LOCALadk Magazine

28 Spring 2017 LOCALadk Magazine LOCALadk Just outside the Olympic Village of Lake Placid, at the Cascade Touring Center, is the newest of the courses we visited. Experience Outdoors is a guided treetop zip line course, with an educational component of outdoor insights and Adirondack history. It opened late summer 2016 and was built and is owned, operated, and guided by young local entrepreneurs Bill Walton and Marc Doering. You can tell when they talk about the business that they are kids at heart and have invested tirelessly to make their playground dream a reality. Our co-guides for the afternoon, Emory and Bill, seem to be best of friends and had a great rapport with each other. They instantly put us at ease and made us feel part of the crew. When gearing up, visitors are issued helmets, gloves, harnesses, carabineers and your zip line "trolley" device. To keep it fun the guides instruct members of individual groups to issue one another special names for the day. Our names included Newsflash, Zebra, Monkey, and Fly Guy, and the guides referenced us by only this name the rest of the tour. This brought me back to my imaginative childhood and treehouse and clubhouse days. Before taking to the course, you are trained in braking and landing and safety techniques and the guides stay with your group throughout the two-hour tour. The guides go back and forth with punch line banter and surprise trivia challenges while teaching about the surrounding area. The course and structures were designed and constructed by the owners, engineers, and architects. The course traverses 12 platforms and employs over 1,200 feet of line. The owners' goal was to create a course as ecologically mindful as possible: nothing is actually bolted through the trees. This made the design and construction process more complicated, but also rewarding and dynamic. "It was really important to us to build the system in a way that has as little environmental impact as possible – these trees have been here for hundreds of years and we are just passing through," said Bill. At the end of the zip lines is one feature lovingly named the "leap of faith." Here you are instructed to actually jump off the platform into a free fall, trusting the gear to safely catch you before you hit the ground. Our boys dove with great exhilaration, abandon, and trust and then cheered me on from the ground. As Emory explained, "The leap of faith, and all of the course for that matter, is a great exercises in managing fear and learning to trust in the jump, the guides, the gear, and yourself." At the end of the tour, we hopped on a trailer platform with benches that was pulled through the trails by an ATV. The boys enjoyed this almost as much as the course. Experience Outdoors

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