Mountain Life
  • Daily Content
    • Trips & Expeditions
    • Climbing
    • Mountain Biking
    • Mountain Lifer
    • Multiplicity
    • On The Trail
    • Paddling
    • Photography
    • Skiing
    • Snowboarding
    • Stay & Play
    • Surfing
    • The Great Outdoors
    • The ML Interview
    • Travel
  • GEAR
  • VIDEOS
  • STORE
  • Magazines
    • ML Coast Mountains
    • ML Rocky Mountains
    • Vie En Montagne
    • ML Blue Mountains
    • ML Annual
    • ML Subscriptions
  • ABOUT
    • What is ML?
    • Our Team
    • Newsletter
    • Adventure Grant
    • Distribution
  • Podcast
  • Contests
  • CONTACT
    • ML Agency
    • Advertising
    • Contribute
Subscription Form

Get notified of the best News

Social Links
Instagram 22K Followers
Facebook 25K Likes
Twitter 5K Followers
Pinterest 1K Followers
Vimeo 34 Followers
LinkedIn 0
22K Followers
25K Likes
5K Followers
1K Followers
Mountain Life
Mountain Life
  • Daily Content
    • Trips & Expeditions
    • Climbing
    • Mountain Biking
    • Mountain Lifer
    • Multiplicity
    • On The Trail
    • Paddling
    • Photography
    • Skiing
    • Snowboarding
    • Stay & Play
    • Surfing
    • The Great Outdoors
    • The ML Interview
    • Travel
  • GEAR
  • VIDEOS
  • STORE
  • Magazines
    • ML Coast Mountains
    • ML Rocky Mountains
    • Vie En Montagne
    • ML Blue Mountains
    • ML Annual
    • ML Subscriptions
  • ABOUT
    • What is ML?
    • Our Team
    • Newsletter
    • Adventure Grant
    • Distribution
  • Podcast
  • Contests
  • CONTACT
    • ML Agency
    • Advertising
    • Contribute
  • Mountain Lifer

Bionic Stoke: Business As Usual For Tyler Turner

  • June 8, 2020
  • Ben Osborne
Total
44
Shares
44
0
0
0
0
0
Total
44
Shares
Share 44
Tweet 0
Pin it 0
Share 0
Share 0
Share 0

words :: Brian Hockenstein.

Pants or shorts? For most, it’s a simple morning decision, usually based on the weather outside, but for 31-year-old Tyler Turner it’s the difference between a regular day or having everyone he encounters stare at him like a human anomaly. Turner is a double amputee—he lost both legs below the knee after a skydiving accident in 2017—and on “shorts days” he draws a lot of attention. It’s hard not to notice the dude with two robot legs, and the biggest smile in the room.

Bionic Stoke Tyler Turner Skateboarding
Bionic stoke. Photo:: Kaylen Vanderee

“The crown jewels,” Turner says as he pulls one particularly future-tech looking set of prosthetics from a selection of six different pair in the back of his SUV. “The BioDapt VF2, the second generation of the Versa Foot. They are so cool it’s not even funny—they’ve got FOX racing shocks in them, with crazy amounts of adjustments available. I don’t have to pull out tools, it’s just click-click-click on these little dials and I can add more knee flexion, whatever I want. These are going to allow me to snowboard again.” 

“I don’t want to show up for a participation ribbon, I wanna crush.”

The idea of snowboarding again is one of the reasons Turner is smiling these days. Another reason is because he’s just that kind of guy, the sort who won’t let something like losing both his legs hinder his goals for the future.

Born and raised in Calgary and trained as a photographer in his early 20s, Turner spent the decade prior to his accident leading one of those enchanted lifestyles that makes for an inspiring Instagram feed: surfing, snowboarding, backcountry guiding, driving snowcats, rock climbing, skateboarding—and a newly-discovered passion for skydiving that led him to Victoria, BC to work as an instructor and airborne photographer.

And then, one day, it all came crashing down. Literally.

“The last thing I remember is opening my parachute, looking down and seeing where I was—just doing the exact same thing I’d done a hundred times before.” Turner says. “It was nothing aggressive.”

But something happened. Turner thinks it was likely a partial wing collapse as he performed a tight turn to prepare for landing, but any memories for about 60 seconds before he hit the ground are completely erased. 

Bionic Stoke Tyler Turner Gear Room
You know a guy with his climbing gear that well organized is capable of anything. Photo :: Kaylen Vanderree

“What happened after I turned? Did the canopy just collapse? Did I turn too low? I like to think it was a canopy collapse because then its not a reflection of anything I did, of me screwing up. I would love for it to just be a random accident, if that makes any sense… because from what I’ve been told, I drove it into the ground throttle wide open.”

