This article is a complete transcription from an article in the Tico Times
Karl Kahler | August 1, 2015
Donald Perry on the cover of Smithsonian magazine. (Courtesy of EcoTram)
It started with the field work of a
California grad student who pioneered new methods for climbing into and
moving around the rain forest canopy, the world’s most complex living
community.
It led to the invention of the canopy tour — a billion-dollar
industry that would delight, thrill and terrify millions of tourists
worldwide for decades to come.
And it all started in Costa Rica.
I give you … the zipline.
It’s a simple concept: You string a cable (or in the old days, a
rope) from one tree to another, at an angle, and you can slide things
and/or people down the cable on a pulley. Variants of this technology
have been used for centuries to transport cargo across rivers or ravines
in places as far away as China and Australia.
Costa Rica did not invent the technology that allows a heavy thing to
slide down a rope. But Costa Rica figured out how to make it fun.
So I set out to discover the origins of recreational ziplining in
Costa Rica, and the outcome of all the litigation about who invented it.
And therein lies a tale.
‘Hombre Mono’
Donald Perry, a graduate student at California State University,
Northridge, climbed his first tree in Costa Rica in 1974, using a
crossbow to shoot a rope into the branches of a 120-foot espavel in the
Osa Peninsula, and then climbing it using mountaineering ascenders.
Donald
Perry won a Rolex award in 1984 worth 50,000 Swish francs (and a gold
watch) for his vision of building a tram through the treetops of Costa
Rica. (Courtesy of Rolex Awards)
Perry pioneered the study of what he calls the “main level” of the
rain forest, the canopy, where upwards of 40 percent of all life on
earth exists.
“The canopy holds the most complex communities of life that have ever
existed on this planet,” Perry writes in his 1986 book, “Life Above the
Jungle Floor
.”
“Limbs can sway or break, and they conceal a variety of poisonous
animals such as spiders, wasps, vipers, scorpions, and ants,” Perry
writes. “To make matters worse, the trees themselves are weak and can
often by heard crashing to the ground during heavy winds.”
So on top of all the dangerous creepy-crawlies, there was the
constant concern that his ropes would fail and he would fall 30 meters
to the jungle floor with a splat.
“In 1974-76 … they called me
Hombre Mono [Monkey Man], as at
the time, I was the only person climbing into the canopy,” Perry wrote
in an email. “I developed the first effective rope-climbing method for
gaining access to tree crowns and used it to study forest tree
reproduction.”
Not only did Perry figure out how to climb the trees and build
observation platforms in them, but also how to move between them at the
canopy level, without returning to the ground — something no other
scientist on the planet was doing.
“In 1979 I used three emergent trees to build the world’s first
canopy zipline at Finca La Selva,” he wrote. “It was made with a
thousand feet of rope.”
Perry’s book describes it like this:
“In front of me was a system of 1,200 feet of white polyester rope
suspended above the canopy; it looked much like a piece of abstract art.
A rope several feet to my left traveled in a long, gentle arc from the
monkey pot tree to one of the almendros a hundred yards away. There it
made a sharp turn over a pulley and spanned a hundred yards to another
emergent tree. At this tree the rope made a final bend over a pulley and
traveled back a hundred yards to the monkey pot tree, where it was tied
off to a limb on the right side of the platform. From above, the rope
formed a huge equilateral triangle between the domed tops of three
towering emergents.”
Donald
Perry, shown on the back cover of his 1986 book, "Life Above the Jungle
Floor," invented the jungle canopy zipline but never turned it into a
business. (Photo by Roberta Halsey, courtesy of Donald Perry)
Perry was nervous as he prepared to test his system, feeling like a
“guinea pig,” but at the same time he was exhilarated. “The web ropes
were taut and motionless and I felt a growing thrill, like at the
beginning of a roller-coaster ride,” he writes.
“The limb snapped up violently as I jumped off, narrowly missing me
as I plunged earthward several feet. The web drooped under my weight,
causing a wave to speed along the rope in front of me. The wave caught a
resting puffbird unaware and hurled it off the line. I shot from the
crown of the monkey pot at a rate of about three and a half yards per
second.”
So how was the world’s first canopy tour?
“I watched the platform recede and felt a sense of ecstatic joy as I
glided past branch tips, where only the lightest of jungle animals could
venture, and into the airways of butterflies and birds.”
