Treetop tour of Alaska rainforest offers wild ride for most extreme adventurers

KETCHIKAN, Alaska – Tourists are getting a bird’s-eye view of the Alaska rainforest in a new high-adrenaline attraction that sends them zipping from tree to tree on a series of high-wire cables.

Alaska Canopy Adventures this season began offering tours of the network of suspended rope bridges and connecting zip lines stretching over three-fourths of a mile at the Alaska Rainforest Sanctuary near Ketchikan.

A nervous hush fell over the group during a recent tour as guide Jake White latched them onto their first zip line. Cautious hesitation and knots in the pit of the stomach gave way to the exhilarating feeling of flight as they stepped off the first platform.

A light rain showered tourists as they glided between towering Sitka spruce and Western hemlock trees 135 feet above the forest floor. There’s no such thing as a rain check in a place that averages 162 inches of precipitation a year.

The group was on the lookout for bald eagles, black bears and other wildlife commonly found in the nation’s largest national forest, the Tongass. But sightings of other tourists zipping off in the distance also grabbed their attention.

“This gives new meaning to the phrase ‘tree hugger,’ ” said tourist Billie Jo Cusack, standing in a tree swaying gently back and forth as the group of eight took its place on the next platform.

Cusack, 38, a former Ketchikan resident now living in Sammamish, Wash., described herself as “the risk-taker type.” She said the zip tour gave her an adrenaline rush similar to skydiving.

“There’s no place to go but down,” said her 10-year-old son Jake Cusack.

For the treetop tour, guides outfit tourists with helmets, raingear and body harnesses before sending them through the forest canopy.

The tour includes seven zip lines – the longest stretching 850 feet – and three rope bridges, for a total of about 4,500 feet of high-tension cable. It takes up to three hours and overlooks Herring Cove, where more than a million king, chum and coho salmon are released each year from a nearby hatchery.

The Ketchikan sanctuary is a temperate rainforest, a type of rainforest found in the Pacific Northwest as well as in Chile, New Zealand and southern Australia. The climate in temperate rainforests is much cooler than in tropical rainforests, but rainfall is plentiful and winters are mild. Tall, old-growth evergreens are common.

It has been less than a decade since the timber town of Ketchikan in Alaska’s southeast panhandle closed its largest pulp mill, but thanks to tourism, entrepreneurs are again looking to the forest with dollar signs in their eyes.

Cruise ship revenue in Ketchikan has more than doubled since 1997, when the Ketchikan Pulp Co., once the community’s largest employer, shut down its mill and laid off more than 500 workers.

Just under 850,000 cruise ship passengers visited the town of about 7,700 in 2004, according Patti Mackey, executive director of the Ketchikan Visitors Bureau.

“In many ways (tourism) has been kind of the glue that’s held the community together after the closure of the mill,” she said.

Len Laurence says the tour his group has set up in Ketchikan is different from challenge courses in Alaska and the Lower 48.

Zip lines on canopy tours traverse from one tree to the next high above the forest floor, while challenge courses run participants through a variety of obstacles, including zip lines that generally end on or near the ground.

“The biggest challenge here is the 125-foot ascent to the first platform,” Laurence said.

He said he and business partner Brien Salazar traveled in 2004 to Puerto Vallarta and Costa Rica, where dozens of zip tour companies have opened up shop since the mid-1990s.

In April, Laurence, Salazar and co-owner Kris Singstad hired STEPS Inc., an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based company that has developed ropes and challenge courses since 1991.

Michael Smith, a project director for STEPS, said the Ketchikan course is the company’s first canopy tour. It recently completed a second near Austin, Texas.

Alaska Canopy Adventures has opened the tour to locals on Saturdays but mainly caters to cruise ship tourists during the week. Laurence said there are about 35 open seats a day on the tour, but he hopes to raise that to about 100 before the end of the tour season.

And if the explosion of canopy tours in Mexico, Costa Rica and South America are any indication, the business is likely to find plenty of tourists willing to pay the $149 fee.

Darren Hreniuk was living in Vancouver, B.C., in 1988 when it occurred to him that canopy tours would be a good way to educate the public about deforestation, the environment and the value of forests.

“I thought it would be great to get people up in those trees,” he said by telephone from Costa Rica, where he now lives.

A short tourism season in Canada and liability issues persuaded Hreniuk to take his idea south to the Central American country.

He set up his first canopy tour in 1993. Just a few years after opening the first tour, dozens more sprung up in Costa Rica and other countries in Central and South America.

STEPS’ Smith said construction of challenge courses and zip line tours is largely unregulated. But he believes that will change within the next five years as the industry grows.