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LANSING, W.Va. -- Rochester, N.Y. resident Spencer Tevels knew he was coming to the New River Gorge for adventure Memorial Day weekend.

And since his mom is a kayaker with a place on the Upper New River, Tevels, 36, just knew his adventure would involve fearfully paddling through frothing whitewater.

Then his mom, Ruth Fitzsimmons, threw the curveball.

"She tried to make it a surprise but then she finally told me that it begins with the letter, 'Z'. I knew there were no Zebras in the Gorge, but I had no idea what else it could be," Tevels said laughing. "I was clueless."

Tevels is clueless no longer, and now he's hooked on Ziplining after completing the new 3 1/2 hour TreeTops New River Gorge Canopy at Class VI-Mountain River just north of the New River Gorge Bridge.

Open since May 2, the new, $500,000 course gives visitors a rare, flying squirrel's eye view of the hemlock, mountain laurel and boulder-filled Mill Creek Gorge that's just a short hike from the rim of the New River Gorge.

Designed and built by Bonsai Design Inc., TreeTops Canopy Tour has its helmeted and harnessed participants stepping off platforms high up in the trees and zipping along at speeds of about 30 miles an hour along 10 ziplines varying in length from 190 feet to as long as 790 feet.

An avid adventurer who lives in Huntington, Fitzsimmons said the more than a mile-long-course through the tree tops was unforgettable.

"I loved how you were kind of balancing and almost like you were floating through the air," Fitzsimmons said of the harnessed flight through the woods and back and forth across the creek. "I think I was surprised how it was so quiet, and I also felt very safe. You're never once unhooked from a line. You're going to love it and you don't want it to end."

Dave Arnold, one of the founders and partners in Class VI-Mountain River, said that's been the universal reaction to the tours, which include two guides and up to eight people, and is priced at $89, like a day on the New River.

"When you gain elevation it becomes a very special experience," said Arnold, an avid bowhunter. "You get even 15 feet up, especially in the Gorge, and it becomes a much more powerful experience."

Arnold said they've been looking at adding a canopy tour for about three years.

They are not alone in exploring the high-flying eco-adventure to be had in the hills of home.

Birthed as a low-impact way for scientists to gather data in the world's rainforests, ziplining is now best known to Americans as something to do on honeymoons and cruises to Central America, where there's reported to be as many as 100 canopy tours in Costa Rica alone.

In the past decade or so, canopy tours have also been becoming more popular in the U.S.

Skyline Eco-Adventures has chalked up more than one million customer zipline crossings just at its Hawaii locations.

In the past year, they have sprung up here.

In the New River Gorge region, North American River Runners opened a zipline course in 2006 with the longest cable at about 300 feet.

ACE Adventure Center in Oak Hill, W.Va., added a 2,000-foot-zipline course/canopy tour last year, and in Southern Ohio, just about 90 minutes north of Huntington, Hocking Hills Canopy Tour, opened up a 3,200-foot-course last year as well. It was also built by Bonsai Design, Inc.

Also this spring Dollywood, Dolly Parton's amusement park in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., just opened up SkyZip, a five, zipline course (built by Skyline Eco-Adventures) that takes park-goers on an hour to 1.5-hour course for an additional $40 fee.

Already known for its Smokey's on The Gorge restaurant, featured on The Food Network's "Best of" show, Class VI wanted to put in a top-of-the-line course that would be the best in the region.

"It's like golf courses," Arnold said. "ACE deserves credit for building the first course, and they built a really nice course. We built the equivalent of an Arnold Palmer signature course -- something much more special. We say that we built the first, world-class canopy tour in West Virginia."

Ironically, and much to the initial surprise of Arnold, Bonsai Design's team did not place the TreeTops course on the rim of the Gorge but deeper into the Class VI property that spans the smaller, but spectacular Mill Creek area whose forest floor is thick with rambling rhododendron and rock cliffs seen from above the ziplines and the five sky bridges affixed to trees that range from about 100 to about 400 years old.

Like riding the rapids through the gorges of the New and the Gauley River, the ziplines are as much about capturing a sense of place as they are about a hot rush of adrenaline from the zips.

