If you ski or snowboard on Hudson Bay Mountain, you've probably seen him. When Brian Wick of Prince Rupert hits the slopes, people can't help but stop and watch in awe.

With a style all his own, he blasts through fields of fresh powder or carves his ski around a mountain of moguls. What makes him so great and so different is that Brian is paraplegic.

Brian learned to ski as a teenager and became a typical ski "bum", fishing commercially in the summer before joining the U.I. (Unemployment Insurance) winter ski team all winter. He lived many of our dreams by spending a season working the slopes in Whistler. He married a woman named Melony and together they had a daughter named Tobie.

Everything was fine until his testosterone got the better of him, he says of himself and an ensuing single motor vehicle accident. "I was a 21-year-old statistic." Returning to Rupert from Vancouver, Brian accidentally drove himself and two buddies off the road in the infamous Fraser Canyon. All survived but Brian sustained a spinal cord injury of the lower vertebrae T11 and T12, and was pronounced unable to walk.