After four days in coma, he woke up in the Intensive Care Unit down one leg with doctors desperately trying to save the other. “They had a whiteboard in my hospital room where anyone with any information about my accident had written it down. They’d drawn out a diagram of the landing field, trying to figure out what happened. Even those first two or three months after the crash, my memory is foggy. I know the stories I have been told but everything is a weird, dreamlike feeling.”

And of course, there was the pain. These days Turner beams positivity and downplays things a lot, but his was a voyage of incredible pain and suffering.

“The pain was brutal but I could deal with it. I feel like in action sports we all deal with pain super well. If you’re going to be dumb you better be tough, and if you want to push it you better be able to take it. I was shot up with fentanyl, ketamine, the works—light it up—but nothing compares to the mental game. Before the accident I was on top of the world, living my best life. Suddenly that goes into being highly dependent on other people, not even capable of feeding myself. I spent a long time doubting, even accepting that it was real, that this was my new life. I didn’t just break a bone… this is my reality forever. Shit.”

Bionic Stoke Tyler Turner Skydiving
Back in the air. Photo :: Mike Cyr

To add to the torment, as Turner spent the next year working through rehab and trying to get some semblance of his life back together, it became painfully clear that his remaining leg was going to have to go, despite how hard the doctors had worked to save it. That realization did not come easy.

“We tried everything to save that leg,” Turner says, “but I was pretty sure it wasn’t gonna work. My prosthetic was amazing, highly functional, but I’d try rock climbing or surfing and it wouldn’t go well. I got a few cool pictures so everyone thought I was just crushing it, but really it was incredibly painful and frustrating. It took six people to get me up surfing and I didn’t like that. If that was what the rest of my life was going to be like, sure… okay, but I knew there was a possibility of more—more independence, like in the old days. But I couldn’t do that until my remaining leg was gone or healed. And it wasn’t gonna heal.”

A full year after his accident, doctors agreed to amputate the remaining leg. Surprisingly, it was a hugely positive moment for Turner—he knew that with the proper prosthetics he could get his old life back. Six months later he went in for the surgery that would define the rest of his life. By that point however, he was also dealing with monsters that were deeper and more insidious than any physical injury.  

“I was not in a happy place that year, waiting for my other leg to be amputated. It was a really bad, really dark place. I’d come out of the hospital on a power prescription. I was crushing drugs—nothing illegal, all prescribed. But when you are that messed up, the doses are high, and they prescribe a lot of them. And I took them all. The drugs didn’t even mask the pain that well, honestly, but they became an escape. I would try to fight my way off them but it was a heavy spiral and it wasn’t good. Those opiates have talons, man, and they sink in deep.”

“If you’re going to be dumb you better be tough, and if you want to push it you better be able to take it.”

Just over a month after his second operation and fed up with life on painkillers, Turner went cold turkey. “It was insane. Nine of the worst days of my life. It was just like every movie—and no I wasn’t shooting heroin—but God, I can’t imagine how much worse it could’ve been. I went crazy, didn’t sleep at all for nine days. I’d stay up all through the night and do laps around downtown Victoria in my wheelchair. And then, two or three weeks later, I started feeling better.”

With two prosthetic legs, Turner began looking forward to chasing all the sports he loved—surfing, skydiving, skateboarding, snowboarding—with a new independence. And because his accident happened while he was working, WorkSafe BC was there to support the rehab efforts, help him return to work, and help him reclaim his pre-accident lifestyle as much as possible. 

“I’m incredibly grateful for that,” he says. “With the support of WorkSafe I am able to explore a little bit with these prosthetics. I want to see what I can do.”

Thanks to the compressed air shock absorbers built in his Versa Foot, Turner is expecting to do a lot. “Like I said, I can click these dials and get a lot of inflexion. With my other feet, when I’d bend my knees, my heels lift off. That’s inevitable because those only flex a few degrees and they need to store all that energy somewhere. With the Versa Foot, that shock will release and keep my heel on the ground while allowing me to bend my knees up to 28 degrees, which is essential for things like skateboarding, snowboarding and surfing. In snowboarding, especially on your toe-side edge, that shock dampens what your ankle would usually do, absorbing all the bumps and vibrations.”

Bionic Stoke Tyler Turner Sit Skiing
My first time back on snow, 16 months post-accident. Also my first time trying sit skiing Photo :: Jaden Steinke

The Versa Foot was created by Mike Shultz, a trained engineer and professional moto athlete who lost a leg in a snowmobile accident in 2008. Within six months of his accident Shultz had developed and manufactured the Moto Knee, a shock absorber-enhanced prosthetic knee designed for riding dirtbikes. He went on to create the Versa Foot and start a company called BioDapt to make his prosthetics available to other amputees. 

