Banning Mills Canopy Tour
This summer I have had the incredible opportunity to work at Historic Banning Mills running their canopy/zipline tours. I first heard about the tour over Christmas break last year. I wanted to go on it with my bro, but it didn’t work out. I applied to work there as soon as I got home for Christmas break, and the rest is history. Because of the skills and training I had in school, I was readily accepted as part of the facilitator team.
My first task was to learn how to receive people coming into the end of a zipline. As a guide, I must judge their speed and tell them when to break. As I watch them coming down the line, there are several factors I must consider: Weight, form, gender, and previous experience. Guys typically go faster than gals. Some people react faster than others when I give them the signal to apply the breaks. Some don’t react at all. Heavier people go faster but also slow down faster. To make matters more interesting, the four ziplines are all different. This is an art I was still perfecting at the end of the summer.
Then I got to learn how to send people off down the zipline. To do this, one must be skilled in dealing with extremely scared people. You have to talk them through hooking up the gear, and sometimes must hook their gear up for them. Getting people to jump off the very first platform is especially difficult. Most people are scared of heights and don’t have a lot of trust in the gear. It doesn’t make it easier that they must step out onto a little platform 60 feet up in the air with nothing much to hold on to.
I met some really neat people over the summer. I got to be on TV and had a radio interview through Banning Mills. I met people from Sweden and Germany. I met engineers who would study the design and construction of the course, pointing out the possible failure points. I also met “Big Nerd Ranch” folks who spent their days writing C++ code for Mac programs. I met people who had done a canopy tour or ziplines in Costa Rica, Belize, Mexico, Alaska, and other places. The youngest person I took was 11, and the oldest was 78. I had adrenaline junkies and scared-to-death middle aged ladies, all in the same tour. One day we had a group of debutantes. The very next tour was the Atlanta chapter of Women on Wheels.
It was very interesting to see how all these different people reacted to the challenges of the canopy tour. The basic tour consists of 3 ziplines and 6 cable and wooden bridges. Some people liked the ziplines and hated the bridges. Others loved the bridges. Some people left the platform screaming. Others stopped in the middle to take pictures. People would ask if the job ever got boring. No, there is no way it could. Every tour was completely different because of the people in it.
Today I ran my last tour, at least my last one for a while. I head back to school up in Canada in a couple days. It was a little hard to leave the place that had blessed me in so many ways over the summer. Not only did it provide me with a way to make some money over the summer, but it also helped me improve my people skills and gave me contacts for the future.
By Mom, August 30, 2008 @ 4:44 pm
You are on Banning Mills’ website (scroll to the bottom): http://historicbanningmills.com/NewThingsComing.htm
By Janet, July 20, 2010 @ 6:11 pm
Did anyone get hurt doing this? I am thinking of taking my teenage kids and their friends to Banningmills this weekend and taking the pattern tour- – Am I crazy? It is too hot to go this time of year? Should I wait to the Fall?