Riding On Faith

By the time she was 18 years old, Amberley Snyder was already living her dream as a serious rodeo competitor. She had just won a world championship, was hitting the finals in other competitions, and was state president of Utah's Future Farmers of America. One day she hoped to be a professional rider. But all that changed on Jan. 10, 2010. Snyder was driving to a Denver stock show when she looked down to check her map. When she looked back up, she was drifting into the other lane of traffic. She overcorrected her truck and the back wheels caught a patch of dirt, causing the vehicle to roll. Snyder remembers every moment of the crash. "I felt myself pick up and leave through my window," Snyder said. "I continued to hear my truck rolling as I'm flying through the air." Just minutes earlier, Snyder had taken off her seat belt because her stomach was bothering her. With no seat belt to keep her secure in the truck, she was thrown against a fence post, where she was found, still conscious, but unable to feel her legs. Doctors later told Snyder she was paralyzed. The injury to her T12 vertebrae was classified as "complete," which meant she had a total loss of movement and sensation below the waist. Her doctors said Snyder would never walk again, let alone ride. But Snyder would have none of that. "The very first day of therapy, when my nurse asked me what my goals are, I tell her, 'Walk, ride, rodeo, that's it,'" said Snyder. "There's not an 'if,' there's not an 'and,' there's not a 'maybe,' this is what we're doing." Physical therapy focused on rebuilding her sense of balance. Snyder was a long way from the days when she could balanced comfortably over a galloping horse. "Even though she was sitting in bed, if she raised her arm to brush her hair, she could fall over," said Tina Snyder, Amberley's mother. "Or when we were driving, if I hit the brake too fast, she'd hit the dashboard." But Amberley had an idea. "I had mentioned to my therapist that my balance is better on my saddle than anywhere else, and they kind of kept just ignoring that, and I'm like, 'No, you guys don't understand, that was where my balance was the best,''' she said. "And so finally I just told my dad, 'Bring my saddle in.' We're no longer asking, we're bringing it in. So we brought my saddle in and I got up on that saddle and my balance was better there than anywhere else." Snyder's saddle was used during physical therapy. Just four months after her accident, doctors gave her the OK to try the real thing and saddle up one of her horses. Surrounded by friends and family, Snyder was lifted up onto her trusted horse, Power. But what was supposed to be a happy moment turned out to be one of Snyder's darkest. "The first time I got on my horse, it was the hardest day of my life," Snyder said. "You think about the day when they tell you you're never gonna walk again. The first day I sat on my horse was ten times harder than that day. "In that moment, I realized my whole life was different. What I had pictured from the time I was 3 years old, what my life was gonna look like, what I wanted to do, what my goals were...in that moment, that's shattered." Later that year, Snyder hit rock bottom. For someone who once said her happiest place on earth was on top of a horse, Snyder wouldn't go near her horses, let alone ride them. "I went to school, and when I'd come home on the weekend I'd look at them outside the window, but that was it,'' she said. "I did not go out there." At one point, Snyder told her mom to sell the horses. "I said, 'These horses are way too athletic for me to just ride them around,'" Snyder recalls. "'My balance isn't the same, my abilities aren't the same and these horses are way too nice for me to just ride them."Tina Snyder refused, telling her daughter at the time, "Your horses have been injured before, and you've waited for them to heal. They're gonna wait for you."