SALT LAKE CITY — It wasn't long ago that Megan Harmon's dream of boardercross racing in the Paralympics would have been just a dream. The proper sports prosthetics didn't exist for someone like Harmon, who lost her left leg above the knee in a motorcycle accident, and snowboarding wasn't even in the Paralympics.

Now both have changed, thanks, in part, to Jarem Frye of Saratoga Springs.

When he was 14, Frye was diagnosed with bone cancer. Eventually doctors amputated his left leg above the knee. One day while skiing — on one ski — with an adaptive ski team, he saw someone telemark skiing and told his coaches that was something he wanted to try.

"They looked at me like, ‘That's crazy, there's no way an amputee could telemark ski,' " he said.

Wearing the prosthetics of the time, Frye wasn't able to bend his prosthetic leg and support his weight. He needed something to replicate the function of his missing quad muscles.

The do-it-yourself kind of kid eventually built his own prosthetic knee out of bike parts and started telemarking.

"Everyone asks if I have a background in engineering," Frye said. And I say, ‘No, I have a background in Legos.' "

Frye's invention eventually became the XT-9 sports knee and a company called K-12 Prothetics. Now, because of the XT-9 and similar prosthetics now on the market, above-the-knee or AK, amputees can participate in a variety of sports — rock climbing, cross-country skiing, wake boarding, snowboarding — that before were difficult or impossible.

"You know this allows me to put all my weight on it if I wanted to and I'm not going to fall," said Harmon, who happens to be a mechanical engineer. "It's not going to collapse from under me."

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Cross country skiing may seem like a normal task for most people, but for one man it is a miraculous feat.

The numbers of adaptive snowboarders grew. Frye said about half of his customers have been veterans.

"Our military servicemen are definitely a large part of the rise of popularity in America of adaptive snowboarding," said Travis Thiele, adaptive team manager for the National Ability Center and Team Utah's adaptive snowboarding team.

Organizers of the Sochi games were expected to include snowboarding in the Paralympics, but in 2011, they declined. After a social media campaign, which included a short film, "Dear Sochi," which directed viewers to an online petition drive spearheaded by Utah snowboarder Nicole Roundy, the organizers reversed their decision.

"I feel like everybody's dreams are coming true, that we have this opportunity now," Harmon said.

Thiele said part of the credit goes to Frye, who, through his invention, helped grow the sport of adaptive snowboarding.

"I would say Jarem and the XT9 have definitely been a large part of opening the sport up to above-knee amputees," Thiele said. "You know there have been below-knee snowboarding for quite some time. Until the XT-9 it really wasn't an option for above-knee amputees to successfully snowboard at a competitive level."

To get the sport into the Paralympics "it had to be proven that there were enough athletes from enough countries with enough of a range of disabilities that could actually participate in it," Frye said.

Harmon said when she was in the hospital just after her accident, she made a two-page list of all the things she wanted to do, despite losing her leg, and handed it to her prosthetist.

"I wanted to know I didn't have any limitations," she said, "and I feel like I don't."

Near the top of the list was snowboarding, although she'd tried the sport only once before. She lived in Alabama.

"Most people are like, ‘Oh, Alabama, I bet there's so much snow there," she said.

Six months after she was fitted with her first prosthetic, she flew out to Utah to the National Ability Center at the Park City Mountain Resort to learn to snowboard.

"It's definitely taken a lot of hard work," she said. "I mean, I was falling down all over the place, tomahawking down the mountain, but that was how I got better — pushed myself to do things I had never done before."

Thiele invited her to join the Team Utah adaptive snowboarding team. Harmon, whose nickname is ‘Pistol,' ("I'm a pistol, I don't know what else can you say") moved to Utah and began snowboarding competitively.

It was announced this week that Harmon, who's been snowboarding for only three winters, earned a spot on the US Paralympic Snowboarding Team. Other Utahns nominated are Nicole Roundy, Tyler Burdick and Keith Gabel. Jarem Frye is obviously pleased he had something to do with Harmon's success and the success of other athletes.

"I've become familiar with this concept of the currency of impact," Frye says, "that money is one impact but seeing the impact you're having in the world to me has become an even more important currency." "It makes me feel like the richest man in the world."

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