Wired: High thrill-to-skill ratio whisks neophytes to ‘Zipline Nirvana’

ZIPLINES are supposed to be reserved for big-screen action heros — Sylvester Stallone shooting between cliffs, or a pony-tailed Sean Connery sailing through the rain forest to save the world.

But increasingly, life imitates the movies.

Fast, high, Hollywood-inspired ziplines are popping up all over the country. Two courses have opened in Colorado in the lpast two years. More are planned. It’s now possible for folks who could only hope to be action-movie extras to clip in and get zipping.

“I’m not a thrill seeker, — at best I’m mildly intrepid,” said Susan Frensley, 58, a gray-haired grandmother from Texas who stood at the start of a zipline across a canyon on a recent afternoon. “I’m definitely nervous.”

She and her husband, Bill, looked down the long cable hanging 80 feet above the rocky deck of Lost Canyon Adventure Park near Salida. A few hundred feet beyond, the other end of the cable landed gently on the distant canyon rim.

Crowded around the Frensleys were four other helmet-clad tourists who had signed up for a 2two-hour tour, and Monty Holmes, who designed and built the park’s five ziplines 2006.

“The Stallones and Schwarzeneggers of the world were having way too much fun,” said Holmes. “I wanted to give normal people a chance. ... Now let’s get the nerves shaken out of you.”

He handed out harnesses and led the group to a practice zipline the length and height of a clothesline, and taught them the do’s and don’ts of zipping. (Do keep a guide arm trailing behind the pulley to keep you pointed forward. Don’t grab the cable in front of the pulley and get your fingers run over by the metal wheel.)

After about 15 minutes of ground school, Holmes led them to the edge of a nearby cliff, saying, “You’re now all ready to be zippists.”

Jaws clenched with tension as eyes followed the slender strand of braided metal sagging across an airy abyss. A floor of sharp rocks waited 15 stories below.

“I don’t know about this, — I’m afraid I’ll get marooned out in the middle,” said Frensley.

Another visitor, Tracy Thompson of Denver, was visibly shaking. “I’m scared,” she told the guide. “I don’t want to look down.”

Before she could think too much, Holmes clipped her in, doubled checked her harness, and sent her flying.

The pulley shot down the cable with a whizzing whine, picking up speed like the line on a reel of a deep-sea fishing rod suddenly snagged by a frisky marlin.

In a few seconds, Thompson landed safely, and softly, on the other side.

“That was fun, not really scary,” she said. “I was actually able to look around and enjoy the view.”

Within minutes, everyone in the group was zipping like they’d been doing it for years.

This is one of the big appeals, said Holmes. Many Rocky Mountain pastimes (skiing, mountain biking, kayaking) take days or months of practice and a solid foundation of fitness to be enjoyable.

Ziplining is like bungee jumping. It delivers the thrill without much skill.

The hardest part is that first step.

“It doesn’t take long before they’re totally comfortable, flying past tree tops and over cliffs into what I call Zipline Nirvana,” he said.

The high thrill-to-skill ratio has created a modest global boom of ziplines, said Steve Gustafson, president of the Professional Ropes Course Association.

“It’s less about physical ability and more about doing something fun for the first time in your life. It’s exhilarating,” he said by cell phone from Idaho, where his company, Experienced-Based Learning, was building its eighth course in four years.

“We’re so busy. This is getting huge. The sheer fun of it is driving demand,” he said.

Of course, ziplines are hardly new.

They’ve been part of military training since at least the 1960s, Gustafson said. They slowly started to make their way into civilian ropes courses in the 1970s.

“But those were just single lines, nothing like what we’re doing now,” he said.

Things changed in 1992, he said, with the movie “Medicine Man,” starring Sean Connery.

“The movie showed people zipping through the forest on cables,” he said. “That same year, companies in Mexico and Costa Rica started offering tourists a chance to do the same thing.”

It took another decade for a course to land on the lawyer-infested shores of the United States.

First Gustafson had to spend a year working out standards that American insurance companies would accept, and that could stand up to litigation. Then, he built the first American zipline course in Hawaii in 2002.

It opened the floodgates. There are now more than a dozen courses in Alaska, New Hampshire, Idaho, Oregon and California. Soaring Tree Top Adventures near Durango, which boasts more than 30 cables strung between the old-growth pines of the San Juan Mountains, opened in 2005.

Lost Canyon Adventure Park near Salida opened in last summer, and owner, Holmes, hopes to build a second course on the Front Range within a year.

“We’re going to see ziplines all over,” he said. “It’s just too fun not to be a hit.”

He led the group of newly-minted zippists through increasingly fast and thrilling zip lines, culminating with a cable that shot them more than over450 feet from the rim of a cliff down to the canyon floor.

Even the Texas grandmother swooped down the bouncing cable as if she’d been traveling by pulley her whole life.

At the bottom of the canyon, she landed on both feet, exhaled and said, “Holy crow, this is cool.”

As the group walked back toward their cars, she stopped the course owner and asked for his card, telling him, “I want you to come out and see if you can build one of these on our property.”

A LINE ON ZIPLINES

Lost Canyon Adventure

Park, Salida

Info: captainzipline.com

Season: Through December

Cost: $79 for a two-hour tour, call for times

Reservations required: 1-877-947-5463

Soaring Tree Top Adventures, Durango

Info: soaringcolorado.com

Season: Through Oct. 14

Cost: $260 for an all-day tour and gourmet lunch in the trees. The zipline is only accessible by the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad; price includes train tickets.

Reservations required: 1-970-769-2357