It’s a rainy Thursday, and I am dangling by one outstretched arm while I slowly drag my thirteen-year-old back onto a platform high above the Brazos River Park after they slipped and started gently twirling from their rope on the zipline course. It’s not going terribly well because the child has their eyes closed in terror until they feel their sneakers touch the relative safety of the wood.
Once they’re standing on their own two feet again, they take a deep breath and launch themselves through the rope course for a second try, this time making it and celebrating with a loud cheer as I grimly follow them as fast as my battered knees will allow. I get a cheer from them, too, when I make it, and, yeah, that’s pretty fun.
Go Ape is a nationwide chain of zipline courses that recently opened a new location in Sugar Land. Visitors climb through various tree obstacles until they reach the hair-raising, fast-paced descent along a line at the end. Each course takes about 30 minutes, and visitors can go through all three or the same one multiple times over 90 minutes.
目前,他们有三个颜色的课程排名by difficulty, though they plan to open a few more options in the near future. These include a course that has a 1000-foot zipline through the trees and another for smaller kids that parents can monitor from the ground. While I visited, everyone from adult groups of friends to little brothers and sisters were trying out the experience.
“It’s been really positive amongst the community.” said site manager Bryce Fencer. “The park partners are excited to have us here!”
Safety is tantamount at Go Ape. A man named Parker, who previously worked as a trapeze artist and sported a magnificent waxed ringmaster mustache, meticulously checked our gear as he carefully explained each strap on the safety harness. Once he was done, we got another safety lecture and had to pass through two checkpoints where workers made sure our wristbands were marked to show we had listened and understood the rules.
The anal retentive nature of the preparation certainly paid off for me. I am terrified of heights and would rather fight a coyote than climb to the top of a tall ladder. The thorough walk-through and commitment to safety made even me feel like I could handle maneuvering across slippery tightropes 30 feet above the ground. By the time I had climbed to the end, I was even exhilarated enough to do some celebratory fist pumping while on the zipline trip down.
Which promptly spun me the wrong way and had me sliding back-first across an Astroturf ramp until I came to rest staring up into the giggling face of my offspring, who had of course nailed the landing perfectly.
“I love seeing people who are so afraid and nervous go to being excited they did something they never thought they could do,” says Fencer. “That’s what’s so unique about this job!”
Jef Rouner is a Houston-based writer.