Zoom Ziplines at Mountain Creek
200 Route 94, Vernon, NJ
The Hunter Mountain zipline in New York, pictured above, is the adrenaline equivalent of a sports car whipping around the Autobahn. Mountain Creek, on the other hand, is like a lazy Sunday drive in the family sedan on the Garden State Parkway.
The former has a spartan, action-movie handlebar, but the latter straps you into a whole supporting contraption, with a big bar, two straps (preventing you from twisting or turning at all, which is a lot of the fun sometimes) and a granny-pants harness that basically turns into a seat when you’re zipping. It’s for the less-adventurous.
And unlike the others, this one starts you with a little baby zip (200 feet long) at ground level, to get you accustomed to the feeling — like a lame bunny slope.
From there, you hop into the ski resort’s stand-up gondola and climb 1,040 feet for the remaining three ziplines. Each one crosses over a lake, though not at particularly zooming speeds, so the whole experience is more of a unique-perspective sightseeing trip, but not a major adrenaline wave. Each ride lasts less than a minute.
Instead of getting to hurl your own body over the edge, you’re released by a mechanism, and instead of having to brace yourself for a manual stop, the resort uses a big spring-loaded device to catch you.
The young guides are friendly and attentive, albeit in a theme-park sort of way.
Aileen Schafer, 39, was initially nervous about zipping, despite having gone sky diving before. Later she described the zips as “calm, relaxing.”
“In my head, I was expecting to be a little more freaked out,” she says.
The only really scary part, as she and other guests agreed, was the 200-foot-long suspension bridge you cross on the way out. The bridge is secured, but it sways and bounces like a rejected prop from an Indiana Jones movie, making you feel like you’re going to tumble into the water, and take all the other bridge-crossers with you.
As a bonus bit of adventure, the tour ends with a ride in a Unimog truck, one of those open-air, all-terrain vehicles you always see in footage of the United Nations abroad. The bumpy trip back to the gondola takes you over mountainous terrain and, in the warmer months, even passes by some of the trick-riding pro- BMXers tearing up the mountain’s bike park.
Info: Prices are $60 for adults, $49 for youths (off-peak rates); zoomziplines.com
Thrill rating: Starts with a baby zip at ground level.
Big Bear Ziplines
817 Violet Ave., Hyde Park, NY
If the Swiss Family Robinson were a modern family on the go, it probably would have commuted on something resembling the Big Bear Zipline course. The course doesn’t start high in the mountains like the others — the tallest is only 60 feet — but it does offer more chances to zip, with eight lines ranging from 200 to 1,400 feet long.
The course goes entirely through the woods, a huge swath of property the company rents near the Hudson River, providing a rustic, summercamp quality as you zoom over old stone walls and the occasional snake.
The run contains extra challenges, too: two Tarzan lines to swing down and two steep fireman’s ladders to climb up. It’s safe, but feels a little more DIY than the others: Lines are hooked to trees instead of steel posts, and we got to throw ourselves off the platforms, or kick off a tree for even more speed, and run up a ramp to stop zipping. Using your own body adds to the adrenaline of it all.
The vibe here is casual, with our guides — the chill combo of Myke Shealy and Una Parciasepe — playing up the fear factor a bit by making you fall backward or jump off the platform with no hands.
The tour builds you up to the big dog, the 1,400-foot finale that zips you over the forest floor at a tight speed, which gives a liberating feeling of pseudo-flying when you take your hands off the handle and spread out.
“I like the tree where we were able to climb up the tree to get speed,” says Mike Naughton, 48, of Mansfield, NJ, who was zipping for the first time after he and his wife, Helen, finally ginned up the courage. “I like the fast ones.”
Info: Prices are $99 per person; on weekends through October and on Halloween night, the course is offering a special nighttime Zombie Zip tour, featuring costumed characters and spooky decorations, which costs $119 to $125 per person; bigbearziplines.com
Thrill rating: It seems like you’re flying along the 1,400-foot line.
New York Zipline Adventure Tours
64 Klein Ave., Hunter, NY
“Are you nervous about dying?” asks guide Tim Parquez. He’s joking, but the thin wire standing between me and the mountain floor 600 feet below is barely perceptible. “Nah,” I say as I step up to the platform and lock in, looking out at the spectacular view across the mountaintops. “What a way to go.”
Our guides have driven us up here in a minibus — its radio blasting the “Superman” movie theme song — up a bumpy pathway to the tip of the mountain. During the winter, the area would be crawling with skiers and snowboarders, but on this warm day, it’s just our three tour guides and six civilians gazing out into the abyss, shaking in our shoulder harnesses.
This is the fastest — a promised speed of 50 mph — longest and tallest zipline in all of North America. So we get a lot of instruction in zipline form and safety beforehand.
“This is not Disney World,” says guide Michael Goyette. He tells us to pay attention and react, because this is supposed to be a high-adrenaline danger sport, not a dinky skyride.
To maximize pants-wetting potential, the SkyRider tour starts you right off with the big one, a line that spans 3,200 feet across the mountain valley.
Goyette gives me a 3-2-1 countdown and yells, “Zip away!” I hurl myself over the edge and hang onto the bar for dear life. The instinct is to pull yourself up and clutch the bar like you’re Sandra Bullock in that “Gravity” trailer, but in reality, you’re still pretty safe even if you just hang there.
I curl my body up into the cannonball form (knees to my chest, head back) for maximum speed, taking a few moments to digest the view. And it is breathtaking, if I had any breath left that hadn’t been sucked out by this weird backward version of flying I’m experiencing. The majesty of the Catskills sucks me in so much, one of the guides has to shake the line to remind me to open up my body, to slow down — lest I fly into the backstop like a wild pitch. It takes barely a minute to get across the longest zip, but the terror makes it feel much faster.
The rest of the zips on the tour are shorter, but the views are great. One that speeds under the tree canopy gives the feeling of being on a Speeder chasing stormtroopers through Endor.
“It’s like no other experience. It puts you in a spot you can’t get to,” says Bradd Morse, founder of the company and a worldwide zipline pioneer. “You just get a bird’s-eye perspective of the world.”
Info: Prices range from $89 for the Mid-Mountain tour to $119 for the SkyRider tour; ziplinenewyork.com
Thrill rating: Zoom along at 50 mph — without a car!