A Zipline for...Excalibur?

I didn't want this to get buried in the other post about the Bootleg Canyon Flightlines, but during my interview with Ryan Geene, the manager of the attraction, he revealed that Greenheart LLC, which owns it is in negotiations with Excalibur to build one there, too.

They two sides are in early negotiations, but one issue, Geene acknowledged, is that they still want tourists to want to come to Boulder City to ride that system. Here's what he told me:

"We’re trying to see if we do one line, a teaser line, so you fly out and when you get off there’s a kiosk where you can sign up to go do the real deal out in Bootleg Canyon. ... But it would have to be exciting, too. If it's just a slow line, it’s no fun, why would you want to do a boring thing? So it would have to be exciting and leave you wanting more."

Geene said they're scoping out places to erect the steel cables, maybe "somewhere above the drawbridge where you walk in so you’re flying over everybody as they’re walking in."

He also said they're talking to the Hualapai Indian tribe in northwest Arizona. They're the ones who built the Grand Canyon Skywalk and they're always looking for new things to build to give tourists more to do. Also, because the Hualapai aren't beholden to the environmental regulations on their portion of the Grand Canyon that the US Parks Service are, there's more opportunity to create a zipline across some portion of the big hole. That said, it doesn't strike me that ziplines are all that harsh on the environment but I doubt the U.S. government would permit it given that they reject most everything else including the Skywalk.

Anyhow, more of these things are coming.

A Day On The Zipline

I've got a story to write for a regional publication on the Bootleg Canyon Flightlines attraction in the hills outside of Boulder City. I took a break from a busy week of MJ-benefit-mania on Thursday to ride it with my friend Trevor. For those unfamiliar, a zipline is steel cable that you glide -- sometimes pretty fast -- down while attached by a harness. These things...


hold what we're attached to. See?


Boulder City, as I reported in my New York Times piece earlier this year, is repositioning itself as an outdoor-adventure hub and this attraction from Greenheart LLC part of that. I'm not a person who likes roller coasters or bungee jumps or anything involving being nauseated, so I was very nervous about this until I got in the harness and hung from the line waiting to be launched. It all feels very secure and 10,000 tourists have done it so far without any injury.

Part of it involved carrying our equipment up part of the hill, which had these views of Lake Mead and the Strip respectively:


Bootleg Canyon is so named because bootleggers would distill alcohol for residents of Boulder City, where liquor was still outlawed even after Prohibition ended in the 1930s. Today, it's known as one of the nation's top places to go mountain biking. Here's some of the ramps and stuff they have.


The deal with Boulder City was that the city gets $10 from every tourist fee on the zipline. Greenheart also gives $2 to a conservation group that cares for the hills. Greenheart has also build ziplines in Haiti, Canada and San Diego, although none have four runs except the Vegas one. You can visit BCFlightlines.Com for more on how long each line is; I can't recall.

I was pretty nervous on that first leap, but it was just so exhilarating and such a stress releaser! Two of the four lines have negative grades at various points and Trevor and I ended up not going fast enough to hit the platform because we encountered very stiff wind. As a result, as you can see in this 4-minute YouTube movie I made, we drifted back and had to be towed in later:



Much of that video was shot by the Bootleg Canyon staff. That was something fascinating to me, that they don't try to soak you by taking your $150 a person for the experience and then charge you for pictures and videos and stuff like that. The guides are only too happy to shoot with your camera as many times as you like. I can't recall that kind of customer service at any similar attraction I've done of this ilk.

My camera battery was dead, but Trevor has lots of photos and has set up a Flickr photo album that you can browse. Here's a fun one of him taken by me...


...and of me taken by him!