Beneath helmet and glasses jim jueneman is wincing. The muscles in his legs are contracted and stretching. His left foot wedged into the cuff of a stirrup, his right hand grappling the horn of a saddle. Jueneman pulls with the forearm around the saddle’s pommel, body bent, as two women in green t-shirts hoist him upward onto a speckled white arabian show horse.

Jueneman, 48, gasps in the hot air, adjusts his posture, smiles. It’s a Monday and he is at Kids & Horses, an Incline Village based 501 (c)3 non-profit formed in 1999 and offering horsemanship therapy for adults and children with disabilities such as blindness, paralysis, autism, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome and other impairments.

Jueneman, a Carson City resident, has been visiting the center for the past 10 years to help with his balance and coordination. Born with cerebral palsy, Jueneman walks with a limp and says the therapy helps him with his bad days — days when he doesn’t want to get out of bed, days when his legs are pained, days when his cat has hidden itself outside his apartment making him search behind the nearby 7-Eleven.

“There’ll be days when I wake up and my legs don’t want to work, and I just want to stay in bed,” Jueneman said. “I don’t know if you have days like that but I do.” Because of his disability, Jueneman said each morning it takes him 40 minutes to put on each shoe. The camp and its instructors, he said, are another reason for him to put them on.

The Double “W” Ranch, the home of the horse camp, rests against a ripple of low bluffs in an open stretch of desert in Minden, Nev. Beyond the ranch, the Carson Valley pitches itself in a flat spread of dry earth and gray sage, an arid sprawl between the Carson Range and U.S. Highway 50’s rolling arc into the Sierra Nevada. The ranch is tucked behind suburban homes. It is bordered in white picket fences with corrals and riding areas, stables and sheds, all hidden within a 10-acre plot. The ranch even boasts its own garden with a variety of climate-defying vegetables, green and lush, and taken care of by Jésus, the groundskeeper living onsite.

Inside the camp’s offices, Judy Holt, an equine manager and instructor, looks upward at a framed photo of a large man wearing a cowboy hat, glasses and a furrowed gray beard. She points out the man is Sam Waldman, a former longtime Incline Village resident and the camp’s founder.

“Sam had the grand plan,” Holt said.

Waldman died in 2000, a year after he founded the non-profit. But his vision is being realized by his wife Lorri and his children who have continued to support the camp’s development under the North American Riding for the Handicapped Association, an internationally recognized organization promoting equine-assisted activities and therapies. Within Nevada, the camp is one of the two camps that are NARHA Premier Accredited Centers.

Holt said the center is run mainly by volunteer support and has dedicated six horses for its winter through summer programs.

Alexis Roman Hill, executive director of Kids & Horses, said the camp provides disabled resources unavailable in most places in the state. And in Jueneman’s case, Hill said it is one of the few programs out there.

Though available for adults, Hill said the center deals mostly with children suffering from disabilities such as autism, cerebral palsy, rickets and Down syndrome.

The program provides children, no matter their disability, the opportunity to build confidence through achievement on the horse. In recent years she said the program has become so popular the waiting list for enrollment has jumped to a three-year wait — most participants recommended to enroll by their physician.

Miracles. Camp co-founder Lorri Waldman says she has seen four at the camp, children who were told by doctors they would never use legs, limbs or feet — walking, shedding braces and restraints, freely moving, unassisted and self-propelled.

Waldman said hippo-therapy, the therapeutic effect of a horses movement, has in some cases been able to make strides where other therapies have not.

Whether this progress is the result of the horses movement against the human body — as Waldman says some studies have suggested — she does not know but said her belief in the program is a result of raw observation.

Waldman said she has heard autistic children utter their first words at the camp, seen children with muscle disabilities become more mobile and listened to countless testimonials from parents praising the program for its empowering results in the their children.

“I think the biggest part for me is that I get such satisfaction seeing how much it does for the children,” Waldman said.

Larry Harper, a professor of human development at the University of California, Davis, said though he is not specifically involved with the camp, it could be providing children an opportunity for safe exploration they can’t get elsewhere, both in their own abilities and how they can interact with their environment.

“It seems one of the tasks of growing up is to discover what you can accomplish by yourself,” Harper said. “These kids have some sense of what they can do with their bodies but may not be on par with their peers and may be able to discover something new there.”

Harper said being able to control events appears to be a fundamental need for all people, a need he described as “a sense of yes” the belief a person has the he or she can make something happen.

“For most kids, what I can do, what I can make happen , is something they want to find out,” Harper said.

He explained, studies have shown that even after one or two days after birth a baby will experiment with its hand to see if it will move. The camp, he said, and other similar learning environments are far from controlled, but they are environments that allow children free exploration and confidence building through self-discovery.

Wendi Fauria sits at a table among rows of saddles, halters, horse shoes and stirrups. Fauria is distant and gazing, caught away in a tumult of emotion. She is rewinding time, going back eight years to the day she describes as the worst day of her of life.

“I was devastated,” Fauria said. “You have all these hopes and dreams for your child and then when you find out the prognosis that it’s a lifelong altering disability, you go through all of the stages of grief: Anger, denial, depression…”

Fauria, a Gardnerville resident, and her husband Garritt are the parents of an 8-year-old boy named Dave. Fauria said she remembered when her son was first diagnosed with autism.

“He was 11 months old when I thought there was something wrong but I wasn’t quite sure what is was,” Fauria said. “But then I saw a special on NBC’s Dateline and I said to myself, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s what he has!’”

Dave was officially diagnosed when he was 15 months old. Since, Fauria and Garritt have been assisting their son with a variety of autism therapies from Applied Behavioral Analysis, a behavioral education therapy, to supplementation, a dietary therapy assisting with autism.

Fauria said when Dave was first diagnosed, her family went to an autism conference and a doctor said the process of learning the diagnosis is similar to going through the actual stages of grief when someone dies — except with autism, instead of the last stage of acceptance, there is hope.

“There are so many different therapies that can help them improve so you never know what their ultimate prognosis is going to end up being,” she said.

Fauria said Kids & Horses is a part of that hope, and it has made a dramatic impact in her son’s development. She said when he first began attending the camp five years ago, at the age of three, Dave wasn’t speaking and was not responsive to questions.

“He’s night and day now compared to how he was back then. He’s made tons of improvements but still has a long way to go,” she said.

As her son grows, Fauria said her family has a type of gratitude and a pride for Dave that can only be measured in small and simple moments, moments easily overlooked.

“Because of everything he has gone through and where he came from, every little step we celebrate,” she said. “We celebrate every little milestone, each small accomplishment, things other parents can take for granted.”