Clare Reilly Has Become the First Person to Ride the Munda Biddi Trail in a Wheelchair

Clare Reilly has just set a world first – she’s the first person to ever traverse the entire 1,072km Munda Biddi Trail in a wheelchair – but if you ask her, it isn’t that big a deal.

‘I think it means more to other people than it does to me’, Clare tells me. ‘It doesn’t feel like a big deal to me. You just go out and do outdoor activities. I just had this idea and then we went and did it.’

How to Take a Wheelchair Into the Wilderness

That idea was to tackle the Munda Biddi Trail over 26 days in a specially built off-road wheelchair to raise funds and awareness for multiple sclerosis (MS), which Clare was diagnosed with in 2017.

Clare, a disability advocate, podcast host, and mum living on Wadawurrung Country on Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula, has always loved outdoor adventures but says the Wheelchair Meets Wilderness journey was about more than just that.

Photo by Clare Reilly

‘It’s about possibility, visibility, and showing that adventure and disability absolutely belong in the same sentence.’

Given the number of people who didn’t expect Clare to be able to do this, it’s an important point to prove.

‘There were lots of people who said to me how hard it would be and that I wouldn’t be able to do it’, Clare tells me. But not only was she undaunted by the challenge of the trail, she was so busy with other logistics – food, fundraising, finding accessible accommodation – that she barely had time to consider it at all.

‘I’m not a great explorer’, she says. ‘I didn’t actually think much about the trail – I’d done so much organising and planning just to get to it! But interestingly, the bits that people said would be the hardest parts weren’t necessarily the bits that were the most challenging. [Riding in the wheelchair] isn’t like riding a bike; sometimes the trail had a nice smooth centre for bikes but my wheels would straddle the track and end up on the rough parts.’

Clare and her crew, which included husband Jay, son Elliot, and Clare’s parents and friends – including a documentary filmmaker – still faced their fair share of challenges while travelling through Noongar Country from the Mundaring trailhead to Albany.

Steep and tight switchbacks that took hours to traverse, brutal weather, and, on the first day, Clare even flipped her wheelchair when trying to balance her wheels on a steep switchback.

‘I hadn’t done that before’, Clare says. Despite plenty of practice rides in her custom wheelchair, a battery-powered beast known as ‘The Rig’, the Munda Biddi trails were a new test.

‘The day I found hardest was day eight, when there was about two hours of really tight switchbacks’, she said. ‘For mountain biking, that’s great but for me it was hard because my turning circle wasn’t that good. I would move a few metres and get to the next switchback and then Jay would have to manoeuvre The Rig for me to get around the next one.

‘That was a really tough day.’

But Clare’s not one to be daunted by difficulties like these.

‘It was definitely mentally fatiguing’, Clare says. ‘There was a lot of concentration. But I wasn’t as physically tired as expected – both my Dad and Jay commented on how well my body was reacting.’

Adventure After a Diagnosis is Good for the Soul

Part of Clare’s ability to adapt to an adventure like this no doubt lies in her history of outdoor adventuring, having been camping, climbing, and hiking her whole life and even holding a degree in outdoor education.

Her diagnosis with MS didn’t dampen Clare’s desire to get outside. In fact, only three months after she was diagnosed, Clare and Jay moved to Gippsland to take up positions as directors at Wollangarra Outdoor Education Centre.

‘I definitely expected that we’d still be doing outdoor activities, mostly because we immediately went and ran this outdoor education centre’, Clare tells me.

‘I didn’t look ahead or think about how the diagnosis would impact that later on so much. It was always going to be part of life.’

For Clare, spending nearly four weeks in nature, passing through ever-changing ecosystems from lush forests and grass trees in the early days, to the huge gums in the Valley of the Giants, before emerging onto the rugged and rocky coastline, only reinforced how important it is to get outside.

‘It was just beautiful’, Clare exclaims. ‘It was a really great way of getting back into the outdoors since my diagnosis and telling people that we can do hard things.

‘The trail obviously wasn’t designed for four wheels and there aren’t many that are but I do hope it’s something that’s considered more and more.

‘There’s lots of links between disability and mental health struggles. If we can get more people into the outdoors – by making it more of a focus for people when building outdoor trails for different levels of access needs – that‘d be really great to help.

‘Nature is really good for the soul’, she confirms.

Clare’s 100,000 Reasons to Keep Going When Times Got Tough

Clare’s ride also aimed to raise funds for the MS Research Flagship initiative at the University of Tasmania’s Menzies Institute of Medical Research.

MS is a neurological disorder affecting the central nervous system which can interfere with the transmission of nerve impulses. According to MS Australia, it’s the most common acquired chronic neurological disease affecting young adults, often diagnosed between the ages of 20-40. MS affects around 38,000 people in Australia, about 75% of whom are women.

Read more: I Was an Avid Hiker Until My MS Diagnosis: Here’s How I Still Get Outside 

Clare is hoping her fundraising goal of $100,000 can be used to help the millions of people living with MS worldwide. Almost $20,000 has been raised so far.

Clare’s also working on a book about her adventure, the proceeds of which will all be donated to the same cause.

‘A cure would be the dream and prevention would be even better’, Clare says. ‘But [the Menzies Institute] also looks for new medications and ways of helping people with MS, so different ways to support people living with MS would be great.’

Having such an important goal also helped keep Clare and the entire team push through the more difficult moments on the trail.

‘We all worked really well together’, Clare tells me. ‘Over a month there’s obviously going to be some moments but we were all there for the one reason – to raise that money – so when everything got a bit tricky we just remembered what we were there for.’

Outrageous idea? ‘You just go out and do it!’

Since finishing the trail, Clare says things have been a whirlwind. Between taking interviews, working on her book, and easing her way into a holiday with Jay and Elliot, she says it ‘hasn’t quite sunk in yet’.

‘Which I think is a good thing, because if it finished all of a sudden, I don’t know how I’d feel.’

With one massive adventure complete, it’s unlikely this is the end of Clare’s adventure career.

‘Jay and I had one day when we were talking about what we could do next, saying maybe we could ride to Sydney, ride around Australia’, she tells me, excitedly. ‘It seemed a bit outrageous – I think we were a bit caught up in it. But who knows?’

I’m sure not that long ago, riding the Munda Biddi Trail in a wheelchair seemed outrageous too. But like Clare says: you have an idea and then you just go out and do it. Disability or not.

You can donate to Clare’s fundraiser, learn more about her ride, and pre-order her book Wheelchair Meets Wilderness at the Wheelchair Meets Wilderness website.

Feature photo by Julia Rau

Photos by Cowboy Hat Films

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