It's as though you have wings with Bootleg Canyon Flightlines
It’s a bird…it’s a plane…it’s YOU!
Imagine yourself soaring over the mountains and desert, taking in the beautiful scenery from more than a thousand feet above the ground – without being in an airplane or helicopter. Your “wings” are compliments of Bootleg Canyon Flightlines, a zipline tour company that allows you to “fly” like a bird on a one-of-a-kind aerial adventure.
Passengers sit in their own paragliding harness that’s suspended from cable wires as they travel from one point to another over the desert ecosystem on an aerial trail that begins at the top of Red Mountain in Boulder City, an environ of Las Vegas. Some will glide at speeds up to 60 miles per hour.
“We’re a conservation-based company,” explains General Manager Max Margolis. “We build in certain areas – we’re part of a sustainable park strategy. Bootleg Canyon is a renowned mountain bike park with 36 miles of trails. But it has no revenue source. Some of our revenue is directed back to the park to sustain it and keep the trails up. Plus, we give $2 a head to the Outdoor Las Vegas Foundation. We also pay a lease on the property.”
Margolis explains that the Flightlines technology offers people the feeling of free flight and has been engineered so that they can go higher off the ground, go a further distance, go faster, and still be safer than with any other standard zipline.
“You sink right into out paraglide harness,” he notes. “It’s like a personal harness and it’s quite comfortable. When people come for the experience, we all meet at the bottom of RedMountain in BootlegCanyon. We then do a mountain pass trail and drive up to the top of RedMountain, from where you can view the entire Las VegasValley and the Strip, EldoradoValley, Lake Mead, and the towers for the bridge that is being built over Hoover Dam. Once there, we do a short hike on a switchback trail and we point out key areas of interest on the aerial trail.”
Of course, there is also a safety orientation as well as the learning of such techniques as how to use the body for wind resistance and slow oneself down.
Tours usually include 12 people and there are two to three Flightlines instructors on each tour. There are four different runs – guests can go up to speeds of 60 m.p.h., 45 m.p.h., 50 m.p.h. and 40 m.p.h., respectively Each person does each run and four people at a time take a run side by side. The experience takes about 2 ½ hours even though the runs vary in length from 35 seconds to one minute long.
“It’s an indescribable experience,” says Margolis. “You can’t imagine what it’s like until you’ve done it.”
- by Bobbie Katz, Las Vegas Reporter for HelloMetro
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