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navitat asheville fact sheet

navitat wrightwood fact sheet

Navitat Canopy Adventures:
Background

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Navitat Canopy Adventures is a zipline canopy tour operator with locations in Asheville, N.C., and Wrightwood, Calif. Navitat specializes in high-adventure zipline canopy tours, with a heavy focus on educating guests about the natural environment, history and culture of the surrounding area.

The company’s original tour opened in May 2010 in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, 20 miles north of Asheville. A second tour began operations in July 2011 in Southern California’s San Gabriel Mountains, 75 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

What is a canopy tour?
Conceived during the 1970s in the Costa Rican rainforest, canopy tours originally guided guests into the treetops to experience the rich biodiversity and to learn more about the natural world. Today, canopy tours are as much a thrill as they are an educational experience, but they always include trees as the main structural element.

What is a zipline tour?
Zipline tours take the primary element of canopy tours—ziplines—and make the thrill ride their key focus. The tours consist of ziplines that are stretched from tower to tower, and they are rarely built in trees.

What is a Navitat Canopy tour?
Navitat tours combine the best elements of a thrilling zipline tour, sky bridges and stairs, trails and rappels, with the educational and environmental elements experienced in the original Costa Rican canopy tours. Guests are gradually introduced to zipping by beginning with shorter ziplines closer to the ground before moving onto higher, longer ziplines and sky bridges. Knowledgeable guides handle all safety equipment, provide coaching and encouragement, and present interpretive information throughout the tour. The result is a unique perspective—where exhilaration meets contemplation.

Navitat courses
Course designer is Bonsai Design Inc., the leading designer and builder of canopy tours in the U.S. In the last five years, Bonsai has completed more than a dozen state-of-the-art installations. Bonsai is a member of the Association of Challenge Course Technology and adheres to ACCT standards for design, building and inspecting.

Navitat courses are comprised of a series of ziplines, sky bridges and stairs, trails, rappels and platforms high in the tree canopy. 

Innovative design and installation methods are used to minimize the impact on the environment and to maximize the safety of the course visitors.

Navitat’s commitment to safety
Safety is Navitat’s top priority in all components of the canopy tour – from design and construction, to staff training and operation.

Guests are escorted at all times on the tour by two highly skilled Canopy Guides, who handle all equipment. Guests are attached to a redundant safety system at all times while off the ground.

Canopy Guides must complete between 50 and 70 hours of training before they are certified to lead tours. Additional training hours are required weekly throughout employment.

Navitat is a member of the Association for Challenge Course Technology (ACCT), which is accredited by the American National Standards Institute. The company adheres to and exceeds all ACCT standards for construction, operations and training.

Navitat’s commitment to the environment
Navitat courses fit seamlessly into the natural landscape, leaving the smallest footprint on the land. Installation methods are minimally intrusive to the trees and other natural features.

Navitat uses environmentally sound products and available timbers onsite for construction of the course, whenever possible.

A full-time, master’s-level educated Environmental Programming Leader is responsible for creating interpretative educational programming for guests, and providing environmental resource analysis and management of the tour site.

The Navitat team and experience
Navitat employs approximately 120 people at its two locations. The leadership team has more than 35 years of combined professional experience in operating, programming, designing and installing canopy and zipline tours, and more than 75 years of combined experience in business development and management with backgrounds in landscape architecture, civil engineering and real estate.

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