Scenic Caves Nature Adven­tures’ newest attraction offers high adventure and environ­mental education for visitors to the Town of The Blue Mountains on the shore of Georgian Bay, Ontario, Canada. Outfitted with helmets and harnesses that clip to an overhead cable, guests enjoy an adrenalin-pumping three-and-a-half-hour trek through the treetops on swaying, 25­centimeter wide aerial walkways. They pause on platforms suspended among the trees as their guides talk about the area’s history and ecology. The tour spans 18 trees and ends with a breath­taking 1,200-foot zip line descent to the forest floor.

“People who’ve done it are really thrilled. Fifty percent of our business is referrals and comes through the Inter­net,” says Scenic Caves’ owner Rob Thorburn, who has reinvigorated the 74-year-old tourist attraction known for its cave crevasses by adding the Eco-Adventure Tour and a 126-meter suspension bridge. Reserved tickets cost $95 and include admission to Scenic Caves, where activities include gemstone mining and mini-golf.

“We’re opening up a whole new world of light adventure to those who want something a little more exciting and unique,” Thorburn says of the canopy tour, which is the first of its kind in Ontario and has won several tourism awards.

Long popular in Costa Rica’s rain­forest, where a Canadian introduced the “Original Canopy Tour” as a recre­ational activity for tourists in the 1990s, treetop walks and zip lines are part of a worldwide trend in eco-adventure and the next new thing in North America.

Rope Beginnings
The idea originated in high ropes courses for experiential learning programs, which often end with a zip line descent as a metaphor for risk taking. “Most canopy tours are either tree to tree, or ground to tree, and also incorporate suspension bridges,” says Mike Smith, project director of S.T.E.P.S. Inc., an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based company that builds challenge courses and canopy tours. “The new concept is stringing zip lines together. I know of 13 tours being built in North America this year, and my guess is in the next five years there’ll be hundreds.”

Last year, S.T.E.P.S. designed tours with multiple zip lines, walkways, and bridges for Alaska Canopy Adventures in Ketchikan and Cypress Valley Canopy Tours in Austin, Texas.

Since then, Smith has fielded inquiries from ski resorts, amusement parks, and entrepreneurs. “A lot of them are looking at how profitable Ziptrek in Whistler, Canada, has been. They were one of the first in North America,” Smith says of the company that offers $98 zip line tours and $39 tree trek walks 180 feet up in the forest canopy. This summer, Spring Moun­tain Ski Resort in Pennsylvania, and Alpine Adventures in Lincoln, New Hampshire, debuted zip line tours built by GIA Canopy Tours.

“These experiences generally attract a high-dollar client, and you’re either putting people through one at a time, with a staff member manning each platform, or people are all moving in a group, maybe six to eight clients with two guides,” explains Smith, noting the low volume has dissuaded one large amusement park operator who consulted him about building a canopy tour. “Even in Roatan, Honduras, which has one of the highest throughputs that I’ve heard of, they may have 500 clients a day.”

Five years ago, Jim Liggett of Ropes Courses Inc. in Allegan, Michigan, introduced challenge courses—with or without zip lines, your choice—to the amusement industry at the IAAPA Attractions Expo. “The past two years we took a full unit and set it up. In fact, we won an award for interactive play for a new product in the FEC market,” says Liggett, whose company is now the largest builder of challenge courses for family entertainment centers. “We’re the only ones that manufacture rope courses out of steel so a lot of times we build, design, ship, and put them up for other builders.”

Zipping Through Nature
Ropes Courses Inc. manufactures attractive indoor/outdoor units called Sky Trails, equipped with an array of activities such as rope walks, swinging suspended boards, teeter totter beams, a Charlie Chaplin (two foot ropes), and a taco cargo (a cargo net folded in half and suspended). A zip line is an option for customers who have the space. The zip line cable can terminate into a tree, wood utility pole, or structural steel pole.

Liggett installs 20 to 40 Sky Trails per year in such indoor facilities as Craig’s Cruisers in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Adventure Park USA, in Myersville, Maryland, as well as in Europe through his German partners. Outdoor models include a 55-foothigh triple-decker with 30 elements at Lal-Shaab, an amusement park in Kuwait, and the Sky Challenge at Dutch Springs, an adventure park in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Liggett describes Track n’ Trail with wooden poles as his entry-level product: “We use a lot of those at summer camps because they like the look of the wood, but we have a proprietary steel tracking system, which allows you to go wherever you want on the course and you’re never unhooked.” The fact that people are able to go around poles and pass each other means a higher throughput compared to systems in which the person has to be hooked and unhooked at each stage of the course. The Track n’ Trail has a volume of more than 40 people per hour, while the portable Sky Trail averages more than 100 per hour.

