Zip lines, canopy tours and aerial adventure parks are all the rage, so we checked a few out in Berk

Zip lines, canopy tours and aerial adventure parks are all the rage, so we checked a few out in Berkshire County and its surrounding areas In January 2009, Catamount Adventure Park in South Egremont and Hillsdale, N.Y., became one of the first ski areas in the area to offer a recreational experience via belays, , harnesses and tweezles. Around the same time, approximately 60 miles away, Zoar Outdoor in Charlemont opened its canopy park with approximately 3,960 feet of zip lines through the company’s forested property.

Now with another Charlemont-based canopy tour at Berkshire East, a new aerial adventure park at Jiminy Peak in Hancock, two new zip lines just opened at Ski Bousquet in Pittsfield (and an anticipated adventure park to be built on the property in the spring) and hundreds of outdoor adventure attractions like these cropping up like wildfire throughout the country, it would seem that Catamount and Zoar definitely were onto something. "I think we didn’t quite realize there was this growing trend in the industry until we built ours in the fall 2008-winter 2009," said Karen Blom, one of Zoar Outdoor’s original founders and the company’s director of public relations. "At the time, there were maybe 12 in the U.S.; now there are more than 100."

I became familiar with Zoar’s canopy offerings after a 2009 trip to Puerta Vallarta, Mexico, where I canopied through the Mexican jungle. When I returned home, I was interested in finding a location locally where I could take my family on one of these trips, minus the cost of a weeklong tropical vacation and passports. A brochure in a local restaurant pointed me in Zoar’s direction, but my youngest wasn’t old enough or heavy enough. (You must be at least 10 years old and 75 pounds.) So we all had to wait.

But then I heard about Catamount and its aerial adventure park (Advocate writer Judith Fairweather wrote about the opening last year), and as fate would have it, Jiminy Peak opened a park of its own this spring. These types of parks can often accommodate anybody between the ages of 5 and 90, although at Catamount adventurers must be at least 8 years old.