Perry’s innovation soon became news, leading to cover stories in
Scientific American and Smithsonian magazines. Geo, Germany’s National
Geographic, came to Costa Rica to photograph Perry using a rope zipline
over a waterfall.
Perry hit the jackpot in 1984 when he won a Rolex Award for
enterprise, which came with a prize of 50,000 Swiss francs. Perry and a
friend, engineer John Williams, used this money to build the
radio-controlled Automated Web for Canopy Exploration at Rara Avis, an
aerial tram that traveled a 1,000-foot (300-meter) cable strung over a
forested canyon and waterfall.
In 1986, Simon & Schuster published “Life Above the Jungle Floor,”
a
compulsively readable narrative about Perry’s adventures climbing trees
in Costa Rica and an intensely scientific book about what he discovered
there
.
The book caught the attention of Hollywood, and Perry became a
primary consultant for the 1992 movie “Medicine Man,” starring Sean
Connery, who was shown roping through the canopy on ziplines collecting
plant specimens to cure cancer.
“The cat was out of the bag,” Perry said, meaning it was only a
matter of time before entrepreneurs would see the tourism potential in
opening up ziplines to the public.
The business model
Enter Darren Hreniuk, a Canadian who approached Perry with the idea
of putting in ziplines at Rara Avis around 1994. But Perry, focused on
more sophisticated ways of moving people through the canopy, wasn’t
interested in building more ziplines.
“We talked about doing ziplines,” said Owen Hyams, a longtime partner
of Perry’s who lives in Heredia, “and he’s like, ‘Ah, that’s stupid,
ziplines.’ ”
So Hreniuk went off to Monteverde and built his own ziplines at a
place he would come to call the Original Canopy Tour, which is still
operating today. It opened in 1997, according to a 2005
Washington Post article,
and in 1998 Hreniuk managed to patent his zipline technology, which he
termed his invention. But when he sued other zipline operators for
infringement, Perry was called as a witness.
“Darren was there, saying, ‘I invented them,’” Perry recalled. “I
said, ‘You didn’t invent them, I invented them. And they’re in the
public domain.’”
Victor Gallo, 53, who has built several ziplines in Costa Rica and
other countries, confirmed that Hreniuk’s Original Canopy Tour was the
first zipline canopy tour open to the public.
“I can give him credit that he commercialized the (zipline) for
tourism,” Gallo said. “He didn’t invent ziplines, they’ve been around
for many years, but what he did was commercialize it and adapt it to
tourism.”
But then to enforce his patent, Hreniuk filed lawsuits claiming
that all the other zipline operators that had sprung up in his wake were
infringing his patent and should be shut down or else required to pay
him a healthy percentage of their proceeds. Hreniuk actually succeeded
in getting a court order authorizing the shutdown of several canopy
tours in Costa Rica and the confiscation of their equipment.
Both Gallo and Hyams told me that around 2002, Hreniuk started going
onto other people’s properties and cutting their zipline cables,
accompanied by a woman from the International Property Rights Registry
who had granted his patent.
Hreniuk even took on the former president (1978-82) of Costa Rica, Rodrigo Carazo Odio.
“Rodrigo Carazo, who was the ex-president, he had a hotel called
Villa Blanca in San Ramón and he had a zipline built,” said Hyams.
Hreniuk tried to get him shut down, too, Hyams said. “Here’s a guy from
Canada and he’s trying to give a hard time to an ex-president of the
country that he’s trying to do business in. That kind of like sealed his
fate.”
Gallo made similar observations separately.
“Carazo’s sons are all lawyers, so he picked an uphill fight,” Gallo said.
On Dec. 17, 2004, the court
annulled Hreniuk’s patent for the second time, effectively putting zipline technology into the public domain. The industry never looked back.
Hreniuk’s website, http://www.canopytour.com, still stresses that his was the first.
“We are the outfit that invented this activity; hence the name ‘The
Original Canopy Tour,’” the introduction says. “We started in Costa Rica
and now export this technology around the world. Beware of Imitations!
… Over 1.5 million of our guests have
SAFELY ‘soared’ from tree to tree by sliding along our Patent Pending cables that make steel ‘Zip Lines’ obsolete. Caveat Emptor!”
Several attempts to reach Hreniuk for comment on the origins of recreational ziplining were unsuccessful.
