Jon Kreamelmeyer has spent decades paying attention to how people move across the snow.
That focus carried him into the Paralympic world, where he’s known as a coach with a sharp eye for technique, helping athletes regain balance and control after injury or limb loss. Inducted into the Colorado Snowsports Hall of Fame in September 2025, he still returns to the same question: What does good movement look like when bodies change?
In April 2025, Kreamelmeyer settled into a sit-ski at the Frisco Nordic Center, with Cal Poly mechanical engineering students watching from a few feet away as he took the device onto the center’s cross-country trails for the first time.
The students’ device placed the skier in a seated frame mounted over skis, propelled by poles. Kreamelmeyer eased into the track and pushed forward, leaning gradually as he felt the frame respond and the skis track beneath him.
From a distance, the scene looked familiar — a coach testing equipment while moving carefully through the snow. But Kreamelmeyer wasn’t there to see whether the sit-ski worked for someone else.
He wanted to know whether he could trust it for himself, as he learned to ski all over again.
When the Roles Shifted
Kreamelmeyer’s work has taken him to some of the sport’s biggest stages.
At the 1994 Winter Paralympics in Lillehammer, he guided blind skier Michele Drolet to a bronze medal. He remains involved today as an International Paralympic Committee technical classifier, helping determine how athletes are grouped for competition.
His connection to Cal Poly began in the early 2000s, when he met mechanical engineering professor Brian Self through Colorado’s adaptive skiing community. Over the years, Self helped connect Kreamelmeyer with Cal Poly senior project teams, pairing students with athletes and coaches to design and test adaptive snowsports equipment.
But the story shifted when Self learned that the coach who had spent his life alongside athletes with limb loss had become an amputee himself.
“It was a strange twist of fate,” Self said.
In 2021, while training for the Masters World Cup, Kreamelmeyer’s right foot began to feel hot. “It felt like I had marbles in my shoe,” he said. When a jolt behind his knee sent him to the hospital, doctors discovered a blood clot and rushed him by helicopter to Denver.
“The doctor told me, ‘You’re going to lose your leg,’” he said.
Surgeons did everything they could, but they ultimately had to amputate his leg. After weeks in the hospital and a long recovery, he returned to the sport he loved and learned to sit-ski. The adjustment opened a path forward but demanded a new relationship with balance and control.
That was the moment Self called with a proposal — a senior project built around Kreamelmeyer’s needs and a chance for students to see how environments can create barriers.
“It’s motivating to students,” Self said. “I hope it changes their model of disability.” The project shifts the focus away from “fixing” a person and toward understanding how design choices shape access.
Kreamelmeyer had stepped into a different role. He was no longer only studying form from the sidelines. He was learning, again, what movement could look like for him.
The Work Takes Shape
The team didn’t start as strangers.
Michael Allen and Nick Larson, who met during Week of Welcome, had worked as bike mechanics before Cal Poly. Cooper Nichols and Emerson Nicholas already knew how to work side by side from Solar Regatta. By senior project selection, the four had the trust that matters when a design has to move from idea to hardware.
Nichols said working with Kreamelmeyer felt rewarding from the start.
“He gave us so much creative freedom,” Allen said. “He wanted something cool.”
Kreamelmeyer didn’t come in with a set design in mind, but he was clear about the direction: keep it simple and lightweight, with as few controls as possible.
That distinction mattered in Nordic skiing. Downhill designs can rely on suspension, while cross-country setups often default to rigid frames that limit turning and edge control. Early concepts came quickly, informed by past Cal Poly projects and familiar design systems, but none delivered what Kreamelmeyer wanted to feel on snow.
It emerged late, after a long back-and-forth, as the team returned to one stubborn problem — improving handling without complicating the design.
“We were about three hours into a conversation when we had that ‘aha’ moment,” Larson said.
After that, the direction snapped into focus. The answer was a frame that could roll from edge to edge, giving a seated skier more control without adding complexity. Inspired by a four-bar linkage, they studied how skis facilitate motion and worked backward toward a simpler system. The result was a compliant composite frame designed to flex in a controlled way, rather than rely on a traditional tube design.
Refinement came through tuning stiffness, materials and load response until the frame behaved the way they intended. But Kreamelmeyer wouldn’t judge it in a lab. He would judge it on his trails.
On Snow
By spring 2025, the prototype was ready. The team packed it up and headed to Colorado, where Kreamelmeyer would test it on snow for the first time.
Kreamelmeyer invited the students into his life as much as into the project. They stayed at his house, shared meals and talked late into the evening. During the day, he brought them to the Frisco Nordic Center and coached them through the basics of cross-country skiing between test runs.
“It didn’t feel like a typical senior project,” Nicholas said. “You could put a face to the person you’re building for.”
On the trail, the students watched Kreamelmeyer ride the prototype while there was still time to change it, reading the feedback in small tells: another run, a deeper lean into a turn, the design responding as it had on paper.
They also took turns riding the sit-ski themselves, pushing it harder than they expected others to. They wanted to see what might fail. The frame didn’t.
“We could see him light up,” Nichols said.
Kreamelmeyer had tested sit-skis before and understood the trade-offs most designs make between stability and control. This one felt different. “He ended up liking it better than his current sit-ski,” Larson said. “It’s something he would take out every day.”
Between runs, Kreamelmeyer slipped into coach mode, offering pointers as the students watched closely and tracked how their design responded beneath him. At one point, he paused, not because the test wasn’t working, but because he didn’t want the run to end.
“He was actually hesitant to give the device back to us,” Nichols said. That reaction carried more weight than any checklist. It told the team how far they’d come and what was now possible.
Back at Cal Poly, the project entered its final phase before the frame returned to Colorado.
In the months that followed, the sit-ski didn’t sit idle. Kreamelmeyer took it back out on the trails while coaching master skiers. The frame, he told the team, performed well. It was an “eye catcher.” What stayed with him most, though, wasn’t just the design but the way the students carried themselves.
The real payoff for the students wasn’t a presentation or a grade. Nichols said it was knowing Kreamelmeyer would be back out on an ordinary Tuesday, finding his rhythm again.
That was the point. Engineering that helps someone reclaim the trail on their own terms.