Zip lines in Arizona: the best canyon courses, and what is near them

Zip lines in Arizona are the counter-example to everything a canopy tour is. There is no forest to fly through and no reef below, so the courses are built to use the shape of the land instead: sandstone walls, dry washes, and the long views that open up when nothing grows tall enough to block them. It makes the height read very differently. Over a Costa Rican canopy you see green a few metres beneath the trolley; over a Verde Valley course you see the canyon floor.

The best of the zip lines in Arizona are concentrated in the Verde Valley around Camp Verde, roughly halfway between Phoenix and Sedona, with a second cluster above Williams on the road to the Grand Canyon. Phoenix and Tucson have shorter adventure-park lines that work as an afternoon rather than a day out. Nothing in the state competes with Hawaii or Costa Rica on span length, and that is not really the point of it.

Ziplining in Arizona is more season-dependent than anywhere else in this reference. Low-desert summer afternoons routinely pass 40 C, and the sensible slots are the first two of the morning. Spring and autumn are the seasons where the whole day works, and at elevation above Williams the shoulder seasons are genuinely cold.

The other thing that shapes an Arizona trip is that the adventure is rarely the whole itinerary. Most people combine a canyon line with Sedona, the Grand Canyon or a stay at one of the different Arizona casinos resorts scattered across the state, which is why the drive times below matter as much as the course specifications.

Set the zip lines in Arizona against the Hawaiian ones in the directory and the trade is clear. Hawaii gives you longer spans, dual lines and a reef under the cable; Arizona gives you geology, altitude and a view that runs for tens of kilometres. Weight and age limits are broadly similar across both, because they come from the same hardware rather than from the landscape.

If you have flown a canopy tour before and found it pretty rather than exciting, the Arizona courses are more likely to give you the second thing. If you are bringing children who have never done it, the Hawaiian dual lines are the gentler introduction.