Most of us measure a good day in the mountains by vertical metres skied or a view worth stopping for. Ben Spencer and Peter Smorthit measured theirs rather differently this summer: 422 kilometres, 6,500 metres of ascent, and not a single power assist between them.
The two friends, both wheelchair users, have become the first people in history to cross the Alps using only manual wheelchairs, travelling from the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland to Lake Como in Italy over 18 gruelling days. The journey coincided with a heatwave that pushed temperatures towards 40°C, adding brutal heat to routes that were never designed with wheels in mind, let alone wheels being pushed by hand over an unbroken fortnight.
A Route With No Easy Days
The pair set off from Montreux, working their way along the shore of Lake Geneva before turning inland and up towards the high passes that eventually carried them into Italy. On paper it reads like a scenic tour. In practice, it was closer to ten marathons stacked end to end, with a mountain range in the way.
The hardest stretch came a few days in, at a steep, unpaved gorge with no accessible path forward. Smorthit, who has been paraplegic since a spinal cord injury at 19, got out of his chair and dragged himself and it more than a kilometre uphill by hand, while Spencer inched along behind him a few metres at a time. That single stretch took two hours. It’s the kind of detail that turns a fundraising challenge into something closer to an expedition.
Why They Did It
Spencer has lived with a progressive form of ataxia since 2022, a rare neurological condition that gradually affects speech, balance, coordination and mobility. Rather than let it shrink his world, he’s used it to expand it. Previous challenges have included summiting Snowdon and completing the London Marathon, both firmly in wheelchair-user “why would you even attempt that” territory.
Smorthit brought his own serious pedigree to the trip. He’d already pushed a wheelchair unsupported the entire length of Great Britain, from Land’s End to John O’Groats, and has completed hundreds of marathons and ultramarathons from his chair since his injury.
Together, the pair took on the Alps in aid of Ataxia UK, a charity supporting the roughly 12,500 people in the UK living with the condition and funding research towards treatments and a cure. You can find more on their fundraising page via Alps4Ataxia (alps4ataxia.com), or follow the pair’s own accounts on Instagram at @benpushes and @the_mad_marathoner.
But beyond the money raised, their aim was simpler and, in its way, bigger: to show other wheelchair users what’s possible in the mountains, and to nudge the outdoor world into thinking harder about who its trails, passes and resorts are really built for. It’s a question worth sitting with. Most of what we cover here, ski resorts, mountain adventures, first descents like Fay Manners’ recent line down Peru’s Ranrapalca, assumes a level of physical access that a huge number of people simply don’t have. Ben and Peter’s crossing is a reminder that the mountains can still be reached, just not always by the route everyone else takes.
What’s Next
They reached Lake Como on 8 July, tired but already talking about what comes next. A push across Canada is on the list. So is a route running the length of Europe, from north to south. For a sport built on chasing summits, it’s a good reminder that the biggest lines aren’t always the ones on a piste map.