How to get to a treehouse: an old method and a new one. (Courtesy of EcoTram)
The partner
I spent three hours driving to Heredia and back to buy a copy of
Perry’s book and talk to Owen Hyams, a 55-year-old expat who has been
working with Perry for 20 years.
“He wanted access to the canopy to be his legacy,” Hyams said, summarizing Perry’s life’s work.
I asked him if Perry’s ziplines were ever used by other people just for fun. Hyams shook his head.
“They were just for his personal use, maybe some other scientists in
La Selva in Sarapiquí. I don’t think too many people got on it. At that
time, that was pretty scary. Nobody had the confidence. You had to be
pretty ballsy to do that.”
So I could eliminate Perry as a candidate for inventor of
recreational ziplining. Perry invented the jungle canopy zipline, but he
never tried to turn it into a business.
Hreniuk did, and it caught on like wildfire and spawned many
imitators. So it’s Hreniuk who appears to have a genuine claim to be the
first person in the world to open a zipline tour to the public in a
rain forest.
“I think ziplines have been around for many, many years before Donald
Perry, but canopy ziplines, that’s a new twist to an old idea,” said
Hyams. “So he put them between trees and that made it a little bit
different, but he never tried to patent anything. Darren saw the idea
and he says, I’m going to patent this.”
Hreniuk’s main innovation appeared to be the fact that he brought the
last zipline all the way down to the ground, Perry said on the phone
from the United States.
“I think he came up with the idea that it could be used for tourism,
and that you put one end to the ground,” Perry said. “That was being
done for years on challenge courses. The only thing he really did was
realize that people would pay to be in the forest and zipline in the
canopy like I was doing, but down to the ground.”
And so the zipline industry was born. Today you can soar 1,590
meters, almost a mile, in a Superman flight at 100% Aventura in
Monteverde. In the same town you can find the Original Canopy Tour, but
it’s said to be small and tame by comparison.
“There are places in the world that become melting pots and cooking
zones for something new,” Perry said. “We were making a new industry of
tourism, all of us. We were all feeding off of each other. We were
making Costa Rica the leader in adventure and nature tourism in the
world. Darren was part of it, we’re both equally big parts of the
zipline craze. And then all the people who copied him.”
Perry called the entire phenomenon a “cauldron of creation,” in which
Costa Rica vaulted seemingly overnight into one of the top ecotourism
destinations in the world.
Road not taken
In 1994, Perry built the Rain Forest Aerial Tram, a system that
resembled a ski lift in Braulio Carrillo National Park, the vast
wilderness north of San José.
Then he proposed putting in a zipline to bypass the “rough, muddy road,” and he suggested making it free.
Donald Perry today in the New York prototype of his new innovation, EcoTram. (Courtesy of EcoTram)
“I had implemented ground-level ziplines to cross rampaging creeks to
reach my jungle cabin at the site,” Perry said, “so I proposed a
one-kilometer zipline that would have provided access to the tramway
through the canopy. This idea was way ahead of its time and would have
been the longest commercial zipline in the world when not even short
canopy ziplines were in existence. …
“However,
my own board of directors rejected the idea and
their short-sighted decision deprived the company of becoming the leader
of the zipline industry before anyone knew what a zipline was,” Perry
wrote.
“Unhappily, it reminds me of Xerox, which invented the personal computer but did nothing with it,” he wrote. “OOPS!”
Perry is focused now on his next innovation, the EcoTram, a
self-driven electric cable car that will allow people to explore the
canopy at their own pace, stopping when they want to. He has built a
small prototype in New York and hopes to bring the concept to Costa Rica
this year. Just this week, the invention was chosen as a semifinalist
in the business idea competition of 43 North, which gives out $5 million
in prizes to inventors and startups.
Whatever Perry’s future holds, his legacy as pioneer of access to the canopy appears to be secure.
Here’s how I score it: Perry invented the jungle canopy
zipline. Hreniuk invented the jungle canopy zipline tour. And the world
would never be the same.
Perry is happy just to have blazed a trail into the trees.
“How lucky am I?” he said. “I’m the first person to really explore the rain forest canopy. I’ve had a charmed life.”
For more info:
http://canopytour.com
http://ecotram.com
https://www.facebook.com/EcotramLLC?fref=ts
Contact Karl Kahler at kkahler@ticotimes.net.
