Take A Seat For Adventure
AdvenChair creator Geoff Babb, seated, during a training hike at Smith Rock State Park in central Oregon’s high desert region.
by Andy Nemann for innovations, in February 2025 PN Magazine
All-terrain wheelchairs aren’t anything new, but a former forest firefighter has designed a chair that allows even more adults and children with spinal cord injury and disease (SCI/D) to go off-road while promoting time with family and friends.
The AdvenChair is a patented and convertible hiking wheelchair designed for people with higher levels of SCI/D or limited upper arm mobility, such as from a stroke.
Showcased at last November’s TravelAbility Emerging Markets Summit in San Francisco, the chair is made so the rider is pushed or pulled by one to six people. Inventor Geoff Babb believes that aspect of the AdvenChair allows his creation to do more than allow people with limited mobility to experience places such as mountain trails.
“We think that adventuring is a team sport, and it really takes a team of people to move the chair,” Babb says. “The AdvenChair not only allows people to be out, but it brings peopletogether to do that.”
A Mountain Bike Chair
A beefy-looking chair with a heavy-duty orange frame, the AdvenChair has several unique features that help it stand out from other all-terrain wheelchairs.
One of the biggest is the AdvenChair’s ability to easily be converted from an off-road chair to one better suited to operate and maneuver indoors.
The All-Terrain Mode utilizes a removable 20-inch front wheel with shock absorbers that helps the chair navigate rugged, soft or steep terrain with the stability and durability of a mountain bike. When it’s time to head inside, use a bathroom or even get on a bus, 6-inch caster wheels are lowered into place and the third wheel is removed. Both modes allow a user’s feet to rest on a multi-position footplate with a minimum of 6 inches of clearance.
It’s only natural that the AdvenChair offers the stability and durability of a mountain bike, since it utilizes premium mountain bike parts for the wheels, tires, brakes and handlebars.
The main wheels are 27.5-inch Maxxis High Roller tires with a Cush-Core inner tire suspension system that allows them to be used with low tire pressure. The height-adjustable handlebars at the back of the chair have hand brakes for the 180-millimeter disk brake rotor. The padded seat is adjustable to fit young children up to large adults and features adjustable armrests and hand grips.
Those mountain bike parts also help make the chair easy to disassemble and fold into a compact size that can fit in the back of a small hatchback trunk or stow on an airplane. Babb says using them makes the chair easy to maintain.
“Wheelchair parts are expensive and not as accessible or as available as mountain bike parts,” he says. “This way, you can go to any bike store and get what you need.”
Try & Try Again
As with so many inventive products, this one wasn’t created overnight. It took a few prototypes, several years, and a rough trip to the Grand Canyon to get here. An avid outdoorsman, Babb was working as a Bureau of Land Management fire ecologist in Bend, Ore., in 2005, when a near fatal brain stem stroke left him in a wheelchair and with limited use of one hand.
Babb adapted and found ways to do things outside, such as sit skiing and horseback riding, but he realized he was being limited not so much by his body, but by his rigid wheelchair. With the help of his friend and helicopter mechanic Dale Neubauer, Babb modified his wheelchair with more robust tires and a third wheel to create the first AdvenChair.
Babb and his family used his new creation to explore several parks in Oregon and Washington, which eventually led to a 2016 attempt to visit the bottom of the Grand Canyon via the famed Bright Angel Trail. Unfortunately, a broken axle 2 miles into the descent forced a return to the top of the canyon’s South Rim and the realization that a whole new off-road wheelchair was needed. This one would be designed from the ground up to be less like a wheelchair and more like a mountain bike.
“I was kind of crushed when the first design failed, but we knew we had to start over again and keep going,” Babb says. “Fortunately, I had some some friends who were creative and led me down this path. I certainly had to learn to be open to talk about engineering and prototyping.”
With the help of CAD designer Jack Arnold and Neubauer, along with Babb and his wife, Yvonne’s, direction, AdvenChair 2.0 was born. Everything with the new chair was going well in 2017 when Babb had another stroke.
Despite the personal setback, a determined Babb steadily recovered from his second stroke. Several minor modifications were made to the chair, and the first production run of the current AdvenChair rolled out in June 2021.
Bringing People Together
Available for individual purchase ($11,950), the AdvenChair has seen strong growth through its own rental program, tour groups, schools and nonprofit groups.
Located in the popular outdoor recreation destination of Bend, Ore., the AdvenChair can be rented for a half day, a whole day, a week or three or more weeks with prices ranging from $75 to $850. The chair has also been popular with local companies such as Wanderlust Tours (wanderlusttours.com) and school programs such as the Northwest Regional Outdoor Science School.
Babb says he hopes to have people exploring and enjoying the great outdoors in AdvenChairs throughout the world in the next five years, but he believes he’s created something more than an off-road wheelchair.
“It just means a lot to me to see smiles and hear the laughter of people that are working together to work through a difficult area and problems,” Babb says. “For me, early on, not being able to rock climb, hike or bike again was kind of hard. But being in the AdvenChair, I feel like I’m really part of the adventure again as a team.”
