This was the highlight of my trip! I jumped off the bus from the Mendenhall Glacier and raced over to my excursion to Douglas Island. We took a speed boat (good thing Ken wasn't around) over to the island, got all harnessed up, learned how to break and turn ourselves around on the zip line, and off we go! We took a Mercedes Benz Moog and climbed 300 feet in about 1/3 mile. Kind of felt like they were putting us on our heads... We continued up the hill on foot til we reached the first set of tree towers over the old gold mine. They split us into gropus of 9 since that is all that fits on the tree towers at a time, gave us a baby line to practice stopping and turning on, and OFF WE GO! There were 9 tree towers, two suspension bridges we had to be hooked to, and we had to repel out of the trees at the end. There were times when we were over 240 feet off the ground and our longest line was 840 feet long. We actually went over a mile combined on the lines - what a blast. One of these pictures shows me being hauled in at the end- I just didn't weigh enough to get me clear to the very end a couple of times and had to pull myself/be pulled in by the guide. It was hard to remember to look down at the mine sites, concentrate on keeping straight (we had a few people get turned all the way backwards as they were sliding), try not to hit any trees, try to yell (it was kinda like a battle cry we were all trying to acheive) and laugh at the same time, and last but not least, BRAKE when approaching the trees at a high rate of speed.
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