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offduty/travel/military_ziplining_092208od

Service members can get a rush — at a discount — from ziplines

By Laura Bly

ROCKWOOD, Colo. — Transcending fear is part of the fun at Tall Timber Soaring Tree Top Adventures. That, and unleashing your inner Tarzan.

The heart-pounding thrill of strapping into a harness, clipping to a cable, then zipping across a canyon, down a mountain or through a canopy of trees has made Tall Timber one of America’s most popular attractions based on TripAdvisor.com reader rankings.

Ziplining and canopy tours were popularized in Costa Rica a decade ago. Now, the elevated excursions are cropping up across the U.S., with at least two dozen in operation and dozens more in the works.

Some, like an Alaska zipline that whisks cruise ship passengers more than a mile in 90 seconds, are aimed at adrenaline junkies. Others cater to families wanting to both scream and savor the scenery. Many are military-friendly, offering substantial discounts to service members.

“Standing on the initial platform looking down and across to the next platform,” says Army Lt. Col. James Clark, who’s stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., “you think to yourself, ‘What am I doing? Do I really want to do this?’”

Clark recently took part in Just Live! Zipline Treetop Tour in Kauai, Hawaii, which boasts a three-hour tour with a maximum height of 80 feet.

Before taking the plunge, Clark says via e-mail, it was “an interesting feeling. From the ground looking up, you have all the confidence in the world you can do this. ‘It’s not that high,’ [you think].”

But those feelings change once you’re aloft. What did Clark feel?

“Fear! A thrill,” he says, “a sense of accomplishment.

“For most civilians, this is their first test,” Clark says. “When I took the tour, two couples in my tour — longtime friends vacationing together, both retired — had never done anything like a zipline tour. In the end, they were filled with a huge sense of accomplishment.”

Clark recommends zipline tours to military people, but particularly families. “It is a great bonding event for the family.”

Many canopy tours let participants “connect with nature and each other in an otherwise inaccessible environment,” says John Walker of Bonsai Design, a Grand Junction, Colo.-based company that designed seven U.S. zipline courses in the past three years.

That mission certainly applies to Soaring Tree Top Adventures.

Tall Timber owners Denny Beggrow and his son, Johnroy, created the 5½-hour aerial tour as a way to broaden their remote, 180-acre retreat’s appeal. Inspired by Johnroy’s childhood treehouses and Sean Connery’s rainforest adventures in the 1992 film “Medicine Man,” their tour rapidly eclipsed such offerings as fly-fishing and horseback riding among wealthy patrons including CEOs, movie stars and vice presidents.

As of this summer, the Beggrows’ 10-room resort — accessible only by helicopter or the Durango & Silverton Railroad — no longer accepts new overnight guests. But as many as 60 people a day pay $329 apiece to clamber aboard the steam-powered train in Durango, spend two hours gaping at vistas captured in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” and get off at Tall Timber to enter a world worthy of Peter Pan or Frodo Baggins.

Mike Robinson of Wimberley Zipline Adventures, based near Austin, Texas, says his company’s tours are a great way for service members to decompress, especially after deployments.

So powerful is the appeal that a group of war widows recently took the tour, relishing in the adventure and cathartic camaraderie. “They visited us to share their lives and their grief and their happiness,” Robinson said. “We’re all about lifting them up.”

Wimberley Ziplines offers various military discounts, officials said.

Safety first

But like all adventure sports, there is risk. The unregulated canopy tour industry suffered a high-profile black eye this spring when an American vacationer plummeted to her death from a zipline on the Caribbean island of Roatan, Honduras.

At Tall Timber, would-be soarers must sign an alarmingly detailed liability waiver that flags the activity’s uninsured status and notes such possibilities as slamming into or missing a platform, falling from 100 feet and becoming “sick from the swinging motion.”

But Soaring Tree Top Adventures’ personable “sky rangers,” all of whom have 40 hours of wilderness first-aid training as well as climbing and rappelling skills, emphasize the safety of both people and trees.

Simon Richardson, 24, recently described the resort’s equipment to an apprehensive customer. It included everything from padded, full-body Petzl harnesses designed for search-and-rescue workers to helicopter-grade, stainless-steel cables and locally manufactured platforms that hug 300-year-old pine trees without invasive bolts.

A patented braking system, Richardson explained, uses a formula based on distance between platforms, wind speed and angle of descent that eliminates the need for riders to slow down by grasping the cable with a leather glove.

The 28-platform course is designed to ease fears by starting out with shorter spans at lower heights, allowing users to focus less on carabiner and pulley mechanics than on the magic of flying through a tunnel of aspens and crisscrossing above the churning Animas River, swollen with spring snowmelt.

Between “whoo-eees” and “waa-hoos,” there’s plenty of time to take deep whiffs of the ponderosas’ vanilla-scented bark, munch on homemade cranberry bars and keep an eye out for wheeling ospreys and the occasional black bear.

Flailing legs and twisting torsos are encouraged on most of Soaring Tree Top Adventures’ 1.2 miles of cable, with many guests turning topsy-turvy on longer runs.

In mid-July, the resort answered repeaters clamoring for “bigger, faster, longer” with a new 1,400-foot-long span that starts after a 15- to 20-minute uphill climb by foot and zooms riders across the Animas River in about 45 seconds.

“That,” says one woman, “would be worth coming back for.”

———

Laura Bly writes for Gannett News Service. Senior writer Jason Watkins contributed to this report.

If you go

• Soaring Tree Top Adventures

Near Durango, Colo.

(970) 769-2357

http://soaringcolorado.com

Details: Open daily from mid-May through mid-October at Colorado’s Tall Timber Resort, about a two-hour ride from Durango, the cost per person is $319 when paying in advance.

• Just Live! Zipline Treetop Tours

Kauai, Hawaii

(808) 482-1295 http://www.justlive.org

Details: Just Live! features six ziplines ranging in length from 225 to 400 feet. Cost is $115 to $125 (call ahead for military discounts).

• Wimberley Zipline Adventures

Wimberley, Texas

(512) 847-9990

http://www.wimberleyzipline.com

Details: Located 1½ hours from Austin, Texas, the site features five ziplines ranging from 250 to 875 feet. Cost is $60 — one of the cheapest in the country — with considerable discounts for military personnel who call ahead.