Biographies | Laughing Trails

• Megan Cutter, a white female, is standing in an open grassy area beside a river. She is wearing blue jeans and is wrapped in a gray patterned shawl, which is flaring out at the bottom from being flung around her. In the background is a pine forest and a mountain peak with some slight snow covering. She is camping with Barton in Silverton, Colorado. Photo taken July, 2023.

Megan Cutter

Layers of identity fold and express themselves like paint on a canvas. Underneath the skin, words seep through Megan’s fingertips, poetry and stories inking out on a blank page. Always seeing the beauty of this world, Megan explores photography, writing, and creative expression. A love of quiet times, sitting on the patio drifting into the mountains compliments moments of laughter and exploration. If we are out traveling, Megan is the one who freaks out just a little bit more if we go off track. And underneath the surface, there is a love of the thrill peeking out, seeing the wonder and delight in everything.

Skills include digging wheelchairs out of sand, mud, and semi-frozen gravel, impeccable navigation skills that typically leads to getting even more lost, high vocal language skills while driving. She is the logistical coordinator who on every adventure ends up having to throw her hands in the air giving up control to a higher power, and when arriving at a place she loves, stopping every ten steps to take in a breath and a photograph.

When she is not adventuring, Megan works in organizational systems change, technology integration, and business development content management.

Barton Cutter

A living embodiment of laughter, contradiction, and complete irreverence, Barton lives for the unknown. He geeks out over the big questions and feels most free when doing the complete opposite of what is expected. He lives to meet with perception, both his own and other peoples. A born troublemaker, he is most at home in the edge of the question “what happens if…?” And it is not uncommon, as the resident navigator, to randomly throw in a “turn left here!” as we suddenly find ourselves navigating and unmarked the road in the middle of the high-desert or encouraging a random stranger to help him over a seemingly impossible cliff in his manual wheelchair.

Barton’s innate irreverence, laughter, and sense of adventure are punctuated by moments of deep stillness and silence, the beautiful irony of his embodiment with Cerebral Palsy, that includes perpetual muscle spasms, and wondrous awe that delights in just about everything he encounters.

When he is not off adventuring with the love of his life, Megan, or messing with his own perception of what it means to live and express from full humanity, he geeks out on bringing the big questions to other people as an executive coach and DEI consultant, rattling their paradigms, and laughing all the way!

Our unique journey encompasses layered identities that includes visible and invisible disability, the jokester, the compassionate one, the curious one, and the troublemakers. As a unit together, we break down barriers and when we’re at our best, bring to others the joy that they cannot see for themselves.

• Barton Cutter, a white male, with short gray/black hair and a high forehead, is sitting on an outcropping area with granite rock and gravel from the summit of Flagstaff Mountain, behind Chautauqua in Boulder, Colorado. There is one tall pine tree behind him and the Rocky Mountain range to the right of his head. The sky is blue, with no clouds. He is wearing a gray four-corner’s t-shirt. Photo taken August, 2024.

Barton Cutter, a white male, wearing jeans, t-shirt, and a blue corduroy jacket and baseball cap, is sitting in his power wheelchair on a wooden walkway in the middle of dense woods. There is a sign behind him that reads “Whoaw 2mph, curves 1 mph, strickly enforced in white paint and “WOW vigilantes” underneath in gray. He is at Wilderness on Wheels, in Grant, Colorado. Photo taken June 2024.

Barton Cutter, a white male, with short gray/black hair and a high forehead. He is wearing sunglasses with blue lenses and a leather jacket. He is looking backwards over his right shoulder at the camera. In front of him is a split wooden fence and mountains in the background. There are clouds with a patch of blue sky above his head. He is at Chautauqua in Boulder, Colorado. Photo taken February, 2024.