Category: News

We’ve paired up with Food Bank of the Rockies and Denver’s Road Home to benefit both organizations in January.

Guests who go zip-lining with Colorado Adventure Center during two special weeks this month can get special deals and discounts by participating.

The food bank’s benefit week starts Jan. 14. Denver’s Road Home benefit week will start Jan. 21. Guests make reservations for Colorado zipping tours whichever week they choose, then they bring a non-perishable food item to check-in.

Colorado Adventure Center will then donate $15 of every zip-line trip purchased to the respective charity. Guests can use the website or call 800-808-0357 to make a reservation, and also will receive $5 off the photographs of their experience.

Food Bank of the Rockies provides food for 350,000 people every year. Denver’s Road Home fights homelessness.

Please consider joining us in mid-January for these great causes. Check out the selection of trips at our Idaho Spring’s zip-line location, which is just 35 minutes from downtown Denver. Take to the skies with us this month and help two great organizations!

Nov. 7, 2012

You’ve been tubing with the kids, ridden through untouched powder fields on a snowmobile, and had dinner in the woods after a romantic horse-drawn sleigh ride … Now it’s time to consider wintertime zip-lining. It’s the newest, funnest way to add lots of zip to your winter vacation!

Colorado Adventure Center is opening its popular Idaho Springs zip-line course through the winter. We’re open seven days a week and at night on weekends.

Colorado’s beautiful winter scenery is the perfect backdrop for zip-lining. You can nearly touch snow-dusted treetops as you zoom high above a serene Rocky Mountain valley. On a zip-line, you own the best view in the house!

You’ll laugh out loud as you cheer friends and family on from one line to the next. And this is not some 8-second ride. Our zip-line course gives you 3,000 feet of zipping — five thrilling rides among five towers, with the longest ride nearly a quarter-mile long. The course is among the highest in the state, with launch towers reaching up to 65 feet.

Zip-lining is a great way to rest ski-weary leg muscles but still let the day’s activities register high on the fun-factor. Step off a launch tower that’s nearly six stories high and reach speeds up to 40 miles per hour! It’s a great family activity that’s completely appropriate for children who meet minimum height and weight restrictions (48” tall, 65-280 lbs).

Wintertime zip-liners dress in layers like ski gear, ready to be outside for a couple of hours. We provide all safety equipment, including helmets and lined gloves, plus professional guided instruction. You wear sturdy shoes such as snowboard boots, but no ski boots please.

One of only a few outfitters offering wintertime zipping, we’re conveniently located right on the way to ski country — 35 minutes from downtown Denver and less than an hour from the major ski areas.

Skeptical about whether this is a good choice for your winter vacation? Consider that some of North America’s most popular ski resorts offer zip-lining, many for the first time this season: Whistler, Montana’s Big Sky, Sunday River and The Canyons in Park City. The first winter zip-line tracks went up five years ago in the Italian Dolomites.

“Zip-lining has become a very popular vacation sport around the world. But doing it in the winter, in Colorado’s amazing Rocky Mountains, is an experience we wanted to offer,” Company Owner and Vice President of Operations John Cantamessa said. “We’re excited to open our Idaho Springs course to the many skiers and snowboarders we know are looking for big adventures.”

With offices located inside the historic Argo Gold Mine and Mill in Idaho Springs, Colorado Adventure Center has shared thrilling outdoor adventures with guests for years. We’re adventure experts, available to help fill your Colorado vacation with thrills and lasting memories. Transportation from Colorado’s major ski areas and Denver is available — call for details.

40 miles per hour, 65 feet in the air, 3,000 feet of cable … Add some zip to your winter vacation! Call 800-808-0357 to reserve space for your group or book your trip online.

Join us for an exhilarating winter day!

Oct. 23, 2012

Our Glenwood Springs river manager, Jay Berkes, has made it nearly 900 miles and into Missouri on his solo cross-country bike quest to raise money for school children in Haiti.

Jay Berkes, a manager at Colorado Adventure Center, is packed and ready to go in Summit County, Colo., earlier this month. He’s riding 2,600 miles to New York on a fundraiser for school children in Haiti.

