Clint and Angie Masse believe that outdoor adventure doesn’t have to be restricted to vacations in exotic locales. It can happen right here, just a stone’s throw from home, in sunny southeastern Manitoba.
Just minutes north of St. Adolphe on Highway 200, Amazing Zip Lines delivers loads of adventure for adrenaline junkies and outdoor enthusiasts. Introduced to the A Maze in Corn fun park in 2012, the zip line adventure has been designed by world-class professionals and would make a worthy part of anyone’s zip line tour.
The course in its entirety boasts seven zip line towers, each about 100 feet in height, providing stunning aerial views over a coulee, through canopies of trees, and across the expansive corn maze. Other dramatic features include the Air Stair, a log and rope suspension bridge; the Geronimo Jump, a ten-foot bungee free fall (optional, of course); and a dual race zip line where competition with friends is part of the fun.
The entire zip line course offers about two hours of activity where your feet never once touch the ground. A training zip line is available for those needing to get a feel for the adventure before taking flight around the course.
“The people that built this course were passionate about zip lining in a different way,” says Clint Masse. “It’s called a full interactive tour.”
Unlike many zip line companies, who maximize profit by getting as many people down the zip line as quickly as possible, Amazing Zip Lines focuses on taking your time, enjoying the view, and getting the most out of the experience.
Masse, who hired zip line professionals from Colorado to design the course, says that each rider can manipulate the brakes, allowing for better control. At times, he says, they might brake too soon and a Mission Impossible-style manoeuvre may be part of the adventure to get yourself across to the next tower.
Fully certified guides with more than 60 hours of training, paired with professional-grade harnesses, ensures the safety of every participant. The course is suitable for adventurers of all ages. A minimum weight restriction of 70 pounds is required for optimal speed on the line.
Come August, when the corn maze is open for business, the zip line tour package will include a trek through the winding 14-acre labyrinth. Later in the fall, the maze will be transformed by more than $20,000 worth of what Masse calls “scare nonsense,” creating the ultimate Haunted Forest adventure in plenty of time for Halloween.
A Maze in Corn is a labour of love for the couple and their two sons. It was conceived ten years ago as a means to provide something for Angie to do during the summer months when she wasn’t teaching schoolchildren. They admittedly had no business plan, and to this day the park has been developing in piecemeal fashion, each new phase being introduced as they dream up new ideas for their quarter section of land.
Today, it has become their full-time job. Throughout the summer and fall, families can interact with the baby animals of the petting zoo, climb the giant bale pyramid, ride the ponies, or enjoy a hay ride pulled by a team of Clydesdale horses. A Snack Shack and collection of fire pits are available across the grounds as well.
As the season progresses, the Masses sell their brand of sweet corn—not the corn maze variety—planted and harvested by their two young sons. Customers can also choose from thousands of pumpkins grown on their five-acre pumpkin patch and piled high inside the Pumpkin Barn.
“People like pretty pumpkins, not just anything we grow,” Masse said. “Now I have to grow three times more acres and I just pick the really pretty ones.”
But it’s paid off. Last year, their pumpkin business grossed $40,000. And generally speaking, the number of visitors who come through each year is also growing. In the last few years, they’ve averaged about 20,000 visitors for the Haunted Forest alone.
“That definitely was a growth factor, because the corn maze and haunt [feature] is a really strong pairing,” he adds.
But for the zip line, those numbers are well below the couple’s hopes. With an investment of $600,000, the Masses were assured by zip line professionals that customers would come by the tens of thousands for that feature alone. Accordingly, they equipped themselves with enough harnesses to meet the needs of 40,000 clients in a season and hired and trained enough guides to prepare for the droves of adventure-seekers. Last year, just 1,420 customers used the zip line.
“Most people, I kid you not, think these are telephone poles up here,” Masse laughs, citing that the majority of their zip line business comes from Winnipeg and tourists visiting the area. “The problem with a zip line in a non-tourist destination is [that] people go on zip lines to interact with [non-typical] geography. But if you’re from Winnipeg, this is your local geography and people don’t want to interact with it. If you go to the mountains, you ask yourself, ‘How do I want to engage the mountains? Well, I want to go zip lining because now I’m really engaging the mountains.’”
To counter that, the Masses invest about $70,000 per year to advertise the zip line.
“During that whole process of pushing the zip line, the corn maze sales went up more than enough to cover the expense in advertising,” Masse says. “So it hasn’t been a total loss. It’s maybe given us some notoriety. We’re the corn maze with the zip line.”
Because creative minds are never idle, the Masses have plans for their newest phase of A Maze in Corn: a winter fun park set to commence this year, which will extend their working season and help offset the overhead further. The experimental stage of this endeavour began last winter with the installation of a $50,000 giant hydraulic toboggan slide set against one of the zip towers and standing about 75 feet at its push-off point. Masse describes it as kamikaze in nature, good for adrenaline junkies.
For 2019 and onward, plans include a variety of slides for all ages and levels of daring, a snow maze, a snow castle, a warm-up barn, horse-drawn sleigh rides, and Christmas tree sales. The recent purchase of a snow-making machine will be put to good use in the creation of the winter park.
Already last year, Masse provided manmade snow for the Festival du Voyageur. His state-of-the-art machine can pump 100 gallons of water per minute at 400 psi (pounds per square inch). About 150 semi-truck loads of snow were trucked off to Winnipeg. This coming winter, he expects to sell around 400 loads, sourced from the bordering Seine River diversion.
“[The winter park will be] a phase growth,” says Masse. “The zip line I did all in one big shot, but my bank account doesn’t want me to do it that way anymore. It’s certainly the most fun business to own, but it’s a hobby [at best]. It’s all about getting that big smile on people’s faces and when you can do that, it’s all worth it.”
