Clockwise, starting above: Synergo built the Redwood Sky Walk in California, which was voted as “Best Aerial Adventure Park” in 2023 by readers of USA Today ; The adventure camp at Mount Hermon, Calif., introduces guests to the climates and ecosystems unique to the redwoods; Building in big trees.
ly, you build, provide training and inspection, and equipment supply. There are a lot of arms of the compa- ny now—is there a particular aspect that you consider your core compe- tency? Jennifer: That’s a hard question, because I think it depends on from what perspec- tive you’re looking at it. Covid really hit the programming side of our business hard, but we would never give it up. It’s so much a part of our mission, and so much a part of why we started this company. Our construction department has grown from just building some camp challenge course elements to now these bridges and big zip line tours and adventure parks and towers. I would say that’s one of the things we’re known for and that we highlight. Training is also something we’re known for and are passionate about. Erik: We still get to play with the pro- grams, we just do it differently now. The programming for us is about helping people change their lives and challenge themselves with this idea of adventure.
over things and through things—and I thought, this is life. So, when we can support a camp that’s got 1,000 kids during the summer doing really cool programs, that’s neat for us. This isn’t about stunts; this isn’t about overcom- ing your fear. This is about learning to dance with your fear, play around at height, and have an experience with your family or with other people, and grow together because of that. API: Sounds like you’re bridging some of those traditional facilitation ele- ments with the commercial side of running a camp or running a zip tour. Erik: Yeah. Your question is, “What are we great at?” I think it’s holding it all together. We were building bridges in California where the clients said, “we’ve talked to four vendors, and no one will touch this. No one can figure out how to do it.” As we are designing that project and figuring the whole thing out, the concept we kept coming back to is how do we let the experience unfold in front of people? As you go up a hundred feet into redwood trees, how do we move people slowly through that and have the story unfold so that when they are on a bridge that moves just
a little bit and they’re looking down a hundred feet, they’re not petrified. That philosophy and that design goes into everything we do. If I could get the whole industry doing that, I think we would all be better. You can’t just keep going longer and longer, higher and higher, and faster and fast- er. There must be limits to it. Jennifer and I built a tour up in the San Juan Islands years ago. It was very small—a zip line tour in the woods with swamps and bushes and trees and stuff. And we would get this feedback from people who said, “I’ve been zip lining all over the country and this is really good: these lines are not long, they’re not fast, they’re not high, but they have the best guides that we’ve ever seen.” And that’s the kind of feedback we love to hear.
API: You are not interested in the su- perlatives. So, when you think about the projects that you’ve worked on,
I grew up very experientially. I would go outside and climb things and crawl
Made with FlippingBook Digital Proposal Creator