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TimberTop Adventures will open a new zip line experience later this year at Snider Mountain Ranch in Sussex featuring 13 zip lines and six skybridges and stairs.
The location, called TimberTop Zip Tours, will be TimberTop’s second. The company’s other adventures in Saint John’s Dominion Park are going on their fourth year.
“Families are constantly looking for something to do with winter, so the fact that there is no winter zipping experience anywhere in the Maritimes that I know of, is going to create a really nice draw,” said David Alston, a co-founder of TimberTop Adventures.
The Snider Mountain Ranch zip tour is expected to open in early November and run until late March on weekends with adjusted hours for holiday and march breaks and weekday availability for private bookings. 11 out of the 13 zip lines will average over 300 feet.
The zip lines, sky bridges, and sky stairs were constructed last winter. The zip tours stretch through a vast forest on Snider Mountain Ranch’s property, whose activities also include horse-drawn carriages.
“It’s a beautiful ranch. The horses there, the ranch setting, the woods are incredible and just having worked on building it over the wintertime, seeing all the snow out in the on the trees, it just creates a beautiful setting,” said Alston.
Alston says the decision to set up TimberTop Zip Tour came in part due to the pandemic.
“Going through the pandemic, many tourism-related businesses have had to rethink the things that they do and how they do things,” he said. “To continue to build out our local customer base … and then to find a way to operate in more seasons.”
He took the idea to Marcel Lebrun, who also owns Snider Mountain Ranch, and they developed the idea and began construction last winter.
By nature of operating in the fall and winter in addition to spring and summer, Alston says he’s excited to potentially hire new employees and give his summer staff the opportunity to work year-round.
“We’ve been so fortunate that we’ve had so much staff return every year and I’d often said, ‘I wish we had another park that we could hire more people into’ because we have some incredible resumes that come across our desk every day, and we don’t get a chance to hire them,” he said.
Select zip lines will also be accessible during the summer months for attendees of Snider Mountain Ranch’s summer camps. More details on season dates and rates will be available in the months ahead.
“We’ve got such incredible experiences here in New Brunswick and I think really, it’s nothing but up in terms of opportunity going forward for the province,” said Alston. “Anything we can do to help that we’re always more than happy to do so.”
Liam Floyd is a summer intern with Huddle, an Acadia Broadcasting content partner.
