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Accessible ski season: a success story

Accessible ski season: a success story

Around November of 2024 I got it in my head that I missed skiing and I wondered what options there were for accessible winter sports. After a quick search, I discovered the Canadian Adaptive Snowsports (CADS) but unfortunately, they had already booked up for the 2025 season. I did get them to add me to their mailing list though so as soon as they opened their rosters for 2026, I tossed my hat into the ring and to my surprise, I was accepted into the program.

Because I didn’t want to take a spot from another participant, I asked The Eldest to sign on as a volunteer with me. She was happy to sign up because a> she would get more volunteer hours to put towards the hours she needs to graduate high school[1]; and b> she absolutely hated teaching skiing. Like, really, really, really hated it. So she was happy to keep skiing as a volunteer as long as she didn’t have to teach multiple kids. FAIR. She did her time. She applied and was accepted into the program!


The snow machine in full force over the hill

What surprised me the most about CADS is the cost: it was only $250 for 8 weeks of skiing! When I expressed shock about this the volunteer I spoke with thought I found it too expensive and was trying to explain how it was the minimum they could charge to keep the lights on – but really, I found it super cheap! As someone who grew up skiing and who has two kids who did skiing and snowboarding since they were in kindergarten, most years it’s been three times that amount and the cost only went down when we bought them their own equipment[2]. It used to cost between $600 and $750 per season, per kid. Snow sports are not cheap, for sure. But since I was so used to that price that I just ended up donating $500 to the program on top of my fee because that’s what I had assumed it would cost to do adaptive skiing – at a minimum! I get why they try and keep it as cheap as possible though: most disabled folks don’t have a lot of money, not only is being disabled wildly expensive, most of them also live on incredibly small incomes. Even with just the price of gear not covered by the program (winter clothes, a helmet, hand warmers etc) it still makes it too pricey for many folks.


Early morning mist on the hill

Early in the new year Mr. Tucker and I went up so I could get fitted for a sit ski. I had justjust met the weight requirement for not only the equipment but also for the tethering. Because every participant requires two volunteers and with a sit ski at least one of them has to be certified to tether with a sit ski, it limited the amount of people who could participate in the program because of the amount of volunteers trained to do it. While there is a lot of variety of the types of disabilities CADS folks have, the physically disabled people have a bunch of different equipment types they can use depending on the severity of their mobility challenges. Because I have no balance, I wasn’t able to just tether standing up or use a “slider” which is similar to a walker on skis. So I ended up with the sitski.


Gearing up first thing in the morning

Our Sunday mornings were pretty chaotic for the first two months of the winter season. Mr. Tucker would drive The Youngest to catch the bus for her Snowboard Instructor job, then as soon as he got home, The Eldest and I would hop into the car and head north into Quebec for our CADS ski day. Because they prefer that their volunteers stay all day, she did both the morning and the afternoon sessions that ran from 10-noon and from 1-3 with an hour lunch in the middle. I just sat in the chalet in the morning and read books or watched videos, we ate lunch together when she got in from the morning session, and then we both headed out for the afternoon sessions after the break.


Balaklava, heated socks, handwarmers and a helmet…oh my!

The Eldest was paired with a couple of different folks at the beginning but after week three, she had the same skier and the same head volunteer for both the morning and afternoon sessions. Her skier had an intellectual disability so she just needed some help with guidance but generally was great skiing on her own. My kid really enjoyed working with both the participant and the other volunteer and actually enjoyed the entire experience much more than she expected to!

What was surprising is that they give the volunteers a free season’s pass to the hill (which apparently also includes the tubing, which is rad!). So on Family Day The Eldest took the car up to the hill by herself and did some skiing on her own, which is a nice little bonus! She would sometimes tackle a few runs during the lunch hour as well because the lifts were less busy then.


The Eldest and her team on top of the hill

The sit skis are absolutely wild in the fact that the volunteers unlatch it, lift the seat from the ski part and then you basically sit on the chairlift in the sit ski as it sweeps you up. Getting off, they click a button that releases the seat back down towards the ski and then you glide off of the chairlift like you would if you are standing. It’s a terrifying experience and you have to give up complete control to the volunteers (who know what they’re doing! I had zero issues with the chair lift!).

The person I was paired with weekly was a guy named Jeff who has to be the kindest man on earth given that he volunteers almost every day of the week with either training, guiding various programs or doing lessons at various hills in the region. He is the king of the dad joke but you can tell he is just a really outgoing, giving guy. In many ways he is the backbone of the organization and while many volunteers keep the entire ship afloat, more than one person mentioned that CADS would be lost without Jeff’s dedication to it. Along with Jeff I had a few other volunteers – all wonderful, lovely people.

