The combination of a low and high ropes course enables participants to grow at the team and individual levels, exploring risk, leadership, and communication. The low ropes focuses on collaboration, communication, trust and problem solving. The challenges call upon every member of the team to participate, providing unending opportunities for discovery, development, and practice of team skills.

The high ropes course emphasizes the value of risk-taking to create outstanding results, trust and team support. The challenges allow participants to expand their comfort zones and recognize fears that may block personal achievement. There is opportunity in every role and in every choice a participant makes to create tremendous, often life-changing value.

Low Ropes

The low ropes are a series of problem-solving activities that engage teams to develop a plan, execute that plan, and review and draw on the learning from the result and process.  The challenges are low to the ground and increase in difficulty as the day progresses, offering the opportunity to continue the challenge and practice the new learning.  The facilitators establish the context for each activity, observe the process to support the learning and help the team recognize valuable insights.

High Ropes

The high ropes course takes "challenge" to a higher level, up to 40 feet off the ground.  With the support of trained technical staff and their teammates on the ground, a harnessed climber creates the opportunity to experience the value of risk taking in a completely safe environment.  Both the climber and the ground team experience what is possible when courage replaces fear, and trust, support and communication are the foundation of teamwork.

A Typical Challenge Course Program

 The challenge course program provides an effective vehicle to work on your team objectives in an environment away from the work place.  In designing the program we will select and sequence activities to create the group experiencing increasingly challenging exercises.  The experiences are structured to require the learner to take initiative, make decisions and be accountable for the results.  Following each activity a reflective or debrief process is facilitated to draw out the individual and team learning.  In each subsequent activity the group will have the opportunity to practice the skills that were effective in the previous events.  The facilitators will be introducing “tools” as necessary to support the learning of skills.  The communication and trust within the team is accelerated with the participants experiencing what is possible when they rely on teammates for support and encouragement.

  At the end of the program a final debrief is held to support effective transfer of the experience back to the work environment and life.  We conclude the entire program with a celebration and acknowledgement of the groups' participation and achievements.  A typical group will take away from the program:

• Effective communication skills
• Common team language and team process
• Higher levels of trust and confidence
• Knowledge of team strengths
• Problems solving skills
• Leadership Skills
• Bonding and a sense of unity within the team
• The value of risk-taking to produce outstanding results.

Challenge Course Programs

Half day:   a five-hour program using a combination of initiatives, low and high elements. This program allows participants to build communication skills, develop trust, increase confidence and promote team collaboration.

Full day:    an eight-hour program using a series of initiatives, low and high course elements.  The full day program allows participants develop an awareness of their interaction and behavior and its effectiveness towards their goals.  The full day format also allows groups to practice the communication, problem solving, creative thinking leadership, and team process tools they are being introduced to.  Increased trust and team bonding are a big benefit of this program as well.

Multi-day: This program uses a similar experiential format customized to your organizations goals and objectives.  The program involves sequencing of activities to discover, develop and practice team skills.  In addition, there is more specific skill development, practice of these skills and introduction of additional tools and techniques for common team process.  Team assessment tools such as the  DISC profile are available with this program. The Samurai Game™ is available with a multi-day format.

Included in all challenge course programs:

   Each program includes use of one of our challenge course facilities, insurance, all safety equipment, certified technical staff and facilitation. The program is customized to your objectives with a large variety of high and low elements to choose from. We can work with teams with as few as five members or up to several hundred. We have several west coast challenge course locations and many choices of retreat facilities to accommodate multi-day programs.  Catering, photography and lodging is available with any program.