The 2008 Montana State grad has a degree in film and photography, and he put his shooting skills to good use to create Double Take, part autobiography and part photo essay. The book details the 25-year-old's international travel and captures the expressions of people encountering Connolly as he rolls by them for the first time. Born without legs, Connolly's primary modes of transportation are either his skateboard or walking on his hands.

The book came out in October 2009, and a monoski of his own design, the Ullr, debuted in December 2009. And that was just the start of a non-stop agenda. The past 12 months have been so hectic that the most foreign part of a two-week vacation in Croatia was the fact that he had nothing on his to-do list. Back stateside, Connolly has been doing some training for Winter X, but it's sandwiched between other projects. He hopes to meet with his publishers in December and go into pre-production for his next book in February, right after Winter X.

Three particular successes are merging in his next undertaking: his work designing his own monoski, his Rolling Exhibition photo exhibit and Double Take. His book proposal: A look at adaptive equipment from around the world. "I hope to become the legless, disabled, travelogue Indiana Jones-type," he says. The proposed itinerary for the book includes the Congo, Afghanistan, Haiti, India and he says, "there's a legless skateboarder named Og de Sousa who I want to meet in Rio."

"It's places where orthopedic trauma is the most prevalent and where the infrastructure is least able to deal with it," he says. "That's where I'll go to document the MacGyverism."

But the written/photographic side of this large-scale project is only part of Connolly's vision. The other half is an online community/website project to open-source the creative designs for the adaptive equipment he discovers. "The ultimate goal is to openly source prosthetics, but in the short term it's to do a gnarly adventure travelogue on how we did it," he says, adding that he's working in conjunction with OpenProsthetics.org.

He hopes that his involvement with Open Prosthetics will spur inventors to create out-of-the-mainstream prosthetics that are affordable and easy to replicate. He's going to submit his monoski design, the Ullr, to Open Prosthetics along with a new invention, the Jumping Legs. The Jumping Legs are based on the curved, carbon-fiber running legs used by amputees. It's a shelf and bucket mounted to two fused carbon-fiber legs with hand-held carbon fiber springs that look a bit like crutches.

"I was able to make it, without the R&D costs, for $600," he says of his first prototype. "It's increased my speed by about 300 percent and I have a standing vertical of about four feet. I can jump straight up in the air and look at you eye to eye, and there's nothing more unsettling than a legless guy hucking himself slightly above your hairline."