Also, Jeff also only lost me once in the woods – on the last day, no less! Some kids cut in front of us so we turned, but then they saw us at the last second and ALSO turned which lead us onto a collision course that Jeff narrowly missed by letting me go off the side of the hill. Sadly, the other volunteer, Andrew thought Jeff was going to stop and when he didn’t Andrew tried to grab me and then ALSO went off of the side of the hill and landed in some trees. We were both laughing so hard at the absurdity of it all as I dangled half on/half off of the packed snow of the hill and the soft snow of the forest that Jeff had to come take Andrew’s skis off so that he could climb out of the woods. The soft powder of the woods was so deep & deceptive that when he stood up, he was actually waist deep in the powder[3]! Thankfully, one of the other volunteers, Greg, saw us careen off of the hill and came and helped Jeff and Andrew haul me back up. That was the last run of the season for us!


It’s as comfy as it looks

Driving home early in the season we were chatting and my daughter said, “I like volunteering way better than I like teaching. People actually appreciate you and are grateful for your help where with teaching I never felt like that. Also, the people are all so nice and welcoming and I never felt like I fit in with teaching.” It’s so true, too: I didn’t meet anyone in the CADS community who wasn’t just absolutely welcoming and kind. On our last day, we brought one of my best friend’s kids with us and even he was amazed at how welcoming everyone was to him. Although, you could argue that people don’t get involved in volunteering with an organization like that if they aren’t the most kind, amazing folks around.


Our friend’s kid drove up with us and at lunch him & The Eldest did some runs together

Yesterday was the last day of the season. After 8 weeks of skiing, I feel like it’s time to hang up the sit ski. The birds are singing and it is brighter in the mornings so I am happy to enter into the spring season after a very successful first season of doing adaptive skiing. The Eldest may go up on March break and take advantage of her season’s pass one last time, but overall we had a great year and are ready to have our Sundays to ourselves again.

I am not going to lie: even though I was brought up skiing and was a skier my entire life, adaptive skiing was a whole new ballgame for me. I had to give up control to the volunteers and learn an entirely new way of navigating the hill. I was never afraid of heights or the hill in the past but this year it took me a little while to find my bearings in the sit ski. I was scared the first few times I fell (and one of those times I rolled right over like a bad car crash – much to the horror of my kid who was there at the time!) and I hit more moguls and icy patches than I would have liked to while I learned how to navigate the slopes. Being closer to the ground also gives you fewer visual cues than I am used to. I won’t say I became a great sit-skier this year but I managed to feel a huge amount of anxiety and then do it anyway.

The Eldest ended up enjoying it so much that she plans to come back and volunteer again next year. I ordered an official CADS jacket for her as a thank you for doing this with me. I think she initially did it so that I could do it but was surprised at how much she enjoyed the people and the skiing community they’ve created (and the ability to ski for free was a nice bonus she didn’t anticipate!). I hope to be back again next year but even if it doesn’t happen, I am grateful I did it this year at least. It’s so easy when you are disabled to just give up so many things because it feels like you are climbing a mountain to just do the things you used to do. It’s just nice to know that there is an entire world of people who are out there volunteering their time to help you be able to do things that most folks don’t even think twice about just doing. I am eternally grateful to them.

[If you have a few extra dollars to spare in your budget, a CADS donation is certainly appreciated. Many of these programs run on fumes so every dollar helps. Thanks, friends!]


The last day was costume day! Here is The Eldest as PB sandwich.

[1] She had a few hours already logged but needed a few more. I absolutely hate that this is a requirement to graduate from high school. I think it turns volunteering into a chore instead of a great community building exercise, and because it needs to be done outside of school hours, it punishes kids who need to work to help support their families.

[2] When your kids are young it is so expensive to outfit them that it just made more sense to rent until they grew all that they would grow. In fact, my dad actually bought them their equipment a few years ago and they’ve both taken really good care of their stuff. We just wax & sharpen their gear every year.

[3] We laughed because we were safe, but the snow off of the mountain can get incredibly deep and you can die by Snow Immersion Suffocation (SIS) which may have killed a woman in Banff earlier this season.

It’s beginning to look a lot like…tax season

It’s beginning to look a lot like…tax season

It’s winter sports season here at The Mullet*. Our front hall is jam-packed with snowboard and skiing gear plus my scooter for when we go and see the PWHL games. Mitts, and hats, and a variety of winter and waterproof gear…oh my! If you are going to stay in Canada for the winter, you really have to embrace Canadian winters.

I had to print out a physical schedule because between the hockey games, the Eldest’s two jobs, and the activities for the youngest, we had way too much to remember off the top of our heads. The actual ice and snow sport season only really runs from January – March (until March break), so 8-10 weeks. But the season feels long because we are super busy with the regular lessons and sports of the year as well. At least, the pure chaos is interspersed with books and a roaring fireplace.