“I don’t think the word ‘adapt’ is negative at all,’’ Shultz says. “It simply means to adjust to a new environment or situation. We all adapt to different things in life whether we have all our limbs, or none. There’s nothing like that moment when you see the excitement on someone’s face as they realize they can do something they thought they’d lost, or figure out how to do something they never thought possible.”

Over the past several years BioDapt technology has helped increase the performance level of adaptive athletes and Schultz says his dream is to get to a point where there is no need to separate able-bodied from adaptive athletes in competition. 

“I keep saying it’s a great time to be an amputee,” says Turner, “because the technology is so tuned into exactly what you need for each activity. The products are absolutely amazing but they are still incredibly expensive—and for each activity, a lot of the time, you need a different foot.”

Turner estimates that for someone like him to start snowboarding with a pair of Versa Foot prosthetics, plus other components—as well as eight to ten trips to the clinic to test socket settings, it could run anywhere from 20 to 100 thousand dollars. 

“I always said I’d like to get to the point where I can look back and say, ‘I wouldn’t change anything’, you know? We’ll see. I think that’s going to be a really cool moment.”

With his plethora of prosthetic limbs, Turner has already returned to skydiving, skateboarding and rock climbing. He’s also surfing, and has cut the amount of assistance required from six people to just one. While he is incredibly grateful for that, the drive to be totally independent remains strong.

“A lot of people have a big switch after an injury like this,” he says. “They flip their lives 180 degrees. I haven’t had that, I’m the same dude chasing the same goals, doing the same things I did before. Probably because I can’t let go of them. These sports are what fuels me and I want to be wholly independent and keep pushing and learning and practicing. I don’t want to show up for a participation ribbon, I wanna crush.”

Outside of that passion, Turner admits he hopes to find ways to give back to the adaptive community—and beyond. “I’ve had so much support from friends and family and regular people, I hope I can find a place where I can help others too. Where can I help? Who can I help? I’m staying open to those opportunities.”

With snow already falling in the Coast Mountains, getting back snowboarding is Turner’s focus. His trademark tenacity is there, but he also remains cautiously realistic. 

“At this point, I don’t even know if I can do it,” he says. “I might stand on a board this winter and not be capable. Not that it will stop my drive to figure it out. I always said I’d like to get to the point where I can look back and say, ‘I wouldn’t change anything’, you know? We’ll see. I think that’s going to be a really cool moment.” —ML

Total
44
Shares
Share 44
Tweet 0
Pin it 0
Share 0
Share 0
Share 0
Ben Osborne

Previous Article
  • The ML Interview

Winning Races, Saving Lives: The Story Behind the Mustang Survival Sailing Collections

  • June 8, 2020
  • Ned Morgan
View Post
Next Article
  • Mountain Lifer
  • On The Trail
  • Skiing
  • Snowboarding
  • Stay & Play

How Can Science Help Us Find The Flow State?

  • June 10, 2020
  • Mountain Life Media
View Post
You May Also Like
Bora-Boreal-Quebec-winter-cabin-stars
View Post
  • Mountain Lifer
  • Stay & Play

Bora Boréal: Frozen in Time and Ice

  • Mountain Life Media
  • March 14, 2023
Skiis-and-Biikes
View Post
  • Mountain Lifer
  • Ontario
  • Skiing
  • Snowboarding

Skiis & Biikes Looks to the Future

  • Mountain Life Media
  • March 6, 2023
A-Forest-Journey-Patagonia-cover-photo
View Post
  • Mountain Lifer

A Forest Journey: The Role of Trees in the Fate of Civilization

  • Ned Morgan
  • March 2, 2023
Nalaga-Avis-O_Brien
View Post
  • Mountain Lifer
  • Women

Bringer of Light: A Conversation with N’alaga

  • Editor
  • March 1, 2023
Nnormal-No-Lost-Shoes-film
View Post
  • Mountain Lifer
  • Videos

Friday Flick: No Lost Shoes

  • Editor
  • February 17, 2023
View Post
  • Mountain Lifer
  • On The Trail
  • Photography
  • Stay & Play

Let It Roar

  • Sarah Bulford
  • February 9, 2023
View Post
  • Mountain Lifer
  • Trips & Expeditions
  • Videos

Arc’teryx Presents: Shaped by Wild

  • Sarah Bulford
  • February 8, 2023
knorthphotography.Beverly-Glenn Copeland-crop
View Post
  • Mountain Lifer

