Snowflower Resort
Zippity Zip-lines

If you were fortunate enough to spend Labor Day weekend at the beautiful Snowflower resort in Northern California’s rugged Sierra-Nevada Mountain range, you were privy to the grand opening of a unique amenity in the system: a zip-line.

A zip-line uses a pulley suspended on a steel cable mounted at an incline. The user holds or attaches to the pulley and uses gravity to propel from one end to the other. It is a common element in challenge courses across the world.

Kirt Davis, Snowflower’s manager, obtained experience in challenge courses while back at school pursuing his bachelor’s degree in recreation management from Southern Oregon University in Ashland, OR. This experience included the use, facilitation and research into the effectiveness of challenge courses.

Davis’ research showed a relationship between the activities in a challenge course, such as a zip line, and self efficacy. Self efficacy refers to a person’s ability to deal with, and sustain good self esteem during, challenging situations. Additionally, they were just plain fun.

These factors were strong motivators in Davis’ pursuit of a zip-line for his park. He is an avid proponent of recreation, and believes these kinds of activities are beneficial physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally and socially.

“It goes back to why I came to 1000 trails,” he said.
Davis spent a year considering geographical considerations and member attitudes relating to the project. Once the decision was made to go ahead, the next step was to find a supplier and conduct all the pertinent research regarding industry standards relating to safe construction, maintenance, correct facilitation and the like.

Once the project was underway Davis had great support from his staff. This included the luxury of having a recreation director, Fred Zillmer, with a construction background. Other staffers acted as test subjects once the line was completed. “That was fun,” Davis said.
With this help and support, Davis says that they have built something that will withstand the depth and weight of Snowflower winters, and not signicantly add to maintenance time or costs.

Davis’ staff also took ownership of the project, developing a sense of pride for this amenity, unique to the system. That sense of pride led to the staff openly and enthusiastically promoting the new zip-line.

This contributed to the great success of the new zip-line, once it opened.

“We had a huge response from our members, young and old,” Davis said.

He added that kids would ride, parents would ride and many grandparents would watch. Some even commented that the park should charge admission to watch.

“We almost created a traffic jam in our park with people stopping in their cars to see what was going on.”

The zip-line will be used primarily during the summer season between Memorial Day and September 15th. Davis looks forward to incorporating it into his theme weekends, including the very popular Adventure Race, which is part of Snowflower’s Adventure Days weekend. He is also looking to adapt it into 1000 Trails’ new Club Blazer kids program.

During the shoulder seasons, Davis is looking for ways to promote his rentals by incorporating the zip-line. His goal is to “fill the gaps” between the end of the recreation season and the start of the snow park season.

Those “gaps” traditionally show declining rentals.
If the zip-line project up to this point is any indication, Davis will approach this endeavor focused and persistent.

When asked what advice he would give other managers or recreation staff pursuing similar projects he replied, “There are ways to work within budgets and provide successful amenities. Through hard work and perserverance you can provide something both unique and fun!”

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