PARKS & OUTDOORS
The Canyons Zip Line & Adventure Park
Marion County · Central Florida
Ninety-four acres of flooded limestone quarry north of Ocala, with cliff walls where Florida is supposed to be flat.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
The rock was mined here in the 1910s and 1920s and the quarry was worked for the last time in 1929. The Walker family bought the land about fifteen years ago and opened it as an adventure park in November 2011. What the digging left is a set of canyons with walls dropping thirty to sixty feet to water that is the Floridan aquifer itself, with roughly ten acres of lakes in the bottom. Twelve zip lines run across them, six thousand six hundred and fifty feet of cable in total. The lines are anchored to trees and to poles sunk into the ground rather than bolted to the limestone, and the trees are checked by an arborist. Horseback tours ride through the wooded parts of the property and kayaks go out on the lakes. Visitors from hill country remark that it does not look like Florida, which is the point of it
Keep comparing