Woman Makes Daring Trip Across the Grand Canyon on Horseback, Breaking Barriers for Disability Representation

• Disability advocate Cara Elizabeth Yar Khan's 12-day journey across the Grand Canyon is the center of a new documentary Facing the Falls, now streaming on YouTube

• "We were doing this for everyone because when you go on this type of journey, this kind of pilgrimage, it never is about the one person," she tells PEOPLE

• Yar Khan has a mutation of the GNE gene, causing her muscles to disintegrate

A new documentary dares viewers to challenge their perception of what people with disabilities are capable of while following an international disability rights advocate's journey across the Grand Canyon.

From executive producers Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and directed by Celia Aniskovich, Facing the Falls follows Cara Elizabeth Yar Khan and her 12-day adventure in 2018.

“You don’t realize the limits of what human beings can do unless you're tested,” Yar Khan said in the film released on Tuesday, Dec. 3 — coinciding with International Day of Persons with Disabilities.

Speaking exclusively with PEOPLE, Yar Khan says her goal was to confront the ableist ideas and barriers set for members of the disability community while she went on a journey of self-discovery.

“What I took out of the Grand Canyon [makes] me the person, the professional, and the woman that I am today," she says, "And for that I will be forever grateful."

Yar Khan shares she first noticed something was wrong with her health while working for Dell Technologies in Panama at 26 years old. For some reason, she developed a limp.

Eventually, her father and stepmother convinced her to see a doctor, who told her to return to Canada for a muscle biopsy.

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About a year later, in December 2006, Yar Khan got a phone call from her doctor in Canada who said she had a mutation of the GNE gene, causing her muscles to disintegrate and “have holes in them like Swiss cheese.”

She was eventually diagnosed with hereditary inclusion body myopathy, known as HIBM for short. “This is a very rare genetic disease,” Yar Khan said in the film, adding that it "leads to severe incapacity" about 10 to 15 years after its onset.

After moving to the United States in the early 2010s, Yar Khan became fascinated with the idea of a Grand Canyon adventure. She says that one particular statistic stuck out to her: for every 1% of the 5 to 6 million people who visit the rim, only 1% actually go down to the belly.

It took her four years of horseback riding lessons and therapeutic horseback riding lessons to prepare her for the expedition. By April 2018, it was go time.

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Naturally, Yar Khan and her crew faced several obstacles on their journey. Some nights were below freezing, making for brutal sleeping conditions. About halfway down the Canyon, she hit her head on the mule she was riding, giving herself two black eyes in the process.

The crew confronted a near-death scare when a kayaker on the team got sucked under a motorboat while the crew celebrated their completion of Lava Falls when disaster struck. Luckily, he survived.

“It was challenge after challenge, roadblock after roadblock, barrier after barrier,” Yar Khan tells PEOPLE. “But I always came back to the people who surrounded me, the people who believed in us … it wasn't about me, it was about us.”

“We were doing this for everyone because when you go on this type of journey, this kind of pilgrimage, it never is about the one person,” she adds.

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After the grand adventure, Yar Khan says she learned she “can do anything” she sets her mind to. “I know that I'll figure things out because I'm okay with failing,” she explains, “I'm okay with being wrong, I think the only failure is not trying.”

She hopes the film inspires others to reach for the stars and find a strong sense of identity — which the advocate says she found in herself during her adventure.

“It's so important just to be yourself and to find a way to be comfortable with who you are, what you bring to the world as you are," Yar Khan continues. "Not needing to prove to anyone something that you're not, finding confidence in the things that you can do rather than what you can't do."

She went on to note that peace comes "in who you are and identity."

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Facing the Falls is available now on YouTube.

Read the original article on People