Ramblewild

Photos from a recent trip to Tyringham.  On Saturday we canoed on Goose Pond (which I have not been to for ages):

The lake is way more developed than I remember it, but it's still a pleasant place to visit.  Weather was pretty awesome too...

Ethan swimming. Water was very nice -- I went for a dip too.

Aagh! I'm being attacked by a pond monster! Or maybe it's just a selfie...

On Sunday my dad had made us reservations for a session at Ramblewild, an outdoor ropes course / adventure place. Kind of overcast-- for a while it looked as though we might get rained on, but we piled into the car and headed out anyway. The place is up north of Pittsfield near Brody mountain.

 Here we are getting "geared up". They give you a climbing harness (fairly standard) and helmet, then attached the harness are two very heavy straps attached to "smart" carabiners. If both carabiners are clipped in, then you can unclip either one, but if only one is clipped in, you can't unclip until you attach the other one. It's a high-tech-ish way to insure that you always keep one point of attachment while clambering around up on a platform 80 feet up in the trees.

Here we are on the "practice" course learning how to use the gadgets:

Practice course done-- now we're off into the trees. They have a sort of central "hub" where you start, then choose one of about a dozen courses, each one graded for difficulty (green, blue, black, and then a single "double black", similar to ski slopes). Away go the kids:

The courses run from tree to tree with various obstacles, platforms, zip lines, etc.

My dad and Joanie decided to give it a shot. Here we are on the first course.

Ethan kind of zoomed ahead -- I didn't see much of him until later in the afternoon:

Joanie taking a zip line:

... and in a weird net-like thing between two trees:

Joanie was a good sport to give it a try, but after the first course she decided that navigating wobbly steps hanging from ropes was not really her cup of tea, so she mostly watched from then on.

My dad zip-lining. This is on one of the "blue" courses. The zip lines were a bit tricky-- if you didn't get it quite right you would wind up stuck out in the middle (at which point one of the staff people would have rappel out to collect you and pull you in).

My dad, again on the "blue" course. [NB: I hope I can still do this stuff when I am 80!]. This segment was a bit trickier than it looked; the footholds were unreliable, so you had to use a lot of upper body:

Lydia making her way:

Lunch! We were all pretty hungry. We also got a lot of rather envious looks from the other folks there are the course (I think we were the only ones who actually packed sandwiches):

Your truly:

Lydia mysteriously managed to get her knuckles bruised up even with the gloves on (???):

Somehow I let my kids talk me into doing the "double black diamond" course at the end of the session (what was I thinking?!?). Here is Lydia on the first part of it:

This part was very tricky. I did the whole thing on my rear end:

We did eventually survive and make it down off the course-- it was exhausting but very fun. A nice treat...