Beverly Glenn-Copeland: Finding the Universal Broadcast

  • Mountain Life Media
  • January 17, 2023

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Featured Posts
  • Mustang-Survival-WOMENS-HELIX-CCS 1
    Gear Shed: Our End-of-Winter Picks
    • March 23, 2023
  • natural-selection-Redbull 2
    Friday Flick: Natural Selection Tour Highlights
    • March 17, 2023
  • Powder-Highway-BC-ski 3
    Powder Highway Revisited
    • March 21, 2023
  • AleTrailsSouthernInterior_Vernon_MikeGamble_LookoutTrail_BenHaggarPhoto 4
    Ale Trails: Southern Interior Part 1, Vernon + Shuswap
    • March 20, 2023
  • Bora-Boreal-Quebec-winter-cabin-stars 5
    Bora Boréal: Frozen in Time and Ice
    • March 14, 2023
RECENT POSTS
  • Elements-Outfitters-Filson-cabin
    Elements Outfitters Partners with SALTS to Protect Alberta’s Incredible Landscapes
    • March 16, 2023
  • Uncertainty-mountains-Rockies
    Facing Uncertainty: The Role of Chance in Mountain Adventures
    • March 13, 2023
  • The-High-Route-Kaytlyn-Gerbin-Jenny-Abegg-North-Cascades-High-Route-glacier-hiking
    Friday Flick: Alpine Ultra-Run Sufferfest
    • March 10, 2023
Social Links
Instagram 22K Followers
Facebook 25K Likes
Twitter 5K Followers
Pinterest 1K Followers
Vimeo 34 Followers
LinkedIn 0
INSTAGRAM
mountainlifemedia
22K Followers
From The Gear Shed: Last Monday was the official start of spring, but we know there’s still some winter to be shredded. So ML staff and partners have picked the latest jackets, lanterns, bindings, mugs and drysuits for winter-spring.
Exploring the sights around beautiful Sutton, Quebec with ML creator @adv_bird ❄️🫶
Back on the road with three generations, dancing lifties, best-on-planet pizza and elusive-but-exquisite pow days.
Live It Up EP 24 is out now!
The Southern Interior region of BC holds an ecological cross-section of the province with alpine meadows, arid Douglas fir grasslands, damp cedar and hemlock forests of the Columbia Mountains and the warm expanse of Shuswap Lake.
Do Not Disturb mode activated ✅ #mountainlifer
Conceived by superhuman snowboarder @travisrice, the @naturalselection Tour highlights earth’s premier riders, from big-mountain mavens to Olympians, all competing on the most stoketastic—and unpredictable—terrain known to humankind.
Built upon a shared desire to enjoy, respect, and advocate for Alberta’s incredible landscapes, it was a natural fit for @elementsoutfitters to work with a local conservation organization @saltslandtrust to highlight the province’s rugged beauty and outdoor apparel to match.
THE UNINVITED INVITATIONAL April 13-16 @woodwardtahoe 😱 $40,000 cash prize purse and a whole lotta spotlight on a group of riders whose time has finally come!! Presented by @jess.kimura and @thenorthface and supported by @yeti @capitasupercorp @slushthemagazine @unionbindingco @smithoptics @sunbum @coalheadwear @fattire 🫡 watch the finals in person Saturday April 15 and join the crew + @btbounds for a public ride day Sunday April 16 @borealmtn. Time to make some history!!! #linkinbio to learn more!
Close your eyes and, for a moment, imagine yourself deep in the polar regions aboard an expedition ship stuck in the ice. The white pack-ice is dazzling, and the immobile vessel seems frozen in time and space. That experience piques your curiosity, doesn't it? Without having to go all the way to Antarctica, you can experience these icy sensations 30 minutes from Quebec City in one of Bora Boréal 's two floating cottages.
Follow

Subscribe

Subscribe now to our newsletter

From The Gear Shed: Last Monday was the official start of spring, but we know there’s still some winter to be shredded. So ML staff and partners have picked the latest jackets, lanterns, bindings, mugs and drysuits for winter-spring.
Exploring the sights around beautiful Sutton, Quebec with ML creator @adv_bird ❄️🫶
Back on the road with three generations, dancing lifties, best-on-planet pizza and elusive-but-exquisite pow days.
Live It Up EP 24 is out now!
The Southern Interior region of BC holds an ecological cross-section of the province with alpine meadows, arid Douglas fir grasslands, damp cedar and hemlock forests of the Columbia Mountains and the warm expanse of Shuswap Lake.
Do Not Disturb mode activated ✅ #mountainlifer
Mountain Life
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Subscribe
  • Advertising

Input your search keywords and press Enter.