Navitat Offers Visitors Unique Vantage Point
Drive just 85 miles from Palm Springs and you’ll find Wrightwood, California. Primarily a ski town, the community tends to be very quiet during the summertime. Those days are long gone though. Outdoor adventure company Navitat recently opened a zip line canopy tour high above the San Gabriel mountains. The tour offers its guests a view of the terrain unlike anything they’ve ever seen. “A lot of people have seen the San Gabriels, but the way they’ve seen it is from their car, or from the TV,” said Navitat tour guide Joel Hunt. “We really want to get people out here firsthand, to experience how beautiful this terrain is.”
The task of creating a fully functional, participatory zip line tour is far from easy. Teamed with a design team from Bonsai Inc., Navitat spent five months hand building everything from the trail to the platforms high in the trees. “The terrain out here is really rugged and really hard to access. All the platforms and steel and all the lumber that you see you out here, was brought up by man power,” said Hunt.
Navitat already operates a successful location in Asheville, North Carolina. However, bringing the tour to the west coast presented a great opportunity for the team. “Oh, it’s immensely gratifying, to be out here and watch folks like yourself, or the friends and family weekend we had, guests, and all the paying customers we had screaming and being terrified,” said designer Mark Craven. “It’s all gravy for me.”
The tour is home to ten zip lines, three repels, three sky bridges, and a brand new sky stairs, the ascent to the top of a tree. The experience obviously not for the faint of heart. “On these zip lines you’ll be at heights ranging from 20 all the way up to 300 feet in the air, going up to speeds from 20 to possibly 55 miles per hour,” explained Hunt. “If you’re deathly afraid of heights, this probably isn’t the tour for you. But if you have a normal fear of heights, we’re very well trained, guides and we’ll get through it nice and smoothly.”
However, the tour is also unique because it helps educate its guests about the beauty of their surroundings. “As far as teaching people about the environment, we have a full time masters environmentalist on our staff, that trains our guides,” said Navitat tour guide Caley Bowman.
The goal is simple: to help develop a passion for the environment that has become the livelihood of Navitat. “We just kind of consume and consume and consume,” said Hunt. “There are still very few untouched places left. We really want to get people out to see that natural beauty, so hopefully, one day if we do influence someone on our tour that maybe they’ll set up a new foundation, to preserve a certain habitat or a certain wildlife, that’s what we really hope and aim for when we bring people out here.”
The tour season runs through November, and for more information go to our “Seen on 3” section.
