Program Sponsored By: The Jasper-Indiana Lions Club
Taking place in the Black Box Theatre of the Community Arts Wing. Use Door 11.
Join us for an unforgettable evening as we welcome Lonnie Bedwell, renowned adventurer and motivational speaker, to share his remarkable journey of triumph over adversity. In this captivating program, Lonnie will inspire and empower audiences with his compelling stories and invaluable insights, proving that resilience knows no bounds. Lonnie will take the stage to share his personal journey of overcoming blindness and defying expectations. Through humor, vulnerability, and unwavering optimism, Lonnie will demonstrate how adversity can be transformed into opportunity, inspiring audiences to embrace change and seize their full potential.
*Lonnie Bedwell is a National Geographic 2015 Adventurer of the Year. He has kayaked some of the most challenging whitewater in the world and is responsible for first blind descents of Africa’s fabled Zambezi River and West Virginia’s world-renowned Gauley River. Lonnie is best known for his first descent of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon — an effort successfully completed during 2013 as part of a team of boaters assembled by Team River Runner. A command performance in the Grand Canyon in 2014 resulted in the Adventurer of the Year nomination.
A former Navy Petty Officer, Lonnie was critically injured during 1997 in a hunting accident that instantly took his sight. Nevertheless, he raised three daughters as a single father, teaching them all to hunt and fish — and, against all odds, to drive. Once the girls graduated from high school, Lonnie continued to challenge himself, ultimately becoming a renowned extreme sports athlete. When the threshold for running the Grand Canyon was placed at 1,000 kayak rolls, he took his donated kayak to the pond on his farm and rolled it 1,500 times. The rest is history.
Lonnie has climbed Mt. Everest, Mt. Kilimanjaro, summited several of North America’s highest mountains, rock climbs, and is an avid downhill skier when he has time away from roofing work in his hometown of Duggar, IN.