“There are a lot of different things besides the zip line that’ll blow your hair back,” says Travis Wuest, vice president of Natural Bridge Caverns in San Antonio, Texas, where the main attraction is tours of the caverns, including a physically challenging three- to fourhour spelunking adventure. “With the advent of auto-belay systems that are used on climbing towers now, we got an idea that would be a good additional attraction.” Natural Bridge ended up purchasing a 40-foot-tall watchtowerthemed climbing wall with two 350- foot zip line descents. This gave the site two attractions instead of one, since it costs $6 to climb the tower and $8 for a zip trip. “They’re totally separate and independent,” Wuest says. “If you want to do the zip, you climb a staircase on the inside of the tower to the top. We hook you up to the zip line and you jump off.”

Natural Bridge Caverns was looking for something that fit the cavern’s natural theme, created another revenue stream, and was something exciting to bring guests back. It seems to be working since people do it two or three times. The zip can handle 30 people per hour. “It’s an adrenaline thing all right,” observes Wuest. “You’ve actually got to tell yourself, ‘Hey, it’s OK, this rope is going to catch me, I’ll be OK,’ and just go ahead and make a leap of faith.”

Views from Above
Some facilities have found success with eco-friendly treetop walks over suspension bridges that offer stunning views. This
group includes Capilano Suspension Bridge and Park’s Treetops Adventure in Vancouver and Arenal Hanging Bridges in Costa Rica.

“Compared to the canopy tours, which are designed for the athletic and the adventuresome, ours was designed for anyone age 2 to 92,” says Capilano’s president, Nancy Stibbard. Unlike a zip trip, Treetops Adventure has no height or weight restrictions. “Anybody can manage. It starts out at ground level and then goes up to about 100-some-odd feet among the Douglas firs. Then it goes into a U shape and winds its way back to ground level.”

Treetops’ innovative bridges are made from recycled timbers and held up by friction collars that actually strengthen the core of the tree. “It’s quite an amazing design,” says Stibbard. “There’s not a single nut, bolt, or nail driven into a tree. The other thing that resulted from raising our pathways off the grounds like this was that the forest floor was really invigorated because people were not walking on it.”

Treetops has boosted attendance at Capilano, which averages 5,000 to 6,000 people on a busy day, by 40 percent. “ Capilano Suspension Bridge has been here since 1895,” notes Stibbard, whose family has owned the park for three generations. “I think Treetops created a reason for people who live in Vancouver to come back with their grandkids because they’ve probably been here many, many times.”

In Costa Rica, Arenal Hanging Bridges, a private reserve of 250 hectares (550 acres) of protected rain forest on the hills surrounding the Arenal Volcano, is a success story for its conservationist-founder Francisco Chamberlain and the local farmers who own the land.

Featuring two miles of trails with 15 bridges, including six hanging bridges with heights of up to 100 meters (328 feet) above the rain forest, the attraction has enjoyed an attendance growth of 80 percent annually since it opened in 2002 and is on the itinerary of the new Adventures by Disney tour of Costa Rica.

“It is kind of a build, operate, and transfer deal,” explains Chamberlain, who leased the land for 12 years and raised $800,000 to develop the ecotourism attraction. “While we operate, the owners of the land will receive 50 percent of the profits while we raise back the money we invested and begin all over again in a different location, helping save the tiny bits of tropical rainforest that are left unspoiled.” At the end of the lease, Chamberlain will hand 100 percent of the investment and a fully operational company to the landowners, many of whom already have their sons and daughters working in the park full time.

Visitors to Arenal can see more than 80 bird species in a couple of hours, including rare or endangered birds whose names grace the bridges where they have been sighted. For example, the Great Currasow Bridge is a place frequented by a huge yellow-wattled turkey-like bird that prefers running to flying because of its heavy weight, Chamberlain says.

While Costa Rica now has more than 100 zip line operators, including several around Arenal, Chamberlain thinks there’s room for one more: “We have plans to do our own zip lines but we want to give it a twist and combine a little more education with the high adrenaline.”