Portraits of Adventure / 3 Trackers / Steve
Steve
Brandywine Ski Resort, Ohio
February 2026
Steve Lumpp is always the first one there, Sundays and Tuesdays, getting the equipment ready before anyone else arrives. He’s always sporting a smile and eager to help set up, rig, and carry equipment out to the snow. He's been volunteering with 3 Trackers for 25 years. As part of the deal with his wife, he learned to ski at Brandywine when he was 31, he says, half-joking: if you're going to live with me, you're going to have to ski. He's been with the adaptive program ever since and considers it family.
Past the age most people retire, Steve is not out on the hill running lessons, he's the one who has everything staged and ready before the first sit-ski comes off the rack. A few weekends a year he’ll put the boots on and step into some skis, I got to make a few turns with him after this chairlift interview.
When you ask why he keeps coming back, rather than talking about himself, he talks about a boy who started with the program at four years old, after doctors told his parents he'd never walk. Fifteen years later that same boy is a man, graduating college. There's a sticker on one of the trailers, Steve says, that gets at it: if I can do this, I can do anything. He also brings up a blind teenager too, who skied tethered to the same volunteer week after week. After a while, he says, her whole demeanor changed.
He's careful not to take credit, there was physical therapy too, he points out, for the boy who learned to walk. The program didn't do it alone, he says. What he also says is that they had him seven or eight weeks a year, and that was enough to matter.
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