In his most recent Update from the Road, Jay confronts challenge, adversity, romanticism and defeat — just like one of his mentors, Benjamin Franklin, whom Jay learned about by reading abridged biographies as a child. Franklin invented electricity and his face ended up on the $100 bill. But, as Jay writes, “if history is a memory of milestones, life is the detail in between.”

And details can be boring, routines mundane.

In his most recent post on Oct. 20, Jay writes that those details — being on the road by himself, pedaling over hundreds of miles of hilly asphalt — embodied the tone of his five-day ride through Kansas.

The details are anything but boring. There’s a little old lady who lectures Jay about being outside in the cold after dark; his description of the night sky filled with stars on an attempt to pull an all-nighter in the saddle; and a wake-up call by a man in overalls poking him with a pitchfork as Jay bedded down in what he thought was a public forest.

Riding 2,600 miles to raise $50,000 for a bunch of kids in a third-world country sounds like a life milestone but Jay’s quest right now really is steeped in the day-to-day, mile after mile, one pedal stroke at a time. To read more about it, and about who Jay’s trying to help with his ride, visit www.haiti100.com.

Good luck, Jay, and be safe! We’ll be cheering you on from the comfort of our computer screens.

Oct. 17, 2012

Although most of us are lucky enough to live in the mountains, we here at Colorado Adventure Center are not unfamiliar with traffic slow-downs on Interstate 70. Nary a Friday afternoon goes by in front of our shop at the Idaho Springs Argo Gold Mine & Mill without a short discussion that goes something like this:

“Look at that traffic on the highway.”

“Yup. Glad I’m here and not there.”

We feel the pain. And we’ve even been accused of causing some of it.

First we’d like to say, rubbernecking (a.k.a. “gaping” in Colorado) is not safe, whether you’re looking at the mountains, the bighorn sheep or the zipliners zooming around our course.

Second, we’d like to help.

The Colorado Department of Transportation recently released a free smartphone App that lets you essentially make the drive on the busy I-70 corridor before you even start your engine. Download it, and you can see drive times, slow-down areas, construction zones and traffic cams along the entire stretch from DIA to Vail. It’s called CDOT-Mobile and we strongly urge you to get it before your next foray into (or out of) the mountains.

We’re also extending a discount, based on suggestions from CDOT, to car-poolers who go zip-lining with us. Show up with at least four warm bodies in your vehicle, from Sunday through Friday, and we will take everyone zip-ling at a 10% discount for the entire group.

We’re pretty sure you’ll agree that soaring over Clear Creek and among the treetops on our 3,000-foot, five-tower course is much more fun than sitting in traffic. To redeem your discount, bring everyone into our office, show us your smartphone’s CDOT-Mobile App icon, and simply mention this blog post. We can’t wait to take to the skies with you!

Oct. 4, 2012

Colorado Adventure Center Manager Jay Berkes is riding his bike across the country to raise money for a school in Haiti.

Jay leaves Colorado next week for his solo, 2,600-mile pedal to New York. And here’s the kicker: Jay will do century rides every day he’s on the road. That’s 100 miles a day.

With “The Haiti 100,” Jay aims to raise money for Haitian school children who won’t attend classes at all this year without some financial help. He worked with these very kids last year when he volunteered with H.E.L.P. Inc., a medical and educational organization that lost nearly all of its infrastructure during the 2010 earthquake.

To support him, Colorado Adventure Center will host a fundraiser, “Gear Up For Haiti,” this Saturday at Glenwood Canyon Resort. The kickoff event includes low-cost rafting ($25) and zip-lining ($15), with 100 percent of the proceeds going toward Jay’s goal of raising $50,000 for the school and community.

While in Haiti, Jay helped deliver babies and tend the injured as an EMT at H.E.L.P.’s clinic. He also taught at the community school, Le Foyer, where working with the students defined his faith in the organization and spurred his effort to raise money for the community’s children.

A Midwesterner from Illinois, Jay, 24, earned a degree from IU in biological sciences while supervising our Glenwood Springs’ rafting operation in the summers. He plans to go to medical school but decided to take time “off” first — if that’s what you call volunteering in a Third World country and riding a multi-thousand-mile bike ride.

For more information on Jay’s ride and those he wants to help, visit www.haiti100.com.

For trip reservations Saturday, please call us at 800-808-0357. The No Name Bar & Grill at Glenwood Canyon Resort will be open, we hope to see you there!