Extreme Motus

The first Extreme Motus chair was built so a third grader could go see a bear. Emma Sorensen, who used a wheelchair, had been invited with her class on a 2 mile hike to see a tranquilized bear, Serve Daily reported. Provo firefighter Dale Pitts and his friend Todd Loader built her a chair that rolled on one large flotation tire. She saw the bear with her classmates, which is more than most field trips deliver.

Pitts had met the family on a call. In June 2000 a cottonwood fell on a family birthday party in the South Fork of Provo Canyon, and Emma, then 4, was left paralyzed from the waist down. Pitts stayed in touch. When her father asked for a chair that could get her up Timpanogos, the two men built a second one, and with help from family and friends she reached the top.

The chairs might have stayed a favor between friends. According to the company's press page, Adam Beesley, an accountant, found the original gathering dust in the corner of a machine shop and started a company around it in 2018. Each chair is still built by hand in the company's Utah shop, and Utah Stories reported in 2024 that Pitts, now retired from the fire department, was still putting them together.

The current chair weighs about 55 pounds and folds when you pull two quick-release pins. It rides on Wheeleez balloon tires, and the company says they let the chair float in shallow water, so a lake becomes a place to sit instead of the end of the trail. There is no motor. A companion does the pushing, and the large size carries riders up to 250 pounds.

Most people have met the chair through two friends from Utah County. Ryan Grassley has been pushing Sam Durst, who was born with cerebral palsy, up mountains and into skateparks on camera since 2019, and the company says their channels passed 400,000 TikTok followers. Grassley's page describes the off-road chairs they tried first as costing as much as a car and weighing as much as a refrigerator.

This one is not cheap either. It lists at $4,500 plus a flat $380 for shipping, and Grassley told Utah Stories that insurance does not come close to covering the cost. "A lot of people are stuck going to Disneyland for every vacation," he said. The warranty covers non-wear parts for two years, and wear parts such as tires are excluded.

In October 2026 the company announced that its chairs are now available at all five of Utah's national parks, free to borrow, with at least one chair at each park. Arches is on the list. That is where Sam took his first test ride, and nobody had to tranquilize anything.