All-Terrain Wheelchair Revolution: How Extreme Motus Is Giving Families the Outdoors Back

I have walked a lot of convention floors in my life. Aerospace shows, media events, tech expos. After a while the booths start to blur together. Then, at the Abilities Expo this weekend, I walked up to the Extreme Motus booth expecting to see another piece of medical equipment. I walked away with a story I could not stop thinking about, and a deep respect for a small Utah team building an all-terrain wheelchair that is quietly handing families back something they thought they had lost for good: the outdoors.

This is not a product review. This is a story about a firefighter’s garage project, two high school buddies with a cracked phone, a combat veteran who could no longer push his daughter across the sand, and a national park that just rewrote the rules on who gets to see the view.

The Moment the Pavement Ends

Ask any family that lives with a wheelchair and they will tell you about the moment. You pull into the trailhead. The kids pile out of the car. The trail starts as a nice packed path, and then, fifty yards in, it turns to gravel, roots and rock. That is where the day splits in two. Half the family keeps going. The other half waits in the parking lot.

Standard wheelchairs are engineered for hospital hallways, sidewalks and smooth floors. Put one on beach sand and the front casters dig in like an anchor. Put one on a rocky trail and every bump goes straight into the rider’s spine. For millions of people, the great outdoors has a hard border, and it is drawn exactly where the pavement stops.

Extreme Motus was built to erase that line.

What Is the Extreme Motus All-Terrain Wheelchair?

The Extreme Motus all-terrain wheelchair is a manual, caregiver-pushed off-road wheelchair hand-built in Utah. It rides on three oversized, low-pressure balloon tires that roll over sand, snow, mud, gravel and rocky trail instead of sinking into them. The frame is aluminum, it weighs about 55 pounds, and the front wheel folds into the seat in seconds so the whole chair slides into the back of a regular SUV. No trailer. No wheelchair van. No tools.

And yes, it floats. You can roll it right into a lake.

Here is what the chair looks like when it leaves the pavement behind:

Extreme Motus at a Glance

Born in a Utah Machine Shop

The Extreme Motus story does not start with a venture capital pitch. It starts with taxes.

In February 2018, an accountant named Adam Beesely was sent to a machine shop in Orem, Utah, to help two men get their books in order. One was Dale Pitts, a longtime Provo City firefighter who had been building hand-cranked recumbent bikes since the 1980s and could never stop tinkering. The other was his partner, Todd Loader.

A few visits in, Adam noticed a blue machine sitting in the back corner of the shop. It was an off-road wheelchair with a single wheel. He went home, researched the market, and could not find anything that did what he believed an off-road chair should do. So he asked Dale and Todd a simple question: what if we built these and sold them?

By July of that year, the first two chairs were finished. A local family took one through a 5K in Provo. That was the beginning.

The team made one decision early that tells you everything about who they are building for. The original design used one wheel, like several chairs still on the market, and it took two adults to handle it on a trail. Adam pointed out what every parent already knows: families rarely bring just one kid on a hike. If mom and dad are both locked onto the chair, who is watching the other two?

So they moved to three wheels for stability, relocated the brake and raised the seat, making the chair manageable for one person to push. That design eventually earned a patent after roughly three and a half years in the process.

Adam’s philosophy fits in three words, and he says it often: butts in seats. He does not want credit. He wants as many people as possible riding in that chair, because he has seen what it does for the rider and for everyone who loves them.

Hear the founding story straight from Adam in the first episode of the team’s new podcast, Wheelie Accessible:

Sam and Ryan: The Friendship That Took the Chair Viral

If you have ever scrolled past a video of a grinning young man in a fat-tire wheelchair popping a wheelie through a creek bed, you have met Sam Durst. Sam lives with cerebral palsy. His best friend since high school, Ryan Grassley, is the guy pushing the chair, filming the adventure and, according to Ryan himself, working nonstop to keep Sam laughing. That last part is easy. Sam laughs at almost everything.