Speaking of books, I have been reading non-stop lately. I finished What we Knew (mentioned in Morgan Housel’s book, Same as Ever) in less than 24 hours. While I generally avoid WWII stuff unless it’s a Ken Burns offering (and I certainly avoid fiction based in that era) I do love stories and storytelling from a first person perspective. WWK is based on a study that spanned ten years in which they interviewed survivors from Germany – both Jews and non-Jews as well as officers who were in the German army. It’s a fascinating book of detailed – and varied – experiences and I highly recommend it. I am now onto The Great Depression (also mentioned in that book). It’s a series of journal entries by a lawyer who lived through the Great Depression and who tried to make sense of the economy while it was happening. Both are Interlibrary Loans so I needed to finish them up before they are due. So I spent yesterday just reading and avoiding the internet entirely. I’m not mad about it.

Link (yes, singular)
One article today due to the doubling-down on book reading recently: Judging by the people around me, chances are they won’t have even close to the “recommended” amounts of retirement savings suggested by the financial industry. I just don’t see the majority of people sitting on millions when they have started late, feel more comfortable working with FAs who take a percentage, and prefer low-risk investments. Still, looking at history they may be ok, anyway. Boomers: the retirement crisis that wasn’t.

We’ve achieved our goals 6 months early!
In January 2021 I wrote a post called The Three Year Plan. I went back today and realized that it was really the 2.5 year plan! We managed to do all of the things on the list: pay off our mortgage, max my RDSP, fully fund the kids RESPs (ongoing because there is a yearly max for matched contributions), and we met our goal of how much we decided to invest in Mr. Tucker’s RRSP before he could retire. We met these goals last July.

I suppose the only addition here is that we are selling the condo. We hadn’t foreseen the drama there (you can’t anticipate everything). We only really kept it because a relative needed a place to go (…and no good deed goes unpunished). Until it sells though, we can’t have Mr. Tucker retire as the mortgage/condo fees come out of his pay while it is on the market. Otherwise, we are pretty set up & we won’t need to touch our investments for 15ish years. We will also have a good amount tucked away for emergencies, travel and future spending.

Drawdown plan
While I adore people who get down into the nitty gritty of the numbers, I am more of a lacklustre financial traveler: I aim my boat in the direction it needs to go in and adjust periodically. I don’t obsess about market timing, watching my investments like a hawk or the minutiae of planning my taxes perfectly. Should I? Maybe. But I just don’t want to be that person.

TFSAs vs. RRSPs**? We all know that the answer is, “ideally, both.” But for us the answer has been RRSPs. Why? Because Mr. Tucker’s plan is to retire early and so he will go from a high salary to no salary (the year after). So reducing that up front was the best case scenario, in my opinion.

The goal is to draw down the Basic Personal Amount (BPA) – which is the amount of money that you can make (or withdraw from an RRSP) without paying taxes – and then flip it into our TFSAs in the 20 years between when he stops working and when the government forces him to transfer his RRSP to a RRIF (Registered Retirement Income Fund) where he is forced to draw out a percentage every year. Because we didn’t have enough money to contribute to both the RRSP and the TFSA at the same time, we prioritized today’s tax burden.

Yes, we may take a hit on our investments (but we may gain as well) by doing this and the government will hold back 10% on the first $5000 and 20% on the next $10000 but we will see that as a tax refund the following year. Yes, I know refunds are not ideal but the goal is to drawdown the RRSP and then load up the TFSA so that when we are 71, we won’t have much left in the RRSPs for them to tax at 20%+. The money will keep growing in our TFSAs tax free over the years, and when we go to get our CPP/OAS at 65+ the withdrawals from our TFSAs will also be tax-free.

My opinion is that the TFSA is a much better savings vehicle in general unless you are a high-income earner. If I made under the $111,733 I would definitely prioritize the TFSA followed by the FHSA (the First Time Homebuyers Savings Account) – regardless of whether or not you want to purchase a home. Why? Because you get a tax credit for money you put into a FHSA so it reduces your taxes today. On top of that, then it can sit in investments for 15 years making money. If you go to buy a home with it you get to withdraw all the deposits and interest tax free but if you don’t end up buying a home, you can transfer the money to an RRSP without affecting your RRSP contribution room.

The other fun game would be to mix it up. If you make $65000 you may want to contribute $9133 to an RRSP to bring your taxable income down to the lower tax bracket of $55867 netting yourself a cool $1872.27 back on your tax return, as you don’t have to pay the marginal tax rate of 20.5% on that $9133. Then you can toss that into your TFSA, getting you the best of both worlds.

It’s always fun to play with the numbers and see what the best option would be for your own particular situation. Since it is the beginning of the year AND we are about to head into Tax Season, maybe it’s time to plan for the upcoming year? Here are the tax brackets for 2024:


*To see the front and to see the back of my house is to know why we call our house The Mullet
** I am going to assume that everyone is familiar with both Tax Free Savings Accounts and the Registered Retirement Savings Program