Katherine Hayes Rodriguez has been a pioneering force in adaptive skiing for nearly five decades. Beginning in 1976 as a volunteer with a program for visually impaired skiers in the Tahoe Basin, she became instrumental in professionalizing adaptive ski instruction across the United States. Katherine was an early leader of an organization that is now known as Achieve Tahoe, Move United’s first chapter, and served as a lead author of the first adaptive technical manual. She led clinics across the country and her work was crucial to the Professional Ski Instructors Association's adoption of adaptive skiing as an official discipline in 1986.