Their partnership with Extreme Motus began in 2019 with an online job posting. Adam needed better videos of the chair. Ryan, looking for a side hustle, pitched him on his friend Sam, who lights up any time he is included in anything.

Adam lent them a chair. Ryan, by his own admission, sat on the footage so long that Adam finally drove over and took the chair back. When Ryan finally sent the edit, Adam was blown away.

That video became Superstar Sam. The park they filmed in had sand, rocks, grass, water and ducks. The chair handled all of it. Because it floats, Sam went into the water. The water was freezing. Sam, Ryan says, has never let him forget it.

Ryan, who served time in the Army, eventually left a steady job at a hundred-year-old company to go all in, right as COVID hit. Then he became Sam’s paid caregiver too, after Sam’s mom pointed out that he was already with Sam every single day.

The marketing budget back then was Ryan’s old phone with a cracked screen. When Adam suggested trying TikTok, Ryan cut a months-old YouTube video with about 600 views into three short clips. Those clips pulled roughly 900,000 views. Today the team says their videos have reached hundreds of millions of views across social media, and the Daily Herald reported their TikTok following topped 400,000. By Adam’s count, Sam and Ryan have taken around 50 trips together in seven years.

The formula never changed. Go have fun. Show what is possible. Let someone watching at home think of their own kid, their grandmother, their brother, and the places they could finally go together.

Addisyn’s Story: A Combat Veteran, a Worn-Out Stroller and a Second Chance at the Beach

Of everything I read about this company, one story hit me harder than the rest.

Her family calls Addisyn their “element girl.” She comes alive near water, mountains and campfires. Watching waves roll in, sitting by a mountain lake while her family fishes, feeling the breeze on a camping trip. That is where she is happiest.

Addisyn was born with spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy, epilepsy and one of the rarest forms of polymicrogyria. She relies on a feeding tube, a tracheostomy and full-time care from two parents who have refused to let any of it shrink her world. For years, an old jogging stroller was their ticket to the beach. After every trip, her dad rinsed it down with vinegar to keep the saltwater from eating the frame.

Her dad is a combat veteran. He lives with his own service-connected disabilities. As Addisyn grew, he reached the point where he could no longer safely push or carry traditional equipment across sand and rock. The adventures that held this family together were slipping out of reach.

That is when Chive Charities, a nonprofit that has funded veterans, first responders, military families and people with rare medical conditions since 2012, awarded Addisyn a grant for an Extreme Motus all-terrain wheelchair.

Think about that for a second. A man who served this country, carrying his own wounds, got his family’s adventures back. Not because someone handed him a sympathy card, but because a donor community and a group of builders in Utah decided his daughter deserved to feel the ocean breeze again. You can read the full account in Addisyn’s story on the Extreme Motus blog.

Sometimes the greatest gift is not mobility. It is belonging.

Zion National Park Just Changed the Game

Here is the part of this story that should make national headlines everywhere.

Zion became the first national park to offer an all-terrain wheelchair for public use. An Extreme Motus now lives at the Zion Canyon Visitor Center, and any visitor can check it out for the day at no cost. The chair was not bought with a park budget. A private donor gave the money to 2LIV4, a nonprofit that gets adaptive gear into the outdoors, and 2LIV4 gifted the chair to the park.

According to the National Park Service, here is how it works:

• Check out at the Zion Canyon Visitor Center information desk, first come, first served.
• Bring a pushing partner. Both the rider and the assistant sign a short waiver.
• A ranger gives you a quick training before you head out.
• Because the chair is too long for the shuttle, rangers issue an accessibility pass to drive the Zion Canyon Scenic Drive.
• The chair goes back to the Visitor Center before closing the same day.

Adam’s long-term vision is bigger than one park. He wants an all-terrain wheelchair in every town of a certain size, available to check out like a library book. They are already on their way. The company lists 59 demo and loaner locations across the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom on its public-use chair map, and more than 500 chairs are now out in the wild.

