Niagara Falls’ Most Recent Normal Miracle To Include Zip Line

Line takes visitors 670 metres along the Canadian side of the gorge at speeds topping 60 km/h.

Niagara Falls is the most recent natural wonder to include a zip line, offering honeymooners and others the opportunity to take an adrenaline-pumping risk toward churning mist at paces topping 60 km/h. The elevated cable rides have developed from a novel approach to explore wilderness canopies to verging on necessary additions to bait visitors in the 21st century to set up destinations. It’s a pattern that has exposed a rift between the individuals who approach nature like contemplative monks and other people who require a compelling, Indiana Jones-style experience.

The booming popularity of commercial zip lines in the course of recent years, with no less than 200 in the United States alone, implies more individuals are encountering nature in a way that would make Henry David Thoreau lightheaded.

“We can’t make these into museums. We have to keep the general public — the folks that these places have been set aside for — we have to keep them motivated to get out there,” said Tom Benson, co-founder and chief experience officer at WildPlay Element Parks, which built the Niagara Falls zip line.

“How do you take a teenager and get them away from a game console to something that is going to capture their imagination?” he asked.

They can ride over the tree line at New River Gorge in West Virginia, over California’s Catalina Island, above rich Hawaiian scenes and in perspective of Denali in Alaska. A zip line ride in Mexico’s Copper Canyon runs about 2.5 kilometres, one in Nepal has a drop of more than 600 metres and another in Sun City, South Africa, boasts top speeds of 160 km/h.

“You feel all this air rushing past you, it’s this great, almost roller-coaster-esque feeling,” Quillan Brady said after riding on the new Eagle Flyer zip line at Lake George in New York’s Adirondacks. “But really, what I think makes it is looking around and seeing all this natural New York beauty.”

Niagara Falls-area resident James Bannister doesn’t quite see it that way. To him, the new zip line there amounts to a “circus midway-style attraction.”

“Every once in a while, somebody comes along and says, ‘Boy, you could build another great attraction here!’ As if the falls itself wasn’t enough of an attraction,” Bannister said.

Zip line fans say it’s still possible to marvel at nature while whizzing above it at highway speeds.

At Niagara Falls, WildPlay’s Benson said his four lines whizzing above 670 meters along the Canadian side of the canyon were intended to be sensitive to the neighborhood environment. Catalina Island’s zip line makes stops for presentations at assigned “eco-stations.” And riders of the Lake George zip line who were addressed after their rides said they had another point of view on the natural wonder.

The proprietor of the Lake George line, Ralph Macchio Sr. (father of the Karate Kid on-screen character with the same name), said he got the thought for his fascination by looking out from on the great Adirondack tops. “I thought, ‘Gee, if you could look at it like you were flying like a bird and get that view, that would be an Adirondack experience,”‘ Macchio said. “And that’s why I built the zip line.”