barrier is other people’s attitudes, 100 percent. All of our biggest barrier is other people’s attitudes.”