Sand, Snow, Rock and Water: Where This Off-Road Wheelchair Goes

The proof is in the places. Owners have taken the Motus across the soft dunes at Little Sahara in Utah, where ordinary chairs sink to the axle. They have rolled it onto the rocky overlooks of Bryce Canyon. They have pushed it through winter snow and straight onto the beach.

One Google reviewer, Colton Sheperd, wrote that his family drove straight from picking up their chair to the Aspen Grove Trailhead and climbed the rocky, uphill Timpanogos trail to the Lower Falls. He said the chair handled it like it was nothing.

A quick safety note the company is upfront about: the Motus floats, but it is top-heavy. Riders should always wear a life jacket and stay in shallow water. Extreme Motus publishes a full water-safety guide, and I respect a company that tells you the limits along with the highlights.

The Cost Question, Answered Honestly

Let’s talk money, because every family reading this is wondering about it. The Extreme Motus all-terrain wheelchair starts at $4,500, plus $380 flat-rate shipping within the U.S. That is real money for most households.

Here is what the brochure does not tell you, and what Extreme Motus does. Medicare usually classifies all-terrain wheelchairs as recreational, so it typically will not pay. But many families end up paying little or nothing out of pocket through adaptive sports nonprofits, state Medicaid waivers, ABLE accounts and disability-focused grants.

The company maintains a free grant match quiz and a database of dozens of verified funding programs. For parks and community organizations, they will even help find and write grant applications at no charge.

Compare that to tracked or powered off-road chairs, which can add thousands in hitch carriers, specialized seating and battery replacements over a few years. The Motus has no batteries and runs on standard bike-shop parts. If you want to try one before you spend a dime, you can request a free demo near you.

Why This Matters to All of Us

I spent more than two decades in aerospace and manufacturing. I know what it takes to build something by hand, test it until it breaks, fix it and ship it again. What Extreme Motus is doing out of a Utah shop is real engineering with a real mission, and you can feel it the moment you talk to them.

But the chair is not the point. The point is the dad who gets to push his daughter to the edge of the lake. The grandmother who makes it to the overlook with her grandkids instead of waiting in the car. The kid who finally gets to be in the family photo at the top of the trail instead of the bottom.

I say it all the time: success is meaningless without contribution. This team is living that. They are not just selling a product. They are putting people back into the picture.

Stories like this are exactly why Stucci Media keeps covering adaptive innovation, from The Vertical Pool and its approach to home aquatic therapy to Paralympian Orlando Perez and the Veterans Wheelchair Games. Mobility is not a niche issue. It touches our veterans, our parents, our kids and, someday, most of us.

If you know a family that has been waiting in the parking lot, send them this story. If you run a park, a beach program, a veterans organization or a church group, reach out to Extreme Motus about getting a public-use chair in your community. And if you just want to smile today, go look up Sam and Ryan. You will not be able to help it.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Extreme Motus All-Terrain Wheelchair

What is an all-terrain wheelchair?

An all-terrain wheelchair is a mobility chair built for surfaces standard wheelchairs cannot handle, such as sand, snow, gravel, mud and rocky trails. The Extreme Motus uses three wide, low-pressure balloon tires and a long wheelbase so a caregiver can push it comfortably off the pavement.

How much does the Extreme Motus all-terrain wheelchair cost?

It starts at $4,500 with $380 flat-rate shipping in the U.S. Many families reduce or cover the cost through grants, nonprofit programs, Medicaid waivers and ABLE accounts.

Does the Extreme Motus really float?

Yes. The chair is buoyant, but it is top-heavy, so riders should always wear a life jacket and stay in shallow water.

Can I try an Extreme Motus before I buy one?

Yes. Extreme Motus lists 59 demo and loaner locations in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K., and you can request a demo through its website. Zion National Park also offers one free for day use at the Zion Canyon Visitor Center.

Who founded Extreme Motus?

Adam Beesely founded Extreme Motus in Orem, Utah, in 2018 alongside Dale Pitts and Todd Loader. Sam Durst and Ryan Grassley joined in 2019 and became the faces of the brand.

Photos and video courtesy of Extreme Motus, used with permission. Learn more at extrememotus.com.