Alan M.
Yelp
Hello, my fellow Yelpers!
Today, I wanted to review Boundless Adventures in Berlin, MA.
After about a 40 minute drive from my home, we arrived on the gravel road leading up to the place. We saw a trailer on site, a number of porta-potties and a mix of wood and steel suspended from varying heights.
My wife and I went to the trailer and picked up our tickets (we had a Groupon for them)...and then we went to the Harnessing area. A young woman found a harness for each of us and adjusted it to our individual specifications. I felt like I was going on a mountain adventure when they were done and I can honestly say that while it was an adventure, there were no mountains involved!
After Harnessing, we listened to a safety briefing and learned how to work the safety hooks that were part of our harness, along with the zip-line trolley. After doing a little practice, they turned us loose in the park for three hours.
They have several courses that you can go through...they are all color coded and in order of level of difficulty they are; Yellow, Green, Blue and Black. Some of the courses are age restricted, but if you are 14 or older, you can go all the way to the Black course, without an adult.
We got onto the starting platform, where all the courses start. We started on a Yellow course, of which there are 3, just to get a feel for what it was like. While I found the Yellow course to be a bit too easy for me, my wife found it very challenging and stopped after that course. Part of the allure of this place is challenging yourself beyond what you think you are capable of...and when I stepped up to a Green course, I found it challenging for me and after seeing what the Blue course entailed, I decided that Green was my limit.
You are securely hooked to the steel security line so there isn't really any danger of you falling and hitting the ground, but there is potential for injury regardless so it is wise to be careful, because some of the obstacles particularly at the Blue and Black levels are quite challenging (picture a 60 foot space with only two steel lines connecting them...you have to cross using ONLY those two lines).
There is some forethought required because the difficulty of the courses ramps up pretty significantly from Green to Blue to Black...once you begin a course, it is difficult to go back because you've got to go through all that you went through to get there, and there isn't a way to quickly get back down to the ground, if an individual challenge is too difficult. The general rule is once you start a course, you finish the course. However, I believe that in the interest of safety particularly for older folks like myself (and granted, I do not believe that my age group (50+) are the intended audience for Boundless Adventures), that there should be a rappel rope from each platform so you can rappel down from a platform before you try a particular challenge, if you believe that the challenge is too much for you (That's the only thing I would improve about my experience there).
All in all, if you're looking for something physically challenging and very different, go to Boundless Adventures and let the sky be your limit!