The Idaho Outdoor Fieldhouse is a place of beauty that’s built for beasts. It is rugged and outdoorsy, but also accessible. In one space there may be several wheelchair athletes playing rugby, in another someone is being fitted for a prosthetic. Made possible by the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation and designed specifically for veterans with disabilities using a range of adaptive fitness modalities — from aquatics to group exercise to strength training — the Idaho Outdoor Fieldhouse is dedicated to help all veterans be the best version of themselves.
But programming at the Fieldhouse goes beyond the walls of the facility. Nestled on the banks of the Boise River and just steps away from the foothills of the Boise Mountains, veterans and adaptive athletes can get out in nature and enjoy all that Idaho has to offer, including hiking programs, mountain biking excursions and downhill skiing, to name a few of the recreation opportunities provided. The Idaho Outdoor Fieldhouse also serves as the headquarters for Mission43 and CAF - Idaho, which means there are a lot of services packed into this property.
Photo by Tobin Rogers courtesy of BRS
Universal design at every turn
The 60,000-square-foot Idaho Outdoor Fieldhouse sits on seven acres of land and houses a gymnasium, a functional fitness space, a storage building, short-term residential housing and the Summit Hyperbaric and Wellness Center. The building itself is hyper-local. According to Roger Quarles, Albertson Family Foundation executive director, “the building was conducive to the visual beauty of this area, incorporating sandstone that was milled right up here in the quarry on the hill, big timber beams that were brought over from Oregon and steel from a local guy in Caldwell.” Quarles also called out the fountain positioned against a wall of windows that gives the impression of flowing water straight out of the Boise River.
Amanda Spear, design manager at Barker Rinker Seacat, the architecture firm tasked with bringing the fieldhouse to life, also celebrated its ability to blur the line between exterior and interior. “I really love the lobby and circulation area,” she says. “That main, central planter that we put in with the skylight above it, the client really wanted to bring the outdoors in and incorporate natural materials. You don’t get the opportunity to put something like that in a facility very often, and I think it makes the space feel so much better.”
However, the impressive design of the Idaho Outdoor Fieldhouse doesn’t stop at the natural beauty of the facility. Universal design is around every corner, putting accessibility at center stage.
“How do we do things that are tied to universal design, that still make it feel rough and tough, yet accommodating?” Quarles posits, thinking back on the process. Quarles knows as well as anyone that veterans don’t want to be given the easy way out, so the accessibility of the fieldhouse is such that an able-bodied person might not even notice it.
Quarles says when the Mission43 team asked the veteran community what obstacles most inhibit their access to other spaces, they said things like, “Don’t put sconces on the wall that I’m going to bump into because my cane doesn’t pick it up when I’m going down the hall.” According to Quarles, the focus group also called out, “Transitioning flooring, so I know where to turn. Lights that come on automatically, so I don’t have to find the button. Sound systems that integrate in different parts of the building.”
“We learned that it would be great if when the person washed their hands, the soap and the paper towels were right there, and they didn’t have to move their wheelchair to another wall with their wet hands to dry them, because then they would already be dirtying them up again,” Spear explains.
Throughout the design and build process, the team was focused on making a space that the veteran and adaptive athlete community could walk into and really think, “They made this for me.” That dream was realized at the Veteran’s Day 2023 ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Photo Courtesy of J.A and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation
Programs for every body
Since opening their doors a year ago, the Idaho Outdoor Fieldhouse has received excitement and dedication from the veteran community in Boise, and enhancing that community has been an underlying goal of everything Mission43 and the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation has been doing for years.
Quarles says that he and his team have focused on one central question: “How do we make Idaho the premier destination for life after the military?”
“We have deployed resources over the years to parks, trails and backcountry access. We’re big recreational enthusiasts, but we noticed along the way that access to the outdoors and recreational venues was limited primarily to able-bodied athletes and civilians,” Quarles says. And many of the program developments at the Idaho Outdoor Fieldhouse have grown out of that enthusiasm. Quarles describes an upcoming six-week training program for ski season with 17 enrolled members who will show up every day for six weeks starting at 6:30 in the morning. Throughout the program, they will train the key muscles needed to excel on the slopes and learn how to use ski equipment that they may be unfamiliar with if they are newly disabled. At the culmination of the class, all members — regardless of physical ability — will go up to the mountains to ski.
Photo by Tobin Rogers courtesy of BRS
“We’ll have upright skiers, sit skiers and everything in between, and they will have forged community even beyond what they’re getting at the fieldhouse generally,” Quarles says.
Other programmatic offerings at the fieldhouse include wheelchair basketball, rock climbing, pickleball and even a 24-miles-in-24-hours race. Quarles also raves about the fieldhouse’s functional fitness and weight lifting areas. “The functional fitness areas are the things people get really excited about. It gets used pretty much all day, every day. They open the door so it lets the cold air or warm air in, and it just makes it more rugged. The turf is definitely a highlight.”
According to Quarles, another member favorite is the fieldhouse’s pool. He notes that many members do pushups, kettlebell swings and other high-intensity interval training exercises on the pool deck in between their laps.
The Idaho Outdoor Fieldhouse has even embraced the pickleball craze. “Pickleball night is starting up this week, so there will be regular pickleball and wheelchair Pickleball for everybody to come participate,” says Quarles, “You might have a dad that’s missing a limb out there playing pickleball with his 12-year-old kid.”
Photo by Tobin Rogers courtesy of BRS
Cutting edge therapies
The facility is also home to the Summit Hyperbaric and Wellness Center, a 16,000-square-foot building that has the country’s most sophisticated hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber.
Known as a dive tank, the chamber can accommodate 10 divers at a time. Users sit in first-class-style airplane seats for the treatment and breathe in the hyper-oxygenated air. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy helps those with traumatic brain injuries, PTSD and physical injuries that are slow to heal.
“It is one of a kind in the U.S.,” Quarles says, “We just finished our first cohort of 16 divers. They do two dives a day, five days a week. The majority of them come stay at the fieldhouse in that short-term housing.”
Most other hyperbaric tanks resemble MRI machines, with room enough for one person to be slid in, closed off and surrounded by the oxygen. Designers of the fieldhouse wanted to ensure that people in wheelchairs, those who wanted to lie down, and able-bodied people were all able to experience the hyperbaric chamber.
Photo by Tobin Rogers courtesy of BRS
“There’s a whole research team that works there, as well. They’re doing pre-assessments, formative and summative assessments, so they can actually inform the literature on new ways to treat old issues,” Quarles explains.
Initially, the team at the Albertson Family Foundation didn’t want to expand their mission to the medical side of veteran care because of the competition among fellow organizations. However, after sending one veteran team member to a hyperbaric chamber across the country, they couldn’t deny the transformative results and added it to the growing wish list of features in the early days of site planning.
Quarles says when the foundation started this journey, the central question was, “How could we create a facility that eliminates barriers to entry and yet is conducive to the visual beauty of the area?”
Through their partnership with BRS, the Idaho Outdoor Fieldhouse was born, and in one year it has made an obvious impact on the local community. From daily workouts and excursions into the wilderness, to happy hours, first-responder meetings and hyperbaric oxygen therapy sessions, the Idaho Outdoor Fieldhouse has transformed the lives of Idaho-based veterans.
It has been just over one year since the Veteran’s Day ribbon-cutting ceremony in 2023, and the team at the fieldhouse, Mission43, CAF - Idaho and the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation are just getting started on their goal of making Idaho the premier destination for life after the military.
