When LJ Wilde and his family approached the trailhead at Grand Teton National Park, he felt a bit nervous about what park rangers might say to him. After all, Wilde was pulling along his paraplegic daughter in a prototype hiking cart that he’d designed and built. It was the first time testing it in the wild, and he didn’t know how the rangers might react to him taking this one-wheeled contraption into the park.
Still, ranger comments or not, he’d spent the last several months working every night on his design so his disabled daughter could join the rest of the family on a mountain trail — and he wasn’t about to waste the opportunity.
As it happens, someone called out asking LJ to stop as he and his family walked through the parking lot. Only, it wasn’t a ranger. It was a woman with her own daughter in a wheelchair, asking how to buy the cart Wilde had built in his garage in Logan, Utah. The attention didn’t stop in the parking lot, either.
“Throughout our hike, we got stopped multiple times by families asking us about it,” Wilde told GearJunkie. “Many of them had left their son or daughter back at the campsite because they had a disability and couldn’t join them.”
That day in June 2022 was the beginning of a new journey for LJ and his family. Four years later, Wilde turned that prototype into the Huckleberry Cascade Cart. He has now sold 2,000 of them to buyers in 28 countries, many of them families searching for the same thing he was: a way to take their disabled child into nature.
Family Hiking — Interrupted
As a Utah native, Wilde grew up in an outdoorsy family that loved venturing in the mountains together. When he got married and started having kids, he carried on that tradition — then came his third child. Luci was born with a rare genetic disorder that rendered her a paraplegic.
When she was little, this wasn’t an issue. He simply bought a Kelty child carrier pack and hiked with her on his back. But by the time Luci was a 55-pound 7-year-old, the child carrier was no longer sufficient, and there simply weren’t many other options available.
“All of a sudden, I was at this fork in the road where I felt like ‘I either have to stop doing this with my family, or we have to leave her at home with somebody’,” Wilde said. “I thought they both sucked, and I wasn’t willing to accept either one of them.”
At the time, Wilde worked on the design engineering team for a circuit board manufacturer. He began designing a prototype hiking chair for Luci, but soon found himself in a slump. Before he knew it, almost 3 years had passed, and the family had mostly stopped going outside together.
“I got upset with myself,” Wilde said. “At first, I thought I was gonna take it to the dump and accept my reality. Then something hit me: ‘No, you’re gonna finish this.'”
He asked his wife to plan a summer trip to the Grand Tetons in 2022 — giving him 4 months to complete the hiking cart. He managed to finish a prototype, and on that very first day in the Tetons, Wilde realized he had created something that could help other families, too.
“My wife told me, ‘What if we quit your job and we go figure out how to get these families hiking?'” Wilde said. “I resigned about three months later. We jumped off the cliff.”
A New Concept for Disabled Hiking
Wilde started tinkering away for 80-plus–hour weeks, trying to turn his initial prototype into something usable by thousands of other families.
He had several important concerns in mind from the start. He wanted to create a durable hiking cart that would allow a caretaker to haul someone with a disability up truly rugged mountain trails — not just walking trails at the local park. It needed to support a decent amount of body weight. And it needed to be significantly cheaper than the existing all-terrain wheelchairs, the cheapest of which still cost around $4,500.
Wilde would eventually name his concept the Cascade Tandem Hiking Cart. It’s sort of like a simplified, one-iheeled rickshaw. At the front is the Frame and Harness, which ensures that only 25% of the rider/cart’s weight is on the carrier’s back. This harness includes trekking poles for forward motion, but they also double as stationary legs when the wearer needs to detach and rest.
This is all connected to a padded, shock-absorbing seat by a metal frame for the passenger. A single, 20″ x 4-inch fat wheel with a knobby tire lives at the end of the frame and features a disc brake to make descents a lot easier.
After 18 months of iteration, Wilde felt good about the design, and they were ready to launch. Around this time, he and his family took Luci on another hike, and a fellow hiker took a video of them and posted it on Instagram. In less than a day, that post was shared 32,000 times.
“That was when I realized this was gonna work,” Wilde said. “We were getting people reaching out in other languages from all over the world.”
The Launch
Wilde and his family launched Huckleberry Hiking in March 2024, with the Cascade Cart as its flagship product.
Because Logan, Utah, is rich in industry, Wilde was able to source all the necessary parts within a 40-mile radius. He also opted against the use of crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter to avoid giving up a percentage of each sale. These choices allowed him to keep prices as low as possible.
The current price of the Cascade Tandem Hiking Cart is $2,500. That’s roughly the same cost as a full-suspension mountain bike — by far the cheapest chair of the existing options. Even Huckleberry Hiking’s competitor, Extreme Motus, acknowledged the Cascade Cart as the cheapest option in its 2026 guide to all-terrain wheelchairs.
As a result, sales took off “fast and hard,” Wilde said. It didn’t take long for there to be 750 orders for the Cascade Cart — a staggering amount for a small team — and it took 10 months to build them all. It was a huge challenge, but they persevered, and now Huckleberry Hiking has produced more than 2,000 carts for families all over the world.
Testimonials from families suggest that the Cascade Cart does have a learning curve. “Finding the right balance takes time and practice,” Alaskan mom Cristi Miller said. “But you’ll eventually get the hang of it.”
“My daughter and I often hit our favorite trails now just the two of us,” Miller said. “After 5 years of not adventuring, my children and I can again all go hiking together. Rocks, glaciers, streams, snow, and mountains are no longer obstacles, but opportunities. My daughter gets so excited when she sees me load the cart into the car. She is happiest when she is outside and moving, and her joy brightens the day of everyone she comes in contact with.”
The Future of Huckleberry Hiking
The Cascade Cart has already proven itself for many families and a wide range of disabilities. Wilde has heard from families using the cart for people with a wide variety of disabilities, including cerebral palsy, spina bifida, Angelman syndrome, Mowat-Wilson syndrome, Down syndrome, epilepsy, or even autism. But no design is perfect, and Wilde continues to develop and refine the design.
In fact, he already has lots of updates he wants to make to the second generation to make it more versatile for more families, including adding a sun canopy, as well as head and trunk supports. He also wants to increase the current version’s load limit of 160 pounds and make it more comfortable for those riders over 5’6″ tall.
“My daughter was the test pilot, and I was the Sherpa,” he said. “We would try something, and she would be like, ‘That sucked.’ And then we would come back, and I would change it.”
Perhaps the most significant innovation is an electronic assist package, which first became available through preorders in February and is scheduled to ship out this month. Wilde called it a “complete game-changer. It extends your range so much because you’re not exerting so much energy up the hill,” he said.
When asked what he’s most proud of with the Cascade Cart, Wilde stated, “So many families are now back on the trail. I mean, to help people’s lives stay enriched through outdoor experience — we can’t change the trails, but we can change how we get them there.”
