It’s the dream of every child who ever climbed a tree or pumped a swing harder and higher, trying to touch the sky. But you just couldn’t get to the top of the mysterious, leafy, wind-fluttering canopy.
What would you find up there where only birds and butterflies could go?
It’s the dream not just of children, but also of biologists and botanists who study forests. To walk around on the ground, gazing up with binoculars, is just not enough. This is especially true where the trees are gigantic, as in the tropical rain forests of Central America and the misty conifers of the Pacific Northwest.
Researchers wanted to get way up there, and then to move among the treetops, from one tree to another. It took ingenuity, along with cables and hardware. They solved the problem – and in the process created an eye-opening adventure sport.
It’s called ziplining, and it’s the sort of thing Tarzan would have invented had he wanted to go into ecotourism.
The concept is playground-simple. A steel cable is strung between trees – often quite high and across rugged terrain, sometimes hundreds of yards long. You climb a stairway or a ramp to a platform at one end of the cable. Then, strapped securely into a body harness attached to a pulley on the cable, you launch yourself smoothly, silently – and rather fast – to the opposite end of the cable.
The end of the first cable leads to the beginning of another. Sometimes a dozen or more cables are joined, so you may travel several miles in the course of a tour. Two adjoining cables might start in the same tree, or you might walk a swinging bridge or suspended walkway from the end of one cable to the beginning of another.
Zipline courses are springing up around the world, wherever trees grow tall. In Costa Rica, you glide past howler monkeys and bright green quetzal birds. In British Columbia, you cruise among ancient Douglas fir trees and look down on the tops of tall cedars.
“Eighteen to 20 stories up in an old-growth forest of fir and hemlock – it’s a different world up there,” says David Udow of Ziptrek Ecotours, which operates a course in the valley between Blackcomb and Whistler mountains, British Columbia. The course consists of five ziplines. The first one is 200 feet, and the longest one is 1,100 feet.
“People aren’t used to looking down at big trees,” Udow says. “Looking up, trees taper away from you. Looking down, you see it expand out beneath you, in a snowflake pattern.”
There’s also the strange sensation of feeling big trees move. One of Ziptrek’s platforms is 160 feet above the ground. When the wind blows, the platform sways 4 feet off its center point, side to side.
You could feel uneasy, rolling and pitching so high above the ground. “Every day we hear from guests who say they’re afraid of heights, but by the end of the tour, they absolutely love it,” Udow says.
It helps that the cables are up to three-quarters of an inch thick and that everything has been designed and certified by engineers – and by tree physiologists who make sure the trees are not harmed by the construction.
Zipline courses in tropical rain forests provide access to an even more rarefied world. Some have become a popular part of cruise shore-tour offerings.
One such is Canopy Tours near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. It offers 15 cables that start short with reassuringly slow speeds, then get longer and faster. Zipliners get close-up views of the dense and raucous world of the forest canopy, including tropical birds, bromeliads (air plants), strangler figs and parrots. The cables lead through the forest, across a deep gorge and along a river above whitewater rapids.
Other courses are found in places like the Monteverde cloud forest of Costa Rica, where the stunning green quetzal bird is a prime attraction, and the Cranbrook flowering tree sanctuary in Jamaica, where botanic diversity is the star.
Most zipline courses offer a dose of environmental education along with the fun. But not all. In New Zealand, they’ve made it a thrill sport – a 1-kilometer zipline called the “Flying Fox” that achieves speeds up to 100 mph. The fox operates even at night.
Tarzan never knew what he was missing.
The details
Ziptrek Ecotours (British Columbia), 604-935-0001, (866) 935-0001 or www.ziptrek.com.
Canopy Tours de los Veranos,(Puerto Vallarta, Mexico), (52) 322-233-6060.
The Flying Fox (New Zealand), www.gravitycanyon.co.nz/flyingfox.htm.
For more information, try Internet search engine keywords ziplining, zipline and canopy tour.
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