Experiencing British Columbia From the Treetops
Is this what squirrels feel like?
This month’s Globetrotters challenge was a little more of…well, a challenge for me than usual. Although I think I’m a moderately adventurous person in some ways, I’m not much of a thrill seeker — I’ve never been bungee jumping, skydiving, or whitewater rafting. So what was I going to pick for my topic? I considered writing about a couple of volcanoes that I’ve hiked up, but then I remembered a slightly more unusual experience I’d had: University of British Columbia’s Greenheart TreeWalk.
I’ve hiked in many types of forests around the world, but the Greenheart TreeWalk was a different thing altogether. Instead of walking on trails on the ground, I got to walk on a suspended canopy walkway.
One thing I really appreciated about it was that despite the fact that it’s a tourist attraction, it wasn’t built at the expense of the environment and health of the rainforest. Here’s a short statement I pulled from their website:
Greenheart’s approach is to provide access to the canopy with minimal impact on the trees or habitat. Unlike other treetop canopy walkway systems bolted into the trees, the Greenheart TreeWalk’s design and engineering does not damage the trees or the surrounding delicate ecosystem.
While I’m not exactly fond of heights, it’s lucky that I’m not truly afraid of them, because as you can see from the photo below, some of the bridges were pretty high up!
The first section is a relatively small incline up to the first viewing platform. But soon, I found myself up in the treetops at a height of about seventy feet. Despite (or because?) of how far up I was, I felt quite serene and peaceful, especially whenever a breeze would blow through and rustle the branches.
The bridges swayed slightly from side to side as I walked, giving the impression that they were less sturdy than they actually were. I was never too worried, though, because they had net handrails on either side.
At one point, a group of guys thought it would be funny to start jumping up and down on the suspension bridges and shaking them to see if they could make other people fall, which made me more than a little annoyed. Activities like this are perfectly safe until people like that try to ruin it. Did I mention they were all fully grown, forty year old men? Anyway…
Aside from that, it ended up being a great experience, one that I’d definitely try again — and one that I’d highly recommend to anyone visiting Vancouver.
If you’re interested in reading more about British Columbia, check out Scott-Ryan Abt’s article about leaving the city and spending time in nature (featuring amazing photos from around Vancouver Island):
And for a trip to an entirely different part of the world, be sure to read Marianne O’s story about Shanghai:
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