"You get a 790-foot zip and that's pretty cool -- those are our rapids," Arnold said of the tour that spans property owned by Class VI and the neighboring sustainable housing development, Wild Rock. "But the trip is so much more than just a zipline. On some zips you go almost as fast as a car, and it's like the difference between canoeing and rafting. This is a canopy tour, you're participating and there's more of a sense of place. It's like the river, it's more about where you are."

Not unlike the river, the TreeTops Canopy Tour comes complete with guides equally trained in safety, timely dispensing of natural history and, of course, plenty of humor.

"That rock formation dates back 16,000 years," said Tim Glasgo on a recent trip pointing at a rock cairn marking a trail built this past winter.

That humor comes in handy as nervous participants are trying to shuck their fear of heights.

Guides start off with a ground school session where they teach participants who are double-clipped onto the steel cables just feet off the ground, learning how to "brake" on the steel cable line with thick leather gloves, and how to "self-rescue," or grab the cable and pull your self to the platform if your weight doesn't get you there.

Participants, wearing helmets and a full harness, then graduate to two warm-up zips of 190 and then 230 feet before the third 540-foot zip, which goes over the gorge and is the start to a destination you can't see.

At the second platform, TreeTops has a zip-out access, or fixed line, where anyone who's truly freaked out by heights can be lowered to the ground.

Arnold said they've had to lower one person so far in about a month of doing the tours.

Many folks, even an F-16 pilot and a person who had jumped out of an airplane, admitted they were kind of scared at first.

"Probably the most interesting thing is we're learning how many people are afraid of heights," Arnold said. "It's an incredible thing. A lot of people are kind of afraid of it. We've had the majority of people go with it and by the end they are hugging us and loving it."

While the guides let loose a joke or two, they also try to identify the beauty seen from above these wooden platforms, with names such as "Roses and Chocolate," "Lover's Leap" and the highest one at 85 feet called "Almost Heaven."

From the sky bridge, guide Erica Little pointed out the nest of the flying squirrel, and from one of the platforms, a nesting bluejay, as well as the diverse number of tree species from black oak and yellow popular to the stands of eastern hemlocks.

On top of the wooden platform known as "Almost Heaven," about 85 feet up in a hemlock nicknamed Zeus, Little and fellow guide Tim Glasgo spoke of the urgency to treat the hemlock trees being attacked and crippled by the Asian native insect, the woolly adelgid, a small aphid-like insect threatening the health of eastern hemlock.

Arnold said he hopes the tours give people a greater appreciation of the natural beauty in their backyard, and a deeper understanding of the fragility of the environment and its giants like the hemlock.

"It's a keystone species," Arnold said. "In the east, hemlocks are like our redwoods. That one tree, Zeus, near the end of the tour, could be 400 years old. We have strong plans to protect them, and we are hoping to educate people. If you have a beautiful hemlock it is very easy to treat. The problem is you can't treat a whole forest. We will protect this zone. We may end up with one of the few hemlock forests 10 years from now. They're protecting Cathedral State Forest and the Park Service is protecting some isolated areas in the Gorge, but unless we protect them we are going to lose them all."

Arnold said that while it was an expensive investment, he thinks that adding the canopy tour to the resorts already long list of adventures from whitewater rafting, caving, fishing, mountain biking, rock climbing and ATV riding, is just another big step in providing a full-service, multi-adventure resort in the Gorge.

"Everybody is aware that the numbers have been declining in the rafting industry and that it's not a good time to make a major investment but when we did the merger we had the capitol to go from a great outfitter to an adventure resort," Arnold said. "We still have things to do, and eventually we are going to have to build a pool, but we have built up with paintball and added on-property rock climbing and built 42 cabins this year. We spent about $4 million this winter. We've sort of been the economic stimulus package for Fayetteville."

Toril Lavender/For The Herald-Dispatch

Erica Little, a Tennessee native guide with Class VI-Mountain River in Lansing, W.Va., shows five customers how to brake on the double cable, zipline system on the new TreeTops Canopy Tour, more than one mile of ziplines in the New River Gorge. The tour trains participants just a few feet off the ground, before trying the first two small ziplines that are part of the 10-zip and five-skybridge tour that takes about 3 1/2 hours.

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