Zipline Asheville: An Amazing Day with the Adventure Center of Asheville

 

Thank you to The Adventure Center of Asheville for hosting me. As always, all opinions and recommendations are my own. This post also contains affiliate links. You can read my full disclosure policy here.

A couple of weeks ago, I took a girls’ trip to Asheville, North Carolina. I had been to Asheville before in a brief one-day visit to the Biltmore Estate. But, I knew there was a lot more to Asheville and so this time, I set out to find different, fun activities to do. Since ziplining is something I love to do, I looked into doing this with the Adventure Center of Asheville. They asked if we would also be interested in checking out their new adventure park which sounded very intriguing so we agreed.

The day became a highlight of our entire trip!! We ended up spending a beautiful day outside in the trees and had the most fun all while getting great exercise. This, in turn, allowed us to enjoy Asheville’s phenomenal food scene. In case you haven’t picked up on it yet, this was a total win-win!!

Asheville Resources & Recommendations

• Aloft Asheville Downtown– (where I stayed) Read reviews | Book rooms
• Allianz Travel Insurance– Protect yourself and your trip-get a free quote!
• TripAdvisor– Read reviews on hotels and tours for Asheville
• Skyscanner– Compare the best prices on flights | best prices on rental cars

Our day broke down into two parts: Asheville Tree Tops Adventure Park for challenge courses and Asheville Canopy Adventures for ziplining.

Asheville Tree Tops Adventure Park

The Tree Tops Adventure Park is a new attraction! It is made up of 60 unique challenges broken down into courses that are color-coded and categorized from easy to difficult. These challenges include ropes courses, crawling through suspended tunnels, jumping from swing to swing, and rappelling. The courses are anchored in 30 trees and range anywhere from 12-45 feet off the ground!

The most interesting part to me is their safety system. Your body harness includes two “smart cables” that talk to each other. When one is open, the other will not open. The system is designed so that the participant is clipped 100% of the time to the apparatus, ensuring safety. It takes a second to get down how it works, but you catch on quickly and then it’s easy!

Blue Course

After suiting up, receiving our safety briefing and completing the safety cable practice course, the guides recommended we start with either the Green or Blue course and so we started with Blue.

Getting through the first few challenges took a little time as I was getting used to the cable system. This one is called the Swiss Fish and is one of the easier elements on the Blue course.

Here’s my friend, Heather (yes, there’s two of us!), on Rainbow Bridge. I love all the colors!

Isn’t this a cool tunnel? This is called Tunnel Road and it doesn’t move. The challenge here is to make yourself small enough to fit through!

Getting to it!

So…remember how I said that Tunnel Road didn’t move? Well, this Conveyor Belt Bridge does move! Let’s just say I began trying to perfect my balancing act! 😉

No need to worry about falling. See those two parallel cables going all the way across? I’m hooked up to both!

One challenge between me and the finish line for the Blue course. Getting ready to do the Exit Zip!

Stuck the landing! That’s a wrap and a win for the Blue course! Next, please!

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Yellow Course

Hello, Yellow! Nice to meet you. It’s you against me and you’re going down! Hopefully. 😜

Can you tell I’m having fun yet?

This is Vortex Bridge. I took a couple of minutes to think about my “strategy” and then got to it!

Got my cables engaged and I’m ready to go! In case you’re wondering what it looks like to look down, here you go!

The evidence that I’m conquering Vortex Bridge. If you look closely, you’ll see me smiling!

Just as I was thinking I had all this under control, no problem, I met the Stump Jump. My friend had warned me that it was hard. I found myself confronting little unevenly spaced targets that moved and tilted!

I began cautiously and got about two steps in and then stopped and had what I felt like was a business conference right then and there to figure out how the rest of this challenge was going to go down.

Made it!! This is looking back at the Stump Jump from the opposite direction.

Next up was the Parkway Tunnel. It sways…

and you even change to another tunnel while crawling. This is really cool!

Waving at you as I zip along the Zip Glider!

And for my grand finale, I climbed down this Taco Net. Backwards!

After I finished the Yellow course, our time was up. It went by fast! I think my favorite thing about this adventure was the mental challenge-sizing up my competition and developing my strategy. I also loved the feeling of accomplishment when I completed a challenge.

And let’s be honest, who doesn’t love getting great exercise when you are having fun? Burning calories when it doesn’t seem like you are exercising is ALWAYS heaven!

On to the next adventure!

Asheville Zipline Canopy Adventures

If you’ve never ziplined before, it is super fun! This is something I like to try to do everywhere I go whenever possible. What drew me to Zipline Canopy Adventures was the fact that their Full Canopy Tour has 11 ziplines. 11!! Not many places have this many. Plus, at the end of the Full Tour, there are two parallel lines so if you are with a friend like I was, you can zip side-by-side and have some friendly competition!

After a training session on the ground, we climbed the stairs where our first zip took place halfway up this tower.

While we were zipping, once we got to certain platforms, our guides Doug and Josh gave us information about the trees we were flying in and out of. Most of these were red and white oaks and some of them even dated back to the Civil War!

We also got views of the mountains, a golf course and even downtown Asheville in the background. It’s a really beautiful and scenic area!

Remember the parallel ziplines I mentioned earlier? Here they are! It was game on with Heather!

Here we are with our awesome guides Doug and Josh! Definitely try to get these guys if you can!

Let’s Zip!

Before we knew it, it was 3:45 in the afternoon and we had spent the whole day outdoors having a lot of fun. Heather kept saying she wanted to keep going to tackle the Orange and Red courses at the Adventure Park!

We both left feeling accomplished and like we had had enough exercise to completely deserve the big meal we were going to eat later that night. We also knew we would sleep really well that night. But most importantly, we had so much fun!

Know Before You Go

• The Adventure Center of Asheville is located only 5 minutes from downtown (without traffic) and there is free parking and covered picnic areas.
• GPS won’t always take you straight to them. We found that putting in the Crowne Plaza Resort Asheville’s address got us there and as soon as we got to its parking lot, there were Adventure Center of Asheville signs everywhere pointing us right in!
• If you go in the offseason, it might be really cold as it was the day we went. Wear layers and make sure your outer layer is a windbreaker! Thin tech gloves work well since you will be given big, leather gloves to wear for ziplining. Also, wear a thin beanie that will fit under your helmet to keep your ears warm.
• Wear closed toed shoes no matter the season.
• There are restrooms on site.
• They have limited snacks and drinks for purchase so you might want to bring your own.
• You can bring your own camera and phone, however, if you do, it’s best to make sure it’s somehow strapped to your body. For example, I brought my camera attached to its crossbody strap and my GoPro with the hand strap. My phone was in my pocket. I did use my phone a few times on the challenge courses, but I didn’t take it out much at all ziplining unless I was standing on a platform. Even then, I didn’t do it much because if you drop it from there…
• This is a perfect activity for a girls’ trip like ours, a couples’ trip and a family trip. They have adventure courses designed for kids as well as kids’ ziplines!

PIN IT!

This is definitely something you want to try if you are planning a trip to Asheville! It’s different and fun and you have to take advantage of those mountain views, right?

Have you ziplined or done challenge courses like these? If you try these out in Asheville, I would love to hear how it goes!

‘Til next time…

Trimm Travels,

Heather

Thank you to Heather for taking the photos of me on the challenge courses and to Adventure Center of Asheville for taking the photo of Heather and myself with our guides.