There’s no need to spend a lot of money by booking a flight to Costa Rica or some other faraway locale if you want to tour a forest canopy while secured to a zipline.  The August ‘09 issue of Popular Mechanics features a fascinating look at a new canopy tour that opened in May in an endangered eastern hemlock forest in West Virginia.  This particular tour uses sky bridges and brief hikes to connect ziplines “that offer more than a mile of high-wire flying.”

The complexities of zipline design are described in the article; then there’s the actual building process.  After learning about the utilization of careful construction methods that minimize damage to the forest and trauma to the hemlock trees, the safety measures implemented for the riders, the company’s efforts to help preserve this forest using revenue from the canopy tours, and chatting with a couple of coworkers who survived their zipline through the trees in other places (like Jamaica), I’m ready to sign a release form and jump off the first platform.

While the adventure in the East sounds great, my first choice would be a zipline ride through the redwood forest.  If you’ve ever walked through the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias in Yosemite or read Richard Preston’s Wild Trees (an exceptional look at scientists’ discoveries of some of the tallest coast redwoods and the rope climbing skills they master in order to explore the incredible canopy ecosystem), you may agree that the thought of ziplining in the Pacific Northwest does seem thrilling—but a little intimidating, too.

Have you ever ziplined through a forest?  If so, feel free to